We have gone a little ahead in the story of Fournier’s life. Another significant event belonged to the year 1905. From childhood he had felt an attraction to things English; now he resolved to spend the summer holidays--from July to September--in London, and secured an easy post as French correspondent for a London merchant, into whose house he was admitted as a boarder on friendly terms. All the impressions of this episode are duly recorded in letters to Rivière. They are mainly favourable; indeed in many respects England and the English made an intimate appeal to the French youth.

When we read the detailed reports of his impressions we note a touch of critical amusement from time to time, but always mixed with sympathetic appreciation. He lived in the western suburb of Chiswick within easy reach of Kew Gardens and Richmond, and was delighted with the green freshness of England and the pleasant little villas, with white-curtained windows, each in its own garden, so unlike Paris. He quickly began to observe English girls, with whom he came in touch both at the office and in the house, and the impression they made on him was not altogether favourable. He seems to have felt that--‘with their masculine gestures and noses in the air’--they were often incompletely aware of the fact that they were women and only concerned to be good comrades. They were too far away from the Frenchwoman, whom he describes as ‘unknown beneath her veil, silent and remote, shut up in her distant salon, and so femininely enwrapped in her dark dress.’ There are exquisite young girls in England, he remarks, but they become at once too comradely. He himself, on the other hand, seemed to them cold and reserved.

England, he said later, enlarged his vision of life. He studied a new national temperament. He learnt to love Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Rossetti, and Morris. He grew seriously interested in painting. He was specially drawn to the Pre-Raphaelites. To-day there is a revulsion of feeling against that wrongly named movement, and it is no longer easy to realise the new revelation of beauty and naturalism which Burne-Jones and his fellow-workers brought to the youth of forty years ago, disgusted with the dead academic conventions of the epoch. For Fournier it was still new, and it embodied in painting something of the same union of realistic detail with dreamlike vision which he himself was already foreseeing in the novel. His favourite in contemporary French art at this time, Maurice Denis, may be said to have similar points of affinity. Fournier left England (in excellent reputation with his hosts) ‘with much tenderness of heart,’ for ‘in many points I resemble these English,’ and he carried away, not only the memory of exquisite countrysides, but a new confidence and serenity in the road he was himself to follow.

Next year Fournier settled in Paris with his grandmother and sister and attended as a day-pupil the upper courses at Louis-le-Grand. His aim was still the École Normale. But when the day of examination arrived he was suffering with brain fatigue from the strain and he failed in the oral. The career he had aimed at was definitely closed to him. ‘I do not see you a professor,’ Rivière had written to him, and on looking back after Fournier’s death he wrote that the design was mad, for to a spirit of that temper ‘no paths could be easy save those that had never been explored.’

In 1907, Fournier wrote and published in the _Grande Revue_ (with a dedication to Maurice Denis) his first personal little essay in prose, though still a rather poetic prose, ‘Le Corps de la Femme.’ With that indifference to ‘pure beauty’ which Rivière said he hated in his friend, Fournier here revolted against the classic image of woman, the nude pagan idol which he associated with Taine and Louys and Gourmont, and celebrated a more modern ideal which had passed through centuries of Christianity, and emerged frail and tender, yet with something of the simplicity of the peasant and the fragrance of nightfall in spring, all the delicate essence of her body expressed in her garment. In 1907 also he began his two years of military service and endured the miseries, fatigues, and forced oppressive comradeships which that life brings to men of his temperament, emerging, however, at the end as a sub-lieutenant, and carrying away with him not only an enlarged knowledge of the France he loved (there are exquisite passages of description in his letters) but a precious familiarity with the lives of the men of the people, his comrades.

At one moment of discouragement Fournier proposed to go out to China to enter the Customs Service under Sir Robert Hart, and at another almost accepted a post in an English school at Margate. Through everything he became increasingly occupied in the absorption or the criticism of contemporary letters and art and music. At an early period he recognised that his own field was the novel, and he realised, with remarkable lucidity in self-judgment, the precise nature of the art he was bringing to the novel. That art was so natural to him that we cannot discern the moment at which _Le Grand Meaulnes_ began to grow in his mind, though we may follow its development and modifications for five or six years before it was finally completed and published.

But a definite step in the growth of the book took place in 1910. He had not yet completely left Symbolism behind and was struggling with a method which he felt to be difficult and artificial. At this time he was much impressed by Marguerite Audoux’s _Marie-Claire_ and R. L. Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_; they gave him a new impetus towards a method he had already felt within him, and now he writes to Rivière: ‘In the end I have scrapped it all, for, one fine evening, I found my _road of Damascus_. I began to write simply, directly, as in my letters, in little tight voluptuous paragraphs, a simple story which might be my own. Now it goes by itself.’

