{"id":77384,"date":"2014-09-26T14:08:37","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T18:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=77384"},"modified":"2014-09-26T14:16:08","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T18:16:08","slug":"in-search-of-the-lost-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/26\/in-search-of-the-lost-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"In Search of the Lost Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remembering <\/em>Le Grand Meaulnes on the centenary of its author\u2019s death.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

Detail from Edward Gorey\u2019s cover of the Anchor 1950s edition of Le Grand Meaulnes<\/i>, dubbed The Wanderer<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThere is no doubting the classic status of Alain-Fournier\u2019s Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em>,\u201d the novelist Julian Barnes wrote in the Guardian <\/em>in 2012<\/a>, having revisited the novel in his sixties to see if it retained its \u201cyouthful enchantment.\u201d \u201cA poll of French readers,\u201d he noted, \u201cplaced it sixth of all twentieth-century books, just behind Proust and Camus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those two are widely known to English-speaking audiences, and yet Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> and its mysterious-sounding author are not. I asked twenty self-admitting Francophile friends if they had ever heard of Fournier; most of them hadn\u2019t. It doesn\u2019t help that the novel\u2014the only book Fournier published in his lifetime\u2014has had at least seven different titles in English: The Wanderer <\/em>(sometimes with the subtitle Or, The End of Youth<\/em>), The Lost Domain<\/em>, The Land of Lost Contentment<\/em>, The Big Meaulnes<\/em>, The Magnificent Meaulnes<\/em>. The most recent translation, from 2007, is called The Lost Estate<\/em>, with Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> in parentheses.<\/p>\n

Originally published in 1913, the novel only barely predated Fournier\u2019s death on the front lines in the first months of World War I, on September 22, 1914\u2014a hundred years ago this week. Fournier was, at twenty-seven, one of the war\u2019s first literary casualties. \u201cHis unit strayed accidentally behind the loose German lines in a forest of the Hauts-de-Meuse,\u201d the novelist John Fowles wrote in an afterword to the book in the early seventies. \u201cThey found themselves trapped at the edge of a beechwood. The Frenchmen charged. Lieutenant Fournier was last seen running toward the Germans, firing his revolver. His grave is unknown. He was presumably buried by the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having recently become a parent, I\u2019ve started to cobble together a young-adult reading list to give to my son one day\u2014which is what led me to Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em>, with its affecting treatment of lost innocence and its finely tuned, fairy tale\u2013like depiction of the \u201ctwilight world between boyhood and manhood.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Le<\/a>That twilight is appealing to me\u2014I can imagine myself as one of the characters, inching along as the story unfolds. Much like Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em>, to which it\u2019s invariably compared, Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> is dreamy and at times overly romantic as it describes one boy\u2019s lost love for a girl he\u2019ll likely never have. That boy is seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes, a mysterious \u201cboarder\u201d of modest means and background who arrives one day in the small provincial town of Sologne, in the heartland of France. He immediately captures the attention and enthusiasm of his classmates, especially his host family\u2019s son, Francois Seurel, who narrates the novel and so resembles Gatsby<\/em>\u2019s Nick Carraway; one might be tempted to see him as a stand-in for Fournier himself, but if he is, then so is Augustin Meaulnes.<\/p>\n

Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> remains, despite its age, superbly modern, and especially charming for young men. Meaulnes\u2014whom Fournier refers to as \u201cAdmiral Meaulnes\u201d at times, imbuing him with a kind of authority\u2014has a Ferris Bueller\u2013ish quality in that he\u2019s almost astonishingly likable; he becomes the center of attention as soon as he arrives on the scene. His fellow students seem to hang on his every word.<\/p>\n

On a misguided attempt to pick up his host family\u2019s grandparents by carriage at a nearby train station, Meaulnes disappears into a forest. When he reappears a few days later, he recounts a fantastic tale: On his journey, he says, he stumbled on a majestic, if dilapidated, French chateau, which hosted a magnificent costume ball. It was there that Meaulnes met the girl of his dreams, Yvonne de Galais, who lives in the house with her brother, Frantz, and their widowed father.<\/p>\n

When Meaulnes returns to school, he\u2019s a changed young man. He becomes restless in his attempts to regain the lost chateau, and Yvonne with it. \u201cThat breath of fresh air coming from the deserted playground,\u201d Fournier writes, \u201cthe bits of straw which could be seen clinging to Admiral Meaulnes\u2019s clothing, and above all the look he had as a traveler, tired, hungry, but thrilled by wonders, all gave us a strange feeling of pleasure and curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>From there, the narrative gets a bit too cooperative: another mysterious boy shows up in town, and he turns out to be Yvonne\u2019s brother, Frantz, in disguise; he\u2019s reeling from a broken engagement. Meaulnes, fearing he\u2019s lost Yvonne forever, then flees to Paris to find her, leaving Seurel in his wake to piece together the backstory, still untold.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the book, in Fournier\u2019s crescendo, it\u2019s Seurel, not Meaulnes, who eventually finds Yvonne. He reunites her with Meaulnes and they\u2019re finally married, but that\u2019s not the happy end\u2014a few days after the wedding, Meaulnes, feeling he owes a debt of gratitude to Yvonne\u2019s brother for unexplained reasons, flees once again, this time on a quest to help Frantz find his lost fianc\u00e9e, leaving Seurel to serve as kind of a surrogate husband to Yvonne. Meaulnes is like the front man of an indie-rock band who walks out on his honeymoon to tour the West Coast instead of chilling with the girl he\u2019s been dreaming about for years.<\/p>\n

