Le Grand Meaulnes (Mass Market Paperback)

The story centers around François Seurel, whose father runs the local boys' school and his friend, an older boy, Auguste Meaulnes . Tall and commanding, Meaulnes is soon the class leader, and gets the nickname "Le Grand Meaulnes" which translates perhaps as "Meaulnes the Great" --hard to put into English. One day, the headmaster sends a student off to the railway station to fetch a visiting relative, and Meaulnes, not chosen for this excursion, bolts out the window and presumably tries to hire a faster horse and carriage and beat the other student to the station. But Meaulnes gets lost, or goes in another direction deliberately, and fails to return that evening.

What happens next is filled with mystery and possibly magic or delusion. Meaulnes tries to find "the lost domain"--a mansion where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman. But the way is hidden from him, the map incomplete, and Meaulnes desperately tries to find his path again. The tone of somber mystery is dark and magical, and evokes a mood of ineffable sadness and delight. The novel is like reading a fairy tale mixed with a romantic novel, and we can only guess what Alain-Fournier would have done had he lived.

The story is told by Francois Seurel, the son of the schoolmaster in a small, secluded town in la Sologne (Central France). One day a new kid comes to study and live with Francois's family. He is called Le Grand (the great) Meaulnes. He's a natural leader and an independent kid who one day steals a carriage in order to go pick up Francois's great parents. He gets lost in the woods and loses the carriage, which forces him to wander around the countryside where, after some time, he comes to an ancient domain, a big, decaying house where a huge party is about to begin. He notices everybody seems to be welcome and after a nap in a bedroom he finds old-style clothes seeminlgy ready for him to wear. So he does and he goes to the party. At some point he meets "the" girl, the most beautiful living being he's ever seen, and of course he falls madly in love with her. But she's mysterious and they will only have chance to exchange names. The day after, the party ends on enigmatic circumstances and Meaulnes gets a ride home at night, and so he is unable to figure out the way back to the house. The rest of his life will be one long and tragic search for the place and the girl of his dreams, and to reveal more would be unkind to potential readers.

As with basically all other books that can aspire to immortality, this one can be read in many levels. You can simply take the story at face value and appreciate it as a great tale, but for me it was impossible not to glimpse some kind of deep symbolism in it, something about the nostalgia for innocence lost, for the irretrievable days of our youth, for the kind of love that is hard to feel later on in life (for good and bad). There is also something about that old notion of being careful with what you wish for, lest you achieve it. The book borders around the realistic, the romantic and the gothic, and it has its touches of magic which are highlighted by the incredible scenery in which the story takes place. It is probably one of the greatest tales ever told and it sure will agitate in the reader their own memories of countryside vacations and that little girl one once saw, fell in love wiht, but was unable to see again (or maybe yes, but in less romantic circumstances). It achieves what great literature does: sparkling something valuable, in this case totally bittersweet, inside the reader's brain, and it is only possible to regret Fournier's early death in that stupidest of massacres, WWI.