In a poll of French readers about their favourite books of the twentieth century, The Lost Domain (known by a number of different titles: Le Grand Meaulnes, The Lost Estate, The Wanderer) came in sixth, just behind works by Proust and Camus. For many it was required reading at school and became as important to them as other great books about the transition to adulthood: Catcher in the Rye for American readers, or Brideshead Revisited for the English. Its haunting strangeness and the author’s early tragic death in the first weeks of the First World War has lent it cult status. John Fowles called it ‘the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature’, yet it remains largely unfamiliar to many readers outside France.

Alain-Fournier’s first and only novel is a stunningly beautiful work. The Lost Domain (1913) evokes French rural life and the places Fournier knew intimately as a child, then slips seamlessly into mysterious, magical realms. The inclusion of a romantic quest mirrors the real life story of Fournier’s eight-year obsessive love for a woman he met fleetingly.

The Story

François Seurel, the novel’s narrator, is the fifteen-year-old son of school teachers who live in the provincial village of Sainte-Agathe. Augustin Meaulnes, a new boy who comes to board with them, comes to be known as ‘the Great Meaulnes’ due to his size and charisma. His first act on arriving at the house flouts the rules. Finding fireworks in the attic he lets them off in the courtyard in front of Seurel’s mother. ’For a second she could see me standing in the magic glow, holding the tall newcomer’s hand and not flinching…She did not dare to say anything.’ In an instant, the timid teachers’ son and the swarthy Meaulnes are allies. Meaulnes immediately takes over as the most popular boy at the school.

Soon after his arrival, Meaulnes skips school and takes off in a horse and cart to pick up Seurel’s grandparents from a distant train station. But he never arrives, and goes missing for three days. When he returns he is changed. Confused and solitary, unsure where he has been, he eventually confides to Seurel the details of his strange adventure.

He had become lost down a country lane in the most desolate part of the Sologne, on a freezing December afternoon, and wandered into a ‘lost domain’. In the grounds of a forest lay a vast and beautiful chateau, its great grey turret peeping out from some fir trees. The estate was festively lit by coloured lanterns and mysteriously alive with children and young people dressed in old world costumes. There was music and dancing, a Harlequin and Pierrot character, and a sense of magic in the air:

Meaulnes…had scarcely taken a step in the hall before finding himself in the midst of laughter, song, shouts, and scampering, though there was no one in sight.

The colourful characters had gathered to celebrate the wedding of Frantz de Galais, the son of the family who owned the chateau. Meaulnes was welcomed like an old friend and joined the feasting; the next day, by the lake, he encountered Frantz’s sister, the lovely Yvonne de Galais. She seemed to him like an enchanted princess and he immediately fell deeply, rapturously in love with her. But then the wedding was mysteriously called off. Meaulnes came across a distraught Frantz de Galais who told him his fiancée had failed to show up. The party broke up and the guests hurriedly left the chateau. Meaulnes was given a ride back to the highway near Sainte-Agathe, where he found his way back to the schoolhouse.

The rest of the novel concerns Meaulnes’s attempt to understand what has happened to him. He becomes obsessed with the idea of returning to the lost domain and finding Yvonne de Calais again. Meaulnes has glimpsed the vital, significant pulse of his life, and now it seems painfully at arm’s length, ‘out there’ somewhere, beyond the fields around Sainte-Agathe. He draws a map to try to pin down the exact location of his nocturnal discovery, but the map remains incomplete. His path back to the domain that has bewitched him will be less direct: a mix of coincidental encounters, an act of friendship and his constant longing. But dreams are impossible to realise and Meaulnes becomes conflicted between his love and another competing promise he has made.

Alain-Fournier Country

The Cher, where The Lost Domain is set, is named after the river that runs through this department of central France. It is a land of forests and lakes, known for its wild game. Near the village of Alain-Fournier’s birth is a district near La Chapelle d’Angillon called the Sologne, a flat land of heath and marshes that he especially loved, calling it ‘useless, silent and profound.’ His sister Isabelle recalled feeling that there were roads on the western edge of La Chapelle, where one could sense the Solonge begin:

…on the road to Presly, soon after you leave La Chapelle, there’s a steep hill and then you reach the fir plantation, the birch woods, the stretches of purple heather and solitude.