Yvonne remains in the \u201clost chateau\u201d alone. Though the book never describes any kind of sex or physical intimacy, she gives birth to Meaulnes\u2019s child and dies two days later. They never see each other again.<\/p>\n

Seurel inherits the house and sits idly by waiting for Meaulnes to return. He stumbles upon a handwritten secret journal\u2014composed in a student\u2019s composition book\u2014which fills in the blanks of a rather convoluted story. Turns out Meaulnes felt so guilty about Frantz\u2019s lost fianc\u00e9e because, years earlier, before he knew Frantz or his sister, Meaulnes had unwittingly romanced Frantz\u2019s fianc\u00e9e.<\/p>\n

\"Le<\/a>In the end, it turns out that the only one left holding an empty bag is Seurel. After Yvonne\u2019s untimely death, he delivers Meaulnes\u2019s daughter. \u201cThe father lifted his daughter on high,\u201d he says in the closing paragraphs, \u201cjumping her up on his outstretched arms, and looked at her with a kind of smile. She was pleased and clapped her hands \u2026 I had stepped back a little to see them better. Rather let down and yet wonder-struck, I realized that the little girl had at last found in him the playfellow she had been dimly expecting \u2026 Meaulnes had left me with one joy; I felt that he had come back to take it away from me. And already I could imagine him at night, wrapping his daughter in his cloak and setting out with her for new adventures.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some respects,\u201d Fredrika Blair points out in her introduction to the 1950 Anchor edition, \u201cLe Grand Meaulnes<\/em> resembles Kafka\u2019s fantasy, The Castle<\/em>. Both are allegories. The Castle<\/em> is an allegorical account of the search for heaven and Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> of the search for happiness. In both of them there is the same combination of dreamlike vision and everyday detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fournier\u2019s good friend and fellow writer Jacques Rivi\u00e9re, who would go on to found the immensely important La Nouvelle Revue<\/em>, warned him against \u201cfalling into sentimentality,\u201d to which Fournier replied, \u201cI think that sentimentality is above all sloppy writing. My credo in art: childhood. To be able to reproduce it without any childishness\u2014its depth touches on the mysterious.\u201d The overwhelming sense that anything is possible\u2014the optimism of youth\u2014holds the book\u2019s somewhat contrived plot together, and redirects the reader\u2019s attention from unbelievable flights of fancy to the endless potential of adolescence.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Perhaps the reason Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> is a rite-of-passage novel in France today is more elementary than most of the criticism surrounding it would have you believe. The novel\u2019s takeaway, for me, is a don\u2019t-look-back realization most teenagers have, at some point, wherein they recognize that everything they thought was the best<\/em>\u2014or the most important, or the worst thing ever\u2014was actually mundane, trivial. That\u2019s a sobering feeling, even when it comes to the vagaries of young love, the ache that feels like a hole in the stomach.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it\u2019s the book\u2019s sexlessness that makes it cling to the adolescent heart. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker<\/em> draws attention, in his introduction to the most recent edition, to a point that helps explain why Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> endures more than one hundred years later: \u201cThe intricate and seductive fabric of romance as Fournier made it for himself there is some sheer fear of sex. We have a sense, reflecting on Fournier\u2019s life and art, that what is being fabulized is in part an ambivalence about sexual intercourse; we want to sleep with the girl in a fairy-tale castle and still live there, remain children and get laid at once \u2026 We can no more imagine the act of sex that produces the child in Le Grand Meaulnes<\/em> than we can imagine Gatsby penetrating Daisy.\u201d<\/p>\n

J. C. Gabel is a writer, editor, and publisher living in Los Angeles. He grew up in Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remembering Le Grand Meaulnes on the centenary of its author\u2019s death. \u201cThere is no doubting the classic status of Alain-Fournier\u2019s Le Grand Meaulnes,\u201d the novelist Julian Barnes wrote in the Guardian in 2012, having revisited the novel in his sixties to see if it retained its \u201cyouthful enchantment.\u201d \u201cA poll of French readers,\u201d he noted, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[4064,15448,15449,15447,2111,7740,9909],"class_list":["post-77384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-adolescence","tag-fournier","tag-innocence","tag-le-grand-meaulnes","tag-love","tag-world-war-i","tag-youth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Search of the Lost Trail<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"J. C. 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