Last year I paid a lightning visit to Adelaide for work. Normally if I go to Adelaide it's to visit family and the visit consists of lots of cups of coffee with hospitable rels, but this time I was there for such a short time that I didn't tell anyone. After I had finished work I went for a stroll around inner Adelaide, through the university, along the Torrens River and ended up in the Rundle Mall, drawn as if by a magical force towards a bookshop that was having a closing down sale. There I laid out two dollars for a copy of Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate, which is quite possibly the best two dollars I have spent for a long time.
The front page of this edition says: "The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published in 1913, the year before Henri Alain-Fournier was killed on the Western Front." He was just 28 when he died, and this was his only published novel.
Its French title is simply drawn from the name of its central character, Augustin Meaulnes - The Great (or perhaps large or tall) Meaulnes. The English translators decided that the nuances of this French title were untranslatable and gave it an inspired title of their own.
At the beginning of the story Meaulnes, aged 17, enters the life of 15-year-old Francois Seurel, the story's narrator. Meaulnes comes to board with Seurel's family and finish his education at the provincial school of which M. Seurel is the master. He is large in every way - tall, daring, a natural leader - and in his company Francois' dull, lonely life is transformed.
In the first part of the story, Meaulnes hatches an escapade that goes badly astray. He has hired a horse and carriage, but the horse bolts, knocking him senseless and carrying him unconscious into a labyrinth of country lanes. When he comes to his senses the horse has calmed down and the carriage is undamaged but he has no idea where he is. His attempts to find his way home go from bad to worse as he loses the horse and carriage and finally ends up in the middle of a rainy night, cold and wet, at a half ruined castle.
This castle is the venue for a strange festivity, a wedding feast at which the honoured guests are all children. The adults are required to dress in period costume and wait upon the children while everyone awaits the arrival of the bride and groom. Meaulnes is drawn into this party and in the course of it he meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman, the groom's sister, promising to return to visit her when the wedding is over.
Then the party abruptly collapses. The news arrives that the bride has changed her mind, the groom has absconded in his grief, and there will be no wedding. The guests hastily depart and Meaulnes finds himself, once again in the middle of the night, departing as a passenger in a carriage. He is dropped the next day near his home still none the wiser as to where he has been.
Meaulnes confides this story to no-one but Francois, and the second part of the story involves their attempts to find their way back to the castle and fulfil Meaulnes' promise to re-visit the young woman. They pore over maps of the district, identifying possible locations, and spend their weekends tramping the countryside. It is to no avail, they cannot find their way back to the castle or find the young woman. A despairing Meaulnes finally departs for Paris, where he has heard that her family may keep a house, in the hope of finding her there.
The third part of the story takes place somewhat later. Francois, on the cusp of manhood and soon to take up a teaching post of his own, takes it upon himself to make a further attempt at finding the estate and its beautiful occupant. This time, older and perhaps wiser, he approaches the subject maturely and commences by asking his uncle to help. Approached this way, the solution is almost absurdly easy - his uncle keeps a general store and not only does he know where the estate is (although, in a kind of warning, it has been sold in the meantime), the young woman is a regular customer. Francois soon meets her, discovers that she too has been waiting and longing for Meaulnes' return, and the couple are soon reunited.
Yet the ease of this resolution is deceptive. Not only has the young woman fallen on hard times, but Meaulnes himself has acquired new adult responsibilities which must be discharged before he can settle down happily. The couple's happiness recedes further and further, and that glorious moment at the children's wedding feast in the enchanted castle can never be recovered.
I have left out a lot of detail here, and it is hard to capture the emotional impact of the tale. The story is a kind of fractured folk-tale, a happy-ever-after story gone wrong. In the first part, the handsome prince does indeed make it into the magic castle and meets the princess. And indeed, he must fulfil a task and overcome a challenge in order to win her hand. Yet the challenge, seemingly easy, proves to be beyond him, and the magical vision fades further and further from view. It may seem that these difficulties are absurd when viewed from an adult point of view, but this happiness is only available to children or, perhaps, to those who retain their childish innocence. Adulthood is merely the time we spend trying to cope with the resulting disappointment and recover whatever fragments of happiness we can.
And right on cue, no sooner had this brilliant and sad book been published than its author, along with 'half the seed of Europe', was dressed up in uniform, handed a rifle, and sent off to his death. The age of fairy tales and childish illusions, if it ever really existed, was well and truly gone. In its place was an age of darkness and ruin, of blood and death, of widows and orphans. It's almost as if Alain-Fournier saw it coming.
Where can we go with this? Is this disillusion inevitable? I think, sadly, that the answer is 'yes'. This is the ache I have in my heart when I see children, especially my own grandchildren, playing innocently in the middle of plague and environmental destruction. I find myself wanting to protect them, to help them stay in this world of innocent dreams and possibilities.
This protection is necessary, but it can only last so long. So often as adults we try to continue living in our childish dream worlds. Particularly in the affluent West, it's easy to delude ourselves that we are living in paradise and that our lives can be one long idyll. Yet now we have a global pandemic and if we don't act soon we will be facing global climate catastrophe in a few short decades. We need to look the disillusion firmly in the face and do what is required of us.