The Huguenots who had once lived here fled persecution in the eighteenth century and their abandoned dwellings and châteaux lend the area an air of mystery.

Much of the early story takes place in the Épineuil-le-Fleuriel schoolhouse, where the Fournier family lived in an adjoining apartment from 1891 to 1898. The particularity of the place, its village and countryside is lovingly recounted: the scorched wool smell of the boys crowding around too close to the stove in the classroom; the furtive whisperings while M. Seurel writes up  questions on the blackboard; the smithy, glowing and warm; Café Daniel giving out the muffled voices of its customers, the sound of carts rumbling and cowmen shouting as night begins to fall.

Background

Alain-Fournier’s real name was Henri Alban Fournier. He renamed himself after a medieval chivalric poet to avoid confusion with a well-known racing driver who was also called Henri Fournier.  He was born in 1886 to parents who were both primary school teachers and pillars of the community.

The village of his birth was La Chapelle-d’Angillon and when he turned five, his parents were posted to a school further south, at Epineuil-le-Fleuriel. Here he spent his formative years, with holidays back at La Chapelle in the house of his maternal grandparents. Fournier’s childhood was as calm and peaceful as his rural surroundings. He was extremely close to his younger sister lsabelle. Their happiest times were spent reading the books that were to be given out as prizes at the end of every school year. Many were English novels and adventure stories which would later influence Fournier’s writing.

‘I am a peasant. I must confess that sometimes I’m embarrassed by my own peasant faults’, he said. But he was more complex than that. One of his biographers, David Arkell, describes him as having possessed the Gallic savoir-vivre and sensitivity of the narrator François Seurel; yet as a brilliant athlete and outgoing rebel, he also had the swagger and adventurousness of Meaulnes.

Meeting Jacques Rivière

Fournier was put through the French system of intense examinations to prepare him for life as a teacher or public servant. In 1903 when he was seventeen, and studying for his entrance exams for the Ecole Normale Supérieure near Paris he met his closest friend, Jacques Rivière, who became a great literary critic and editor of France’s leading literary journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française.

Their friendship was slow to form. For the first year they did nothing but fight and Rivière noted that his new friend possessed the same rebellious, independent spirt that he later gave to Meaulnes. In Rivière’s introduction to Miracles, a collection of Alain-Fournier’s short fiction that was published posthumously, he described how they forged a bond.

[Alain-Fournier] had placed himself at the head of a group of rebels, with whom I secretly sympathised but could not yet bring myself to join because of my timidity and my wish to avoid distractions…I felt a little scandalised and a little frightened, yet at the same time attracted to his personality. I hesitated to approach him and it was he who made the advances, mixed  though they were with much mockery and teasing. It was clear that I irritated him, yet in some way he was drawn to me…slowly I became conscious of his sincerity, which won me over and broke down my resistance. Then it was that I found, alongside his indiscipline, a quite different aspect of his personality, which little by little revealed itself to me, and which I could love. Beneath that untamed exterior I found someone tender, naive, full of dreams and gentleness: in short, someone who, in the battle of life, was even more vulnerable, if that were possible, than I was.

Meeting Yvonne de Quiévrecourt

In June 1905 Fournier encountered the woman who came to be identified with Yvonne de Galais in his novel, the greatest love his life. On the steps of the Grand Palais, leading down to the Seine he noticed a beautiful, fair haired, blue eyed girl. She was talking animatedly with an old woman. As he watched, the girl turned to him and gave him a long, cool stare. He followed the pair along the Cours-la-Reine and then onto a river boat near the Pont de la Concorde. The girl was fashionably and elegantly dressed in the style of La Belle Epoque, with a wide hat trimmed with pink roses and a loose brown coat partially covering her svelte figure. She had a habit of slightly biting her lip.

