THE THREE LETTERS FROM MEAULNES

In all my life I have received only three letters from Meaulnes. They are still at home in a chest of drawers. Each time I read them again, I feel the same sadness as of old.

The first arrived two days after he had left.

MY DEAR FRANÇOIS,

To-day, as soon as I got to Paris, I went in front of the house mentioned. I saw nothing. There was no one there. No one will ever be there.

The building mentioned by Frantz is a private house one storey high. Mademoiselle de Galais’ room must be on the first floor. The top windows are the most hidden by the trees, but one sees them quite well from the pavement, as one walks by. All the curtains have been drawn and it would be mad to hope that, one day, Yvonne de Galais’ face would appear from behind the drawn curtains.

The house stands on a boulevard.... It was raining a little on trees already green. You could hear the sharp clanging of the tramcars always going by.

I walked up and down, underneath the windows, for nearly two hours. I went in for a drink at a bar close by, so as not to be taken for a burglar up to some mischief. Then I returned to my hopeless watch.

Night came. Windows lit up nearly everywhere, but not in that house. There is certainly no one there. And yet Easter is approaching.

Just as I was about to leave, a girl or a young woman--I don’t know which--came and sat on one of the rain-soaked benches. She was dressed in black with a small white collar. When I left, she was still there, not having stirred in spite of the cold of the evening, and waiting, goodness knows for what or for whom. You see, Paris is full of fools like me.

AUGUSTIN

Time passed. I waited in vain for a word from Meaulnes all Easter Monday and the following days--days so calm after the Easter fever that just to wait for summer seemed the only thing to be done. June brought examinations and a terrible heat, a suffocating haze hovering over the countryside, without a breath of wind to dispel it. Night afforded no coolness and consequently no respite from this torture. It was during this unbearable month of June that I received the second letter from Admiral Meaulnes.

_June, 189.._

MY DEAR CHAP,

This time all hope is gone. I have known it since yesterday evening. My grief, which I hardly felt at first, has been increasing ever since.

Every evening I went and sat on that bench, watching, pondering, hoping in spite of all.

Yesterday, after dinner, the night was dark and stifling. People were talking on the pavement, under the trees. Above the dark leaves--toned to green by the lights--flats were lit up on the second and third storeys. Here and there, summer had forced a window to be thrown wide open.... The lamp could be seen standing alight on the table, scarcely changing the sultry obscurity of June; you could see almost to the other end of the room.... Ah! if the dark window of Yvonne de Galais had suddenly lit up as the others, I believe I should have found courage to go up the stairs, to knock and enter....

The girl of whom I spoke to you was still waiting there, like me. I came to think that she might know the house, and I asked her.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘that at one time, in this house, a girl and her brother used to come for the holidays. But I learned that the brother had run away from his parents’ country-house and was never found again, and that the girl had married. That explains why the house is shut up.’

I walked off. Ten steps farther, I stumbled against the curb of the pavement and nearly fell. During the night--it was last night--when the women and the children left off their noise in the back yards, and I might have gone to sleep, I began to hear the cabs rolling by in the street. They passed only now and then. But no sooner had one gone by than, in spite of myself, I waited for the next: the horse’s bell, his hoofs clinking on the asphalt.... And it went on repeating: empty town, your poor love gone, eternal night, summer, fever....

Seurel, dear man, I am in great distress.

AUGUSTIN

Few confidences in these letters, whatever you may think! Meaulnes did not tell me either why he had remained silent so long, or what he now intended to do. I had the impression that he was breaking with me, his adventure over, as he was breaking with his past. It was no good my writing to him; I received no reply. Only a word of congratulation when I passed my preliminary Matriculation. In September I heard through a school friend that he had been for his holidays to his mother’s at La Ferté d’Angillon. But, that year, invited by my Uncle Florentin, we had spent the holidays at Vieux-Nançay. And Meaulnes went back to Paris without my having a chance to see him.

I received the last of the three letters I ever received from Meaulnes, on my return to school, at the end of November, while I was working with melancholy zeal for my final Matriculation,[6] hoping in the following year to secure a teacher’s post without going through Bourges Training College.

‘I still go under that window,’ he wrote. ‘I still wait, not that there is any hope: just sheer madness. At the end of these cold autumn Sundays, about the time when night comes, I cannot decide to go home and close the shutters of my room without returning to stand there in the chilly street.

‘I am like the mad woman of Sainte-Agathe who would go to her front door every minute and look towards the station, one hand raised above her eyes, to see if her dead son were coming home.

‘Seated on a bench, shivering and wretched, I take pleasure in imagining that some one is going to take me gently by the arm.... I should turn round. It would be she. “I am a little late,” she would simply say. And all suffering and all madness vanish away. We enter our home. Her furs are cold, her veil damp; she brings in with her a flavour of the outside mist; and as she draws near the fire, I see the flaxen fairness of her hair and the soft outlines of her beautiful face bent towards the flame....

‘Alas! the pane remains white, with the curtain drawn across it. And should the girl from the Lost Land draw it aside, I have no longer anything to tell her.

‘Our adventure is at an end. Winter, this year, is as dead as the grave. Perhaps when we die, perhaps death alone will give us the key, the sequence and the end of this adventure that failed.

‘Seurel, the other day, I asked you to think of me. Now, on the contrary, it is better to forget me. It would be better to forget everything.

* * * * *

‘A. M.’

And this new winter proved as dead as the preceding one had been alive with mysterious life: the church square without gipsies; the playground which the boys deserted on the stroke of four ... the classroom where I studied alone and without pleasure.... In February, for the first time that winter, snow fell, definitely burying the tale of our adventures, blurring every trail, blotting out the last traces. And I tried, as Meaulnes had asked me in his letter, to forget everything.