Yet this shouldn't be the end of the story. Perhaps if Alain-Fournier had survived, he could have written a sequel in which Meaulnes and Seurel pick up the pieces of their adolescent dreams and go on to build adult lives, to face adult challenges and to wrest happiness from the jaws of despair. It would not be the childish dream, but it can be real, and deeply rooted, and endure until the day of our death - and who knows, perhaps even beyond.
The front page of this edition says: "The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published in 1913, the year before Henri Alain-Fournier was killed on the Western Front." He was just 28 when he died, and this was his only published novel.Its French title is simply drawn from the name of its central character, Augustin Meaulnes - The Great (or perhaps large or tall) Meaulnes. The English translators decided that the nuances of this French title were untranslatable and gave it an inspired title of their own.
At the beginning of the story Meaulnes, aged 17, enters the life of 15-year-old Francois Seurel, the story's narrator. Meaulnes comes to board with Seurel's family and finish his education at the provincial school of which M. Seurel is the master. He is large in every way - tall, daring, a natural leader - and in his company Francois' dull, lonely life is transformed.
In the first part of the story, Meaulnes hatches an escapade that goes badly astray. He has hired a horse and carriage, but the horse bolts, knocking him senseless and carrying him unconscious into a labyrinth of country lanes. When he comes to his senses the horse has calmed down and the carriage is undamaged but he has no idea where he is. His attempts to find his way home go from bad to worse as he loses the horse and carriage and finally ends up in the middle of a rainy night, cold and wet, at a half ruined castle.
This castle is the venue for a strange festivity, a wedding feast at which the honoured guests are all children. The adults are required to dress in period costume and wait upon the children while everyone awaits the arrival of the bride and groom. Meaulnes is drawn into this party and in the course of it he meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman, the groom's sister, promising to return to visit her when the wedding is over.
Then the party abruptly collapses. The news arrives that the bride has changed her mind, the groom has absconded in his grief, and there will be no wedding. The guests hastily depart and Meaulnes finds himself, once again in the middle of the night, departing as a passenger in a carriage. He is dropped the next day near his home still none the wiser as to where he has been.
Meaulnes confides this story to no-one but Francois, and the second part of the story involves their attempts to find their way back to the castle and fulfil Meaulnes' promise to re-visit the young woman. They pore over maps of the district, identifying possible locations, and spend their weekends tramping the countryside. It is to no avail, they cannot find their way back to the castle or find the young woman. A despairing Meaulnes finally departs for Paris, where he has heard that her family may keep a house, in the hope of finding her there.
The third part of the story takes place somewhat later. Francois, on the cusp of manhood and soon to take up a teaching post of his own, takes it upon himself to make a further attempt at finding the estate and its beautiful occupant. This time, older and perhaps wiser, he approaches the subject maturely and commences by asking his uncle to help. Approached this way, the solution is almost absurdly easy - his uncle keeps a general store and not only does he know where the estate is (although, in a kind of warning, it has been sold in the meantime), the young woman is a regular customer. Francois soon meets her, discovers that she too has been waiting and longing for Meaulnes' return, and the couple are soon reunited.
Yet the ease of this resolution is deceptive. Not only has the young woman fallen on hard times, but Meaulnes himself has acquired new adult responsibilities which must be discharged before he can settle down happily. The couple's happiness recedes further and further, and that glorious moment at the children's wedding feast in the enchanted castle can never be recovered.
I have left out a lot of detail here, and it is hard to capture the emotional impact of the tale. The story is a kind of fractured folk-tale, a happy-ever-after story gone wrong. In the first part, the handsome prince does indeed make it into the magic castle and meets the princess. And indeed, he must fulfil a task and overcome a challenge in order to win her hand. Yet the challenge, seemingly easy, proves to be beyond him, and the magical vision fades further and further from view. It may seem that these difficulties are absurd when viewed from an adult point of view, but this happiness is only available to children or, perhaps, to those who retain their childish innocence. Adulthood is merely the time we spend trying to cope with the resulting disappointment and recover whatever fragments of happiness we can.
Where can we go with this? Is this disillusion inevitable? I think, sadly, that the answer is 'yes'. This is the ache I have in my heart when I see children, especially my own grandchildren, playing innocently in the middle of plague and environmental destruction. I find myself wanting to protect them, to help them stay in this world of innocent dreams and possibilities.
This protection is necessary, but it can only last so long. So often as adults we try to continue living in our childish dream worlds. Particularly in the affluent West, it's easy to delude ourselves that we are living in paradise and that our lives can be one long idyll. Yet now we have a global pandemic and if we don't act soon we will be facing global climate catastrophe in a few short decades. We need to look the disillusion firmly in the face and do what is required of us.
Yet this shouldn't be the end of the story. Perhaps if Alain-Fournier had survived, he could have written a sequel in which Meaulnes and Seurel pick up the pieces of their adolescent dreams and go on to build adult lives, to face adult challenges and to wrest happiness from the jaws of despair. It would not be the childish dream, but it can be real, and deeply rooted, and endure until the day of our death - and who knows, perhaps even beyond.
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