He followed the girl to her house on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he looked out for her for several days, catching glimpses of her through her bedroom window. One day, following her to the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he approached her, telling her she was beautiful and asking for her name: ‘I am Mademoiselle Yvonne de Quiévrecourt’, she answered. She told him she was from Toulon and her father was a naval officer. When asked if he could see her she replied with a sad look: ‘What’s the use? I don’t live in Paris. I’m leaving tomorrow,’ and she added: ‘We are two children.’ She asked him not to follow her, and crossed the Pont des Invalides. Yet she looked back at him twice, the last time staying quite still for several moments before she disappeared.

This meeting had a profound effect on Fournier. He made little attempt to meet Yvonne de Quiévrecourt again but became obsessed with her for the next eight years. He told those friends who were bewildered by his fixation: ‘It was a great shared love’.  Rivière said it was the defining event of his friend’s life and wrote that for Fournier, ‘perfect purity and innocence’, were essential for him to fall in love; that he believed in ‘the union of souls before that of bodies’. It is that ‘height of perfection and purity’ that Meaulnes attains on his first visit to the lost estate, yet can never recover. For Fournier, no other love came close to capturing this experience.

Meaulnes’s meeting with Yvonne in the novel replicates the notes Alain-Fournier wrote at the time of his first encounter with Mlle de Quiévrecourt. She is the fair, blue-eyed daughter of a naval officer, who bites her lip; her features are ‘drawn with an almost excruciating delicacy’. The serious look she gives him seems to Meaulnes to mean: “Who are you? What are you doing here? I don’t know you – yet I feel as though I do…” Like Fournier, Meaulnes follows the woman and her elderly companion on board a boat. The only difference is the substitution of the Seine for the lake beside the fantasy chateau, surrounded by woods of fir.

What were Meaulnes’s feelings afterwards as he recalled this moment when, on the banks of the lake, he had so near to his own the face of this girl – a face that was then lost to him! He had stared at that exquisite profile with every atom of his eyes until they were ready to fill with tears.

Writing The Lost Domain

All his life, Alain-Fournier was possessed of a powerful sense of nostalgia that beckoned him back to his childhood. In a letter to Jacques Rivière he wrote:

I no longer know if it is the countryside itself that I miss, or that time in the past which I spent there. The feeling I get, very gentle and very deep, could be called nostalgia for the past.

And while in school in Paris he wrote to his parents that he wanted ‘to write books and books for you about everything one saw and felt in that little corner of the earth which was our whole world’.

This longing to reconstruct the place of his childhood and imbue it with feeling, became the focus of The Lost Domain which he had begun to write while he was studying in Paris. Hermione Lee, in her introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the novel, observes how Fournier’s homesickness for the Cher became entwined with his ambition to become a writer. Like Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, he drew inspiration from the place he had left behind, wishing to map it in fictional form.

In his third and final year of study in Paris, Fournier was deprived of his friend Jacques Rivière, who had failed his exam and was now studying for a degree in his native Bordeaux. Their separation sparked a flood of correspondence (some of the most beautiful letters in French literature). They were enormously influential to the aspiring writer. The friends were passionate about literature and they discussed their reading in depth.

Fournier was an anglophile and a great admirer of Dickens, Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. He regarded English literature as less elitist and more down to earth than the French and wrote to Rivière of his desire: ‘to write novels as one conceives them in England, beautiful novels for the peasants, for the teachers, for the towns of province.’

Rivière, an acute critic from an early age, warned him against ‘falling into sentimentality’, or becoming ‘mawkish’. He felt his friend was ‘too moved by things that aren’t worth while.’

Universal pity is fine enough in its way, but you can’t feel sorry for everything […] I think you should be careful. Despite their talent, or even genius, Dickens and Goncourt and Daudet could well be dangerous for you: and I’m telling you this so that your book won’t be just a banality. Let it be strange, contrived, false, devious or what you will – but, for the love of God, not banal.

