Henri Fournier--to use the name by which he first comes before us--was born on October 3, 1886, at Chapelle-d’Angillon, a small place, to the north of Bourges in the Département of the Cher, on the border of Sologne. The Sologne is a region between the Cher and the Loire, once flourishing and with many Huguenots among the population. When they were driven out the region became deserted, a land of marshes and ponds thinly populated under unhealthy conditions, but also a land of tender and delicate solitudes, with many a more or less decayed old mansion or château still marvellous and exquisite amid the wild scenery. In recent years there has been a movement for draining and reclaiming this district; it has become healthy and more populous, though still a favourite country for people who go to shoot wildfowl. We have to note these traits of the Sologne for it was background predestined for the adventure of _Le Grand Meaulnes_, ‘the country of my dreams,’ wrote Fournier in later life of Nançay and the Sologne, ‘the country from which I am exiled.’ But it was more especially the still smaller village of Épineuil, at the extreme north of the Département, where his parents were for a long time the village teachers, that his childhood and boyhood were passed, leading the life of a little peasant. This region, in the centre of France, the old province of Berry, is in its southern portion the literary land of George Sand. But Fournier was in the north of it, a region of different aspect, quieter, a land of alders, rushes, and reeds, in a horizon which, it has been said, recalls the miniatures in the old French Books of Hours with their delicate little pinnacles against the sky. It was the region which alone Fournier knew in early life and it made on him a profound impression. He loved it, but in some mysterious way, while far from the sea and from international routes, it was the background which favoured the ardour of his adventurous spirit. We know how that flame was fed. At the beginning of July, every year, the books arrived which were later to be distributed as school prizes. These books Henri and Isabelle carried up to the attic to devour greedily beforehand. It was in this way probably that he first read _Robinson Crusoe_, a book that always meant much for him, though at first merely as a story of actual adventure, and this was the beginning of his attraction to England, which for him was the land of adventure. Naturally it was towards the ocean that his thoughts were directed (it was by no accident, as Pilon remarks, that Frantz de Galais belonged to a family of sailors) and at the age of thirteen he resolved to become a naval officer. After a short period at school in Paris he went to Brest to prepare for this career. But here, although he had done well in mathematics, he seems to have found the work uncongenial and felt out of sympathy with his surroundings. He left Brest with regret, but with his adventurous temper unquenched, and throughout his work we catch subtle suggestions of ships and the sea. Henceforth his adventures in real life, even for those who most sensitively follow his career and his intimate letters, were largely beyond exact analysis; we catch glimpses, there is a far music in our ears, we inhale a delicate fragrance--and that is all. ‘Perhaps I am not altogether a real person,’ said Benjamin Constant, and we are told that when Fournier came on that remark it was with a shock; he felt it applied to himself. ‘But,’ he said on reflection, ‘perhaps I am able to pass where you see only an abyss.’

It was from lack of anything better rather than from any immediate sense of vocation that Fournier turned from the sea to letters, thinking, no doubt, that all his early dreams had gone for nothing. It was not so. We do not understand Fournier unless we remember Bougainville, the great French navigator who found and fascinatingly described a Paradise in the Pacific, and unless we bear in mind the scheme of _Robinson Crusoe_, the great English epic which is the prototype--however remote it may seem--of the adventure of Meaulnes in Sologne, in the heart of France.

At the age of seventeen, then, in 1903, Henri Fournier went to a well-known Secondary School, the Lycée Lakanal, delightfully situated to the north of Paris, with the idea of preparing for the École Normale Supérieure. Here his independent temper quickly manifested itself in revolt against various antiquated regulations and humiliating obligations; he placed himself at the head of a group of rebels and circulated revolutionary petitions aimed at the scholastic officials. Jacques Rivière, who from Bordeaux had entered the Lycée at the same age and the same time and with the same object, observed his comrade’s proceedings with interest, even with secret sympathy, but his own temperament was different and his character more timid. These dissemblances at first held them apart. But before long a revelation, which came to both at once, served to bring them together.

When we are young we do not immediately know where we shall hear those voices of our own time to which our virginal hearts will deeply and instinctively respond. They must come from figures of our own time, older than we are or they would not have found expression, but not old enough to have ‘arrived,’ so that we do not at once learn of their existence. Our teachers, as well as popular fame, thrust upon us the figures of the last generation, by whom they had themselves been inspired in youth, and these are, in general, precisely the figures to whom our instincts are most rebellious--though later we grow able to estimate them better--while the great figures of the past can only be genuinely understood when we have ourselves reached maturity. Young Fournier seems to have discovered nothing of literature or art at Épineuil, and at Lakanal the figures that came before him--Racine, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, even Flaubert--had nothing to say to his heart, for the great masters presented in a scholastic framework can scarcely make any strong appeal to the young mind. But one day a professor read to the class Henri de Régnier’s _Tel qu’en Songe_. A new note struck both boys at once. They turned towards each other and from that moment were friends. ‘We came upon words,’ as Rivière later put it, ‘without even knowing before that such existed, chosen expressly for ourselves, words which not only caressed our sensibility but revealed us to ourselves. An unknown spot was touched in our souls; a harp we had not suspected within us awoke and replied.’ It was the process of religious ‘conversion’ which so often occurs in youth. With Rivière, who was less of a poet and artist, the process was not final; a spirit of disquiet, receptive and yet always quickly critical of what he received, he was much troubled in later years over more specifically religious problems. But with Fournier--though he, too, was at one period touched by religion--the experience was decisive; he had, once and for all, found the path to his own Heaven.

