French Literature · 1 books
Alain-Fournier was born Henri-Alban Fournier on October 3, 1886, in La Chapelle-d’Angillon, a village in the Berry region of central France, and died on September 22, 1914, in the forest of Saint-Remy near Vaux-lès-Palameix in Lorraine, killed in action on the Western Front at the age of twenty-seven. He published one novel, Le Grand Meaulnes — known in English as The Lost Domain or The Wanderer — in 1913. It is enough. The novel has been continuously in print in French for over a hundred years, translated into dozens of languages, and placed by generations of readers among the small number of works that seem to have been written specifically for the experience of adolescence and the experience of having lost it.
He grew up in central France, where his parents were schoolteachers and his childhood was spent in a landscape of flat farmland and provincial villages that he later transformed into the novel’s setting. The Berry region’s particular quality — quiet, rural, slightly melancholic, with an underlying sense of things half-remembered — is inseparable from the world of the book. He attended secondary school in Paris and then in Brest, and in 1905, while waiting to take his entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure, he had an encounter in Paris that became the emotional seed of the novel.
Walking near the Grand Palais on Ascension Thursday in 1905, he saw a young woman he found beautiful and followed her. She paused at a moment and spoke to him briefly and without encouragement. She was Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, the daughter of a naval officer. He learned her name, attempted to arrange another meeting, and was gently refused. He never saw her again. The encounter lasted minutes. Its consequences lasted the rest of his life, and the life was short enough that the consequences had no time to diminish.
He failed the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in 1906 and again in 1907. He served his military service and then worked as a journalist and secretary. He corresponded extensively with his closest friend, the writer and critic Jacques Rivière, who would become his brother-in-law; the correspondence between them is one of the most sustained records of literary and personal development in French letters of the period. Through the correspondence, and through the years of working on what became Le Grand Meaulnes, we can trace the transformation of a personal obsession into a work of fiction.
Le Grand Meaulnes, published in 1913 by the Nouvelle Revue Française, tells the story of Augustin Meaulnes, who arrives at a country school, makes a nocturnal journey that takes him to a strange and beautiful fête in an isolated domain, falls in love with a girl he meets there, loses the domain, spends years trying to find it again, and finally, in finding it, destroys the possibility of happiness for everyone concerned. The novel is narrated by François Seurel, the schoolmaster’s son, who watches Meaulnes from a slight distance and whose perspective gives the book its quality of witnessing something both real and just out of reach.
The novel was nominated for the Prix Goncourt in 1913, losing by one vote to Marc Elder’s Le Peuple de la mer. The loss has been described, with the benefit of hindsight, as one of the prize’s more arguable decisions.
He was mobilized in August 1914, the first month of the war. He was reported missing on September 22, 1914, near the village of Les Éparges, during a German counterattack. His body was not found at the time. Decades later, in 1991, a mass grave near the site of the action was excavated and a group of French soldiers was identified; among the effects found was a military identity tag associated with Alain-Fournier. He was one of the soldiers killed in what appears to have been a firefight in the woods of the Meuse.
The single novel has a specific quality that is difficult to name precisely. It is not simply nostalgia. It is something more like a meditation on the impossibility of holding what you love — the way the most beautiful experiences carry inside them the seeds of their own dissolution, and the way pursuing them to their conclusion is precisely what destroys them. The domain Meaulnes finds is real; the problem is that finding it again, in daylight, with all the conditions of adult life in place, is not the same as the first encounter in the dark. This is not a comfortable idea, and Alain-Fournier does not make it comfortable.
The novel was the only one he had time to write. The life that would have produced others ended in a wood in Lorraine before the war was two months old.
The translations of the novel into English have been numerous, and they have tended to reflect the period in which they were made. Earlier translations sought to preserve the fairy-tale quality of the prose; later ones have been more attentive to its psychological precision. The question of how to render the domain — the lost estate and its vanished fête — in a language and culture that do not have exactly the same associations as French Romanticism with landscape and the pastoral past is one that each translator has answered differently. The best translations are those that trust the strangeness of the original and do not attempt to make it more explicable than it is, because the inexplicability is the point.
His friendship with Jacques Rivière — cemented in their school years and sustained through an extraordinary correspondence until the war ended both of their lives — was one of the animating intellectual relationships of early twentieth-century French literature. Rivière survived the war, became the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and published the correspondence posthumously. The letters show Alain-Fournier thinking through the problems of writing with a seriousness and precision that his single novel confirmed. He knew what he was doing. The loss is not only of the novel he did not write; it is of the writer he was becoming.
At Classics Retold, we have published a new English translation of Le Grand Meaulnes — an edition designed to bring the novel’s particular atmosphere and emotional precision into English without sentimentalizing it or reducing its strangeness. This is a book that asks something specific of its readers: to remember what it was like to want something you couldn’t quite name and couldn’t quite reach.