To which Fournier replied,

Yes, but all that is just semantics. Sentimentality is when it doesn’t come off – when it does, you get a true expression of life’s sorrow.

He later added:

I think that sentimentality is above all sloppy writing. My credo in art: childhood. To be able to reproduce it without any childishness, with its depth that touches mysteries. 

For a year or so, Fournier pressed on with the writing of his novel but came to an impasse. He broke through once he recognised that he needed to drop the artificial note he had adopted from the start: ‘I shan’t be truly myself as long as I have a single bookish phrase in my head’, he wrote. In a letter to Rivière he explained:

I began to write simply, directly, as I would in a letter, with short paragraphs, smooth and voluptuous, telling a simple story as if it were my own. I threw overboard all my entangling abstractions and philosophy. And what’s marvellous is that the essence of the thing remains: it’s still my book.

This new direction involved a break with the Symbolism they had admired; a rejection of its mental abstraction in preference for objects and facts. As Rivière explained:

Fournier found his real aptitudes and strength when he realised he was a novelist. In one bound he released himself from dream, and grasped real life with all its accidents. Henceforth he would count solely on things he had scrupulously observed to reveal the emotion that comes ‘at the bend of a road or the end of a paragraph.’

He went back to the beginning of his novel and started with the tangible world of his childhood: the school house, the village, the countryside.

As The Lost Domain took shape Fournier borrowed elements from Robert Louis Stevenson’s tales of adventure (the writer whom Fournier believed to be the greatest story teller of all). The male camaraderie, incomplete map, sworn oaths, and ambushes, the locked case containing the missing clue, all take their cues from Stevenson.

Yet Fournier retained from Symbolism a fascination for eerie and enchanting atmospheres, for shimmery music and images of shadow-plays, masks, mimes and magic lanterns. The reader is gently led away from the tangible into a mysterious, longed-for world: the everyday made strange. He used Rivière as a sounding board for a new theory of literature; one that maintained a constant ‘to-and-fro’ between dream and reality’.

…by dream I understand that vast and imprecise life of the child, which floats above ordinary life while all the time receiving from it echoes and reminders […] Delicious and half-known things happened to me, leaving behind only the impression of delight; yet somehow the delight has to be expressed.

It is this contrast between the realistic and the dreamy, mysterious realm that is so striking about the novel.

After two years of military service, Fournier began to make his name as a critic and journalist. He worked for a time for the Paris-Journal while also contributing to various literary reviews.

Meeting Yvonne Again

Throughout his correspondence with Rivière, Fournier dropped cryptic reminders of his continuing obsession with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt. Months before his novel was published, and eight years after they first met, a mutual friend arranged a meeting between the couple. It was something of an ordeal for them both as it turned out that Yvonne had been as impressed as he at their first encounter. Fournier asked whether they could be friends and she agreed. She invited him to visit her home in Brest where, she suggested rather pointedly, he could join her husband on his long country walks. She stressed that she was now on good terms with her husband but this had not always been the case:

If you’d come three years ago, anything might have been possible. I was unhappy and often thought of you. I would have written to you if I’d been able. I wasn’t getting on at all well with my husband. We didn’t seem to have a thing in common. Since then we’ve both made concessions and forgiven each other. I’m now the happiest of women. It was my fault as much as anything: I was a little goose.

To emphasise the fact that anything romantic between them was out of the question, she introduced Fournier to her two infant children. Although Fournier came away astonished that Yvonne had come so close to contacting him and that there had been a distinct possibility of real love between them, he was able to come to terms with the situation as it stood. The powerful erotic attachment was spent. Perhaps Yvonne de Quiévrecourt had served her purpose in becoming Yvonne de Galais.

Shortly after this meeting, Fournier embarked on a torrid affair with Simone Benda, a famous actress, and the wife of his employer, the French statesman Jean Casmimir-Périer.

