The Lost Estate (7 page)

Leaving La Motte, he paused at a crossroads just after the schoolhouse and thought he could remember that you had to
turn left for Vierzon. There was no one to ask. He roused the mare to a trot on the road which was now narrower and badly surfaced. For a time, it ran beside a wood of fir trees, and at last he met a carter: cupping his hands around his mouth, he asked him if he was on the right road for Vierzon. The mare pulled at its reins and trotted on while the man, who probably didn’t understand the question, shouted something, with a vague wave of the hand. Taking a chance, Meaulnes carried on.

All around him, once more, was the vast, frosty plain, featureless and lifeless except for the occasional magpie which flew up, frightened by the cart, and settled a little way off, on the stump of an elