The scene is set for the arrival of a mysterious figure, in this taster from Alain-Fournier‘s classic novel

He arrived at our home on a Sunday of November, 189… I still say ‘our home,’ although the house no longer belongs to us. We left that part of the country nearly fifteen years ago and shall certainly never go back to it.

We were living in the building of the Higher Elementary Classes at Sainte-Agathe’s School. My father, whom I was in the habit of calling M. Seurel as did other pupils, was head of the Middle School and also of the Higher Elementary classes where pupils worked for the preliminary teacher’s examination. Mother taught the infants.

At the extreme end of the small town a long red house with five glass doors and a Virginia creeper upon its walls; an immense courtyard with shelters, a wash-house and a huge gateway, on the side looking towards the village; on the north side, a small gate opening on the road leading to the station three kilometres off; on the south, at the back of the house, fields, gardens, meadows joining the outskirts… such is the simple plan of this dwelling where I spent the most troubled but the most happy days of my life – the house from which we launched our adventures and to which they returned to break themselves like waves on a bare rock.

At the time of some new ‘appointments,’ a whim of fate, due to some inspector or to the Prefect, had led us there. Towards the end of the summer holidays, a long time ago, a peasant cart, preceding our household goods, deposited my mother and myself before the little rusty gate. Urchins who were stealing peaches in the garden silently escaped through holes in the hedge…. My mother, whom we used to call Millie and who was the most methodical housekeeper I ever knew, had at once gone into the rooms full of dusty straw, and had declared with much consternation – as was her custom at each ‘removal’ – that our furniture would never fit in a house so badly built…. She had come out to impart her trouble to me. While speaking she had, with her handkerchief, gently wiped my face blackened by the journey. Then she had gone back to consider what doors and windows would have to be blocked to make the place habitable…. As for me, wearing a big straw hat with streamers, I was left alone on the gravel of that strange playground, waiting for her, prying shyly around the well and under the cart-shed.

Thus to-day I picture our arrival. For as soon as I wish to bring back the distant memory of that first evening when I waited in our playground at Sainte-Agathe, at once it is another kind of waiting which I recall, at once I see myself again, both hands pressed to the bars of the front gate, anxiously watching for someone who will soon come down the High Street. If I try to imagine that first night which I must have spent in my attic, amidst the lumber-rooms on the upper storey, I recall other nights; I am no longer alone in that room; a tall, restless, and friendly shadow moves along its walls and walks to and fro. And that quiet countryside – the school, old Father Martin’s field, with its three walnut trees, the garden daily invaded on the stroke of four by women paying calls – all this is, in my memory, forever stirred and transformed by the presence of him who upset all our youth and whose sudden flight even did not leave us in peace.

Yet we had already been ten years in that district when Meaulnes arrived.

I was fifteen. It was a cold Sunday of November, the first day of autumn to make one think of winter. All day Millie had waited for the station omnibus to bring her a hat for the bad weather. That morning she missed Mass, and right up to the sermon, from my place in the choir with the other children, I looked anxiously towards the door to see her come to church wearing her new hat.

In the afternoon, I had to go to vespers alone. ‘Anyhow,’ she said to comfort me, brushing my little suit with her hand, even if it had come, this precious hat, I should have had to spend my Sunday making it up again.’

This is how our winter Sundays were often spent. In the early morning Father went off to some misty pond to jack-fish from a boat, and Mother retired till nightfall into her dark bedroom, to remake her simple dresses. She shut herself up in that way for fear some lady visitor, as poor as herself and as proud, might surprise her at the job. As for me, vespers over, I waited, reading in the cold dining-room, until she opened the door to show me how she was getting on.

That Sunday, a little excitement in front of the church kept me out-of-doors after vespers. A christening, under the porch, had attracted a crowd of urchins. In the square a few villagers had put on their firemen’s jackets and piled their arms; stiff and stamping their feet with cold, they were listening to Boujardon, the corporal, losing himself in theory….

The christening bells stopped suddenly, like festive chimes at a mistaken time and place. Boujardon and his men, rifles slung over their shoulders, dragged off the fire engine at a slow trot, and I saw them disappear at the first turning, followed by four silent urchins, crushing under their heavy boots the twigs on the frozen road, down which I dared not follow them.

In the village the only place left alive was the Café Daniel, from which I heard the murmurs of the drinkers’ talk rise and fall, and hugging the low wall of the big playground which separated our house from the village, I came, rather anxious at being late, to the small gate.

It was ajar and I saw at once that something unusual was happening.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below.

Our August/September 2025 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.