Publication

The Lost Domain was published to good reviews in 1913 and overnight Fournier became the talk of Paris. It came second in that year’s Goncourt competition, losing out by only the narrowest of margins.

The book has passionate admirers. John Fowles in the afterword to the first British edition of the novel named it as his favourite book as an adolescent. He described it as ‘a poignant and unique masterpiece of alchemized memory’ that profoundly influenced his own masterpiece, The Magus. He added:

What Fournier pinned down is one truly acute perception of the young, which is the awareness of loss as a function of passing time. It is at that age that we first know that we shall never do everything we dream. . . . It is above all when we first grasp the black paradox at the heart of the human condition, that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire.

Writer Adam Gopnik in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition calls it a ‘refusal-to-age’ story, as against a coming of age story and suggests a reason for the novel’s continued popularity is its sexlessness.

In the 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’s 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 …

Strong parallels have been drawn between The Lost Domain and Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which was published twelve years later, in 1925. Both novels have obsessive love at their centre and larger than life, charismatic heroes whose less adventurous friends, while participating in the events, also narrate the story. There are similarities in the party going, and scenes involving strange green lights. Fitzgerald even appears to have mimicked the title. Although there is no direct evidence that Fitzgerald read The Lost Domain, it is likely that he did, since he was living in France at the height of the book’s popularity.

Endings

Alain-Fournier was part way into his second novel Colombe Blanchet , a romance set in the provinces, when he was called up for action in the First World War. On September 22, 1914, at the age of twenty-seven, he became one of the war’s first literary casualties. On a reconnaissance patrol with a group of men he had somehow ended up behind enemy lines. John Fowles wrote that his company ‘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.’

But in 1991, following a fourteen year search, Alain-Fournier’s remains were discovered in a mass grave with twenty other fallen French soldiers. He had been shot in the head. The following year, he and his comrades were laid to rest in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne. Markers of the graves include a white stone statue of a flame, the cap of the regiment, and a book with the title Le Grand Meaulnes, with Alain-Fournier’s name in black letters.

Many years after his death, the man who married Yvonne de Quiévrecourt read The Lost Domain to their children and told them their mother was its heroine. Yvonne died on 29 December 1964, having represented for a generation, the idea that ‘somewhere, but always out of reach, there exists a happiness which ravishes the soul.’

Music

Pelléas et Mélisande (Suite) Claude Debussy, played by WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Conducted by Alain Altinoglu

In 1908 Alain-Fournier and Jacques Rivière saw and fell in love with the Debussy opera Pelléas and Mélisande which had gained a cult following in France. Based on Maeterlinck’s Symbolist drama, it is the story of a fairy-like woman who has lost her way in a forest and is found by a prince. The innocent quality of the relationship between the lovers, and its dream-like atmosphere found their way into Alain-Fournier’s own novel.

Connection

In The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir wrote about attempting a first novel at the age of nineteen but being unable to think of a subject. She found the world that she knew ‘stupefying’ and felt that she had no particular viewpoint to offer. The only way out of the difficulty she felt was to copy the imagery of other writers, ‘indulging in pastiche, an always regrettable habit’.

Her models were Le Grand Meaulnes and English writer Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer  (1927), another tender book about adolescence adored by girls of her generation. They were books Simone had loved and delighted in. She wished to move from a realistic world into a more magical one.

She discussed her plans with her lover Jean Paul Sartre who told her he found such illusory subject matter repellent. He advised her to above all be honest in her work. Yet, she wrote,

the only kind of honesty open to me at this point would have been silence. So I set about manufacturing a story that, I hoped, would borrow a little of Alain Fournier’s and Rosamond Lehmann’s magic.

She gave up the enterprise by the third chapter, feeling that the work lacked conviction.

In any case, de Beauvoir was starting to have some adventures with Sartre that would provide her with plenty of material. She Came to Stay (1943) was her first published novel about a Parisian couple who enter a ménage à trois with a younger woman. The plot closely follows her own experiences with Sartre and the sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. There is a story about de Beauvoir’s early life with Sartre here.