Started strong, but went out with a whimper. Elegiac, romantic (decidedly not in the Harlequin / Mills & Boon way, but in the capital-R Romanticism way), Proustian (published the same year as Remembrance of Things Past) in its nostalgic descriptions of the memories, times, and landscapes of the narrator’s youth. Fifteen-year-old François recalls a slightly older boy, Augustin Meaulnes (pronounced like “moan”), who disturbs the equilibrium of the local school and small community. Le grand Meaulnes, as the other boys dub him, borrows a horse and carriage, gets lost on the road, and finds himself in a strange, dreamy “domain” (a manor house) where a wedding is about to take place. There he sees an enchanting girl, and falls instantly and irretrievably in love, but she wanders off sighing “It’s no use… we are just children.” He fumbles his way back home again, but is not able to figure out where this out-of-the-way place is or how to get back, to find the girl again. He becomes gloomily, drearily obsessed with finding her, and François wants to help. But Augustin hies himself to Paris where the girl purportedly makes occasional visits, and pines. There is a muddle of classmates, townsfolk, chance meetings, and the thwarted groom of the wedding that never came off after all. Everyone is at cross-purposes; lovers are redirected, reunited, weep, desert one another, die, reappear… it’s all very melodramatic and I won’t offer any spoilers. The thing is, after all this drama, I kept expecting some kind of dark secret to finally emerge, something big and terrible – a murder, an illicit gay passion, something that would explode and explain the mess. But it never does. Even the death is not particularly tragic – more bathos than pathos.
Alain-Fournier has written this tale to wallow in (and maybe exorcise?) his own sad adolescent crush, and couches it in quite sweet and lovely memories of his schoolboy years in places he clearly loved deeply. The saddest part of this story is his own: killed within weeks of the outbreak of La Grande Guerre at Verdun at the age of twenty-eight. Very much a period piece, and very much subject to your own literary tastes. But kind of fun, if you like this sort of thing – I often do, but this one petered out and left a vague disappointment in its wake.