Alain-Fournier lived in the Observatory quarter of Paris in a quiet and isolated street recalling the streets of Bourges, and his room, we are told, was simple and neat and orderly. He might often be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens, a slender young man dressed in black, with a dark serious face and slight moustache, ‘the face of an imperious young prince,’ it has been called. Pilon says he recalled the figures described by Pater in his _Imaginary Portraits_ when dealing with Watteau. ‘You could not see him without loving him,’ said Paul Fort. But Paul Fort had no intimate knowledge of the man he found so lovable; to come near to Fournier may well have been a difficult experience; his sensitive tenderness was not incompatible with hardness and violence. There was a certain awkwardness in him--even in his hands, we are told--and he lacked patience. ‘Only women who have loved me,’ he himself said, ‘know to what point I can be cruel. Because I want the whole. You see,’ he adds, ‘my hero Meaulnes!’ And Valentine in the story, I may further add, was based on Fournier’s personal experience. In a letter to his sister he narrates the episode with the real Jeanne B. whom he treated so badly. Fournier mentally prescribed to women as Rivière says, the angle at which they were to enter his life, and at the smallest lapse on their part he would overwhelm them with reproaches for their innocent failure to attain his ideal. The ideal demand, he himself remarks in 1907, which he would make of his wife, was ‘audacious initiative’ blended with ‘superhuman tact.’

He formed various literary relationships during the last years of his life, the most notable being with Péguy, whom he first met in 1910. Péguy, for all his obstinate temperament, was often influenced by Fournier and always ready to follow his advice. Fournier on his side found in Péguy the most congenial of contemporary writers. He felt a strong sympathy with his instinctive, childlike peasant’s nature; he admired his spiritual materialism (‘a Rabelais of ideas,’ he calls him), and with that tendency to find the miraculous in everyday life which Péguy carried to so high a point Fournier was entirely at one. Péguy was not without influence on _Le Grand Meaulnes_ and, during Fournier’s last years, seems to have been his nearest friend. Rivière’s sympathy with Péguy was only partial, and at this period the correspondence between Fournier and Rivière begins to languish. The old personal ties always subsisted, but the profound temperamental difference was becoming more clearly revealed. Rivière admits that Fournier’s attitude sometimes ‘gets on his nerves,’ while Fournier jealously guarded his own spiritual integrity and could not be moved from his own path. But to Rivière we owe a sensitively appreciative and adequate account of Fournier’s life which cannot be superseded.

Over the last years we seem to feel a hovering obscurity. Rivière in after days reproached himself--though the reproach was unnecessary--with a neglect that led his friend to fall, we gather, into what Rivière regarded as evil courses and to come under disturbing influences. Amid episodes with women which brought him no satisfaction because, as he said, he had ‘once met an Antigone,’ we find Fournier still actively pursuing his aims in literature and with the promise of success. But often we only see him through an atmosphere of melancholy. He realises that he has lost his childhood vision of the world and at times he is inclined to recover what he has lost by turning to religion. He obtains a copy of the Bible and is touched by incidents in the Gospels; he is deeply impressed by Dostoevski, especially by _The Idiot_. At one moment it even occurs to him that he would like to enter a religious order and seek new adventure as a missionary.

When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 Fournier happened to be in the south of France. Like others--like Rivière, also in the south and who chanced to be in the same army division--he was hurried among many hardships to the front, and found himself eventually in the Meuse, near Vaux-les-Palameix, at a later period of the war occupied by the Americans. Fournier’s captain was an unintelligent man whose own idea, against the better judgment of his lieutenants, was: ‘Hunt out the Boches!’ Fournier, ‘timid but fearless,’ for whom life was a ‘great game,’ never drew back. The inevitable end swiftly ensued. Fournier led a company; the captain was in command. On the 22d of September at Saint-Rémy a vague figure was seen in the enemy’s lines. The captain rushed forward, revolver in hand, followed by Fournier, but only by a small number of men. They were being led into an ambush on the edge of the wood. Most of them were shot down. Fournier fell struck in the forehead, according to the only report that could be obtained, but his body was not recovered. Until the end of the war his friends cherished the hope that, like his friend Rivière, he had been imprisoned and conveyed to Germany. When after the war, Rivière came to search the ravaged and desolate ground for traces of his friend he found little memorials set up by the Germans--some ‘to a French hero’--but they were all of later date than Fournier’s disappearance.

Five years earlier he had written in a letter: ‘I am seeking for the key to these escapes into desired lands--and perhaps it is Death, after all.’