The Lost Estate (26 page)

So this is what that fine morning at the start of term had in store for us, the treacherous autumn sunlight shining through the branches. How am I to fight against this bitter feeling of outrage, those tears choking in my throat? We had found the beautiful girl; we had conquered her. She was the wife of my friend and I loved her with that deep, secret love that is never spoken. When I looked at her, I was happy as a little child. One day, perhaps, I should have married another girl, and Yvonne would have been the first in whom I would have confided that great secret…

Yesterday’s notice is still there, near the bell, in the corner of the door. They have already brought the coffin into the hall, downstairs. In the room on the first floor, it is the child’s nurse who greets me, who tells me about her end and gently opens the door… There she is. No more fever, no more struggle. No more flushed face, no more waiting… Only silence and, wrapped in cotton wool, a hard face, white and unfeeling, and a dead brow beneath stiff, hard hair.

Monsieur de Galais, crouching in a corner with his back to us, is in stockinged feet, without shoes, and searches with dreadful obstinacy in some muddled drawers taken out of a wardrobe. From time to time, with a burst of sobbing that makes his shoulders heave like a burst of laughter, he takes out an already yellowing old photograph of his daughter.

The burial is to take place at noon. The doctor is afraid of the rapid decomposition that sometimes accompanies an embolism. This is why the face, and, indeed, the rest of the body, is surrounded by cotton wool steeped in phenol.

When the body was dressed – they put her in her splendid dark-blue velvet dress, spangled with little silver stars, though they had to flatten and rumple the leg-of-mutton sleeves which
were by then out of fashion – as the coffin was being brought upstairs, they realized that it would not go round the corner in the narrow corridor. It had to be taken up with a rope through the window and afterwards lowered down in the same way. But Monsieur de Galais, who was still bending over some old things, looking for heaven knows what lost memories in them, refused with dreadful vehemence.

‘Rather than allow such an awful thing,’ he said, in a voice stifled with tears and anger, ‘I will take her myself and bring her down in my arms…’ And he would have done so, at the risk of weakening halfway and crashing down the stairs with her!

At this, I came forward and did the only thing I could: with the help of the doctor and one of his women assistants, I put one arm under the back of the outstretched corpse and the other under her legs, and held her against my chest. Lying against my left arm, her shoulders resting against my right one, and her head lolling under my chin, she weighed dreadfully on my heart. Slowly, step by step, I went down the long, steep staircase, while they prepared everything downstairs.

Very soon, both arms feel as if they are dropping with weariness. Every step with this weight against my chest makes me more breathless. Clasping the dead weight of the lifeless body, I bend my head over that of the woman I am carrying; I am breathing heavily and her blonde hair is sucked into my mouth – dead hair with a taste of earth. This taste of earth and of death and this weight on my heart are all that remain for me of the great adventure, and of you, Yvonne de Galais, a woman so long sought and so much loved…

XIII

THE MONTHLY COMPOSITION BOOK

In that house full of sad memories, where all day long women were cradling and comforting a sick infant, old Monsieur de Galais soon had to take to his bed. He died peacefully in the first great cold spell of the winter, and I could not help weeping beside the bed of this delightful old man whose indulgence and whimsy, joined to that of his son, had been the cause of our whole adventure. Fortunately, he died without ever really understanding what had happened and moreover in almost absolute silence. As it was a long time since he had had any relatives or friends in this part of France, his will made me his sole heir until the return of Meaulnes, to whom I had to account for everything if he ever should come back… And from then on I lived at Les Sablonnières. I only went to Saint-Benoist to teach, leaving early in the morning, lunching at noon from a meal that had been prepared at the house, which I had heated up on a stove, and returning home in the evening after prep. In this way, I was able to keep the child with me, and the servants on the estate looked after her. Most of all, I increased my chances of seeing Augustin, if he ever returned to Les Sablonnières.