Henri de Régnier is perhaps the most exquisite poet of the so-called Symbolist Movement which at that moment reached its full expression in French literature. It was natural that these two youths should respond harmoniously to the spirit of their own time. But it must not be concluded that Alain-Fournier (or Rivière either) is to be classed among the Symbolists. Symbolism was the porch through which Fournier entered to take possession of his own mysterious domain, but while echoes of the Symbolists’ delicate music linger about that domain, it has a vigorous life of its own completely independent of the fashions of a movement which had in it much that was merely decorative and artificial and evanescent, though it opened a new home of the soul for the young poetic natures of the end of the last century. We are not surprised to find the youthful Fournier, who had not yet discovered Mallarmé or Verlaine or Rimbaud or even Baudelaire, reading with congenial enthusiasm Henri de Régnier and Maeterlinck and Viélé-Griffin, but more especially Laforgue and Jammes. These two really embodied aspects of his own temperament, and if at this time they may seem to have excited a certain degree of formative influence over him, while Rivière was at first carried away by Barrès, they were merely aiding him to discover his own path. In Laforgue he found a temperament closely allied to his own, tender, timid, proud, ironical (‘ironical because wounded, and only on that account’). Physically, Rivière remarked, Fournier was far from being timid, but he had a deeper timidity of the spirit, in the sense that while he was strongly attracted to women he could not endure the idea of being disconcerted or ill-used, and required for the development of love the perfection of purity and innocence. In this way, as will happen to the idealist, he manifested the cruelty of those who demand more than life will yield. At this period of youth he formed a relationship, of quite innocent nature, with a student girl who became his companion on Sunday excursions and whom he tried to form to the shape of his ideal. But he suffered from the limits she imposed to his imagination; he desired more sincerity, more openness, and her little feminine coquetries hurt him.

Francis Jammes was a rather later but still youthful influence; he appealed to Fournier on the naturalistic side, to that sensitive realism which was never submerged in his idealism. Fournier was enchanted by Jammes’ close and fervid grip of Nature and the felicity with which he has sometimes been able to incarnate the very scent and colour and shape of things in verse which, it has been said, ‘may sometimes be grasped like a pole and sometimes be crushed between the fingers like a sprig of mint,’ while Jammes’ great maxim, ‘We do not separate art from life,’ was adopted by Fournier and carried to a point of exquisite perfection which Jammes never attained. It was at this time--while absorbing Gide and Claudel and Rimbaud and Ibsen--that Fournier began to seek after his own personal style in the art of writing. Now also, at the age of nineteen, he began occasionally to write verse, always in free form, and, while personal and genuine, hardly the utterance of a born poet. But it remains interesting to us precisely because it is personal and genuine. Some poems have been printed since his death and are important because they record (especially ‘A Travers les Etés,’ one of the earliest) the precise germ of the future _Grand Meaulnes_.

One day (it was Ascension week in 1905), Rivière narrates, while walking in Paris along the Cours-la-Reine, Fournier met a marvellously beautiful girl whom he was impelled to follow. He even succeeded by some lucky ruse in obtaining her name and address. The next time he saw her, although her air was extremely reserved, he approached and spoke. Strange to say, for she appears to have been of superior social class, he was favoured with some words of response which led him to think he was not altogether disdained. He felt that this lovely apparition was exerting an effort over herself to say: ‘We must separate; we have been foolish.’ She left Paris; Fournier had the greatest difficulty in finding her traces. At last, in 1907, he learnt--on the very day after he had unexpectedly failed to pass his École Normale examination--that, as he at once wrote briefly and in deep grief to tell his friend Rivière: ‘Mademoiselle de Q. was married last winter. What is now left to me, dear friend, but you?’ That corollary was wrong. The great adventure of Alain-Fournier’s life was indeed over. But Admiral Meaulnes had set forth to seek Yvonne de Galais, and a masterpiece of art was slowly growing beneath the surface.

The woman who incarnated for Fournier the essence of a mysterious domain which was hardly of this world (in his later letters he always refers to her as Yvonne de Galais) continued to live in his memory, though there were episodes in his life, we clearly discern, which left behind an oppressive burden later to be echoed in _Le Grand Meaulnes_. But the anniversary of the day on which he met the young girl in the Cours-la-Reine was a sacred season for Fournier. Later, the year before his death, he met her again, married and more inaccessible than ever, and wrote to Rivière: ‘That was really the only being in the world who could have given me peace and repose. It is now probable that I shall never achieve peace in this world.’