In any case, I still hoped that eventually, in some piece of furniture or drawer in the house, I would uncover a sheet of paper or some other clue that would tell me how he had spent his time during the long silence of the preceding years – and so, perhaps, understand the reasons for his departure or at least find some trace of him… I had already searched in vain through I don’t know how many cupboards and wardrobes, and opened a large number of boxes of every kind in storerooms
which turned out either to be full of packets of old letters and yellowing photographs of the Galais family, or else crammed with artificial flowers, feathers, plumes and old-fashioned stuffed birds. These boxes gave off an indefinable musty smell, a faded perfume that would suddenly awaken memories and regrets in me and put an end to my search for the rest of the day.

Finally, on one school holiday, I found a little old trunk in the attic: long and low, covered in worn pigskin, I recognized it as Augustin’s school trunk. I blamed myself for not having started my search there. I had no difficulty in breaking the rusted lock. The trunk was chock full of exercise books and school books from Sainte-Agathe: arithmetic, literature, workbooks, and goodness knows what… More from nostalgia than curiosity, I started to leaf through them, rereading dictations that I still knew by heart because we had copied them out so many times – Rousseau’s ‘Aqueduct’, P.-L. Courier’s ‘An Adventure in Calabria’, and the letter from George Sand to her son…
¹⁷

There was also a ‘Monthly Composition Book’. I was surprised to find it because these books stayed at the school and pupils never took them away. It was a green exercise book, yellowing at the edge. The pupil’s name,
Augustin Meaulnes,
was written on the cover in splendid copperplate. I opened it. From the date of the exercises, April 189–, I realized that Meaulnes had started it only a few days before leaving Sainte-Agathe. The first pages had been kept with the meticulous care that was obligatory when one was working on these composition books, but only three pages had been written on: the rest was blank, and this explained why Meaulnes had taken it away.

Crouching on the floor and reflecting on these childish forms and rules that had played such a large role in our adolescence, I was turning the edge of the unused pages of the book with my thumb. And so it was that I discovered the writing on the later pages: after leaving four pages blank, someone had started to use the book again.

It was still Meaulnes’ writing, but fast, careless and barely readable: little paragraphs of unequal width, separated by blank
lines. Sometimes there was just one unfinished sentence, sometimes a date. As soon as I started reading, I guessed that there might be some information here on Meaulnes’ past life in Paris, some clues to what I was seeking, so I went down into the dining room to read through the strange document at my leisure and in daylight. The light was that of a clear, breezy winter’s day. At times, the bright sunlight projected the cross of the window frames on to the white curtains, at others a sharp wind dashed an icy shower against the panes. And it was in front of that window, by the fire, that I read the lines that explained so much to me and which I now set down here exactly as I found them…

XIV

THE SECRET

I have passed once more beneath her window. The pane is still dusty and whitened by the double curtain behind it. Were Yvonne de Galais to open it, I should have nothing to say to her, because she is already married… What can I do now? How shall I live?

Saturday, 13 February. On the embankment, I met the young woman who told me about the closed house in June and who had been waiting, as I was, in front of it. I spoke to her. As she was walking along, I looked sideways at the slight defects of her face: a little line at the corner of the lips, a little sagging of the cheeks, some powder visible by her nose. She turned round suddenly and stared me straight in the face – perhaps because she is prettier full face than in profile – saying curtly, ‘I find you very amusing. You remind me of a young man who once paid court to me in Bourges. We were even engaged…’

And saying this, after dusk, on the damp, deserted pavement shining in the light of a gaslamp, she suddenly came close to me and asked me to take her to the theatre that evening with her sister. For the first time, I notice that she is dressed in mourning, with a lady’s hat too old for her young face and a long, slender umbrella, like a walking stick. As I am right next to her, when I make a gesture my finger nails scratch the crêpe on her bodice… I try to refuse. She is annoyed and wants to leave at once. Now I’m the one holding her back, begging. And
then a workman walking past in the dark mutters, jesting, ‘Don’t go, girl, he’ll do you harm!’

The two of us stayed there, reduced to silence.

In the theatre: the two girls, my friend, who is called Valentine Blondeau, and her sister, arrived with cheap scarves.

Valentine is sitting in front of me. She turns round constantly, uneasily, as though wondering what I want. And, close to her, I feel almost happy: I reply each time with a smile.

All around us there were women showing too much bosom. And we joked. She smiled first, then she said, ‘I mustn’t laugh: my dress is cut too low as well.’ She wrapped her scarf around her. Under the square of black lace you could see that, in her haste to change her clothes, she had turned down the top of her simple, high-necked chemise.

There is something indefinably poor and naive about her. In her look, there is an intangible air of suffering and audacity that attracts me. Near her, the only creature in the world who could tell me about the people of the Estate, I think constantly of the strange adventure I once had… I would like to have questioned her again about the little mansion on the boulevard, but she, in her turn, put such awkward questions to me that I was unable to say anything in reply. I feel that from now on we shall both of us stay silent on the subject. Yet, I know, too, that I shall see her again. Why? And for what? Am I now condemned to follow the trail of any being who has the vaguest and remotest connection with my failed adventure?

At midnight, alone, in the empty street, I wonder what this new, odd story is going to lead me to. I am walking along beside houses like rows of cardboard boxes in which a whole tribe is sleeping. Suddenly I remember a decision that I took a month or so ago: I would go there in the middle of the night, around one o’clock in the morning, open the garden door at the back of the house, enter like a thief and look for some clue that would allow me to find the Lost Estate, to see her again, just to
see her… But I’m tired and hungry. I too was in a hurry to change my clothes before the theatre and I didn’t have dinner… And yet, anxious, worried, I sit on my bed for a long time before going to sleep, feeling a vague sense of regret. Why?

Another thing: they did not want to be taken home or to tell me where they are staying. But I followed them as long as I could. I know that they live in a little winding street near Notre-Dame. But which number? I guess that they are seamstresses or milliners.

Without letting her sister know, Valentine arranged to meet me on Thursday at four o’clock in front of the same theatre where we had been.

‘If I should happen not to be there on Thursday,’ she said, ‘come back on Friday at the same time, then Saturday, and so on, every day.’

Thursday, 18 February. I left to meet her in a gusting wind, damp with rain – the kind that makes you feel constantly that rain is coming.

I am walking through the half-dark streets, with a weight on my heart. A drop of water falls: I am afraid that it will start to rain: a shower might stop her from coming. But the wind starts to blow again and, once more, the rain does not fall. Up in the grey afternoon of the sky – now grey, now radiant – a large cloud has had to succumb to the wind. And I am here, earthbound, miserably waiting.

In front of the theatre. After quarter of an hour, I am sure that she will not come. From the embankment where I am standing, I am watching the lines of people walking across the bridge that she would have to take. My eyes follow all the young women in mourning that I see coming this way and I feel almost grateful to those who, for the longest time and closest to me, resemble her and keep my hopes alive…

An hour of waiting. I am weary. At nightfall, a police officer drags a young tearaway off to the nearby police station while
the lad is cursing him in a strangled voice with all the insults and filth that he can muster… The policeman is furious, pale and silent… As soon as he gets him inside, he starts to hit him, then closes the door on them so that he can beat him at his leisure… The dreadful thought occurs to me that I have given up paradise and am now standing at the gates of hell.

Tired of waiting, I leave the place and go to the low, narrow street between the Seine and Notre-Dame which I know is roughly the place where she lives. All alone, I walk up and down. From time to time, a maid or a housewife comes out under the drizzling rain to do her shopping before nightfall. There is nothing here for me, and I leave. Once again, I go past the square where we were due to meet, under the clear rain that is holding back the dark. There are more people than earlier – a black crowd…

Suppositions. Despair. Weariness. I cling to the idea of tomorrow. Tomorrow at the same time at this same spot I will come back and wait. And I am in a hurry to get to tomorrow. I imagine the boredom of this evening, then tomorrow morning, which I have to spend in idleness. But is today not almost over? Back home, beside the fire, I can hear them selling the evening papers. No doubt in her house, lost somewhere in the city, near Notre-Dame, she can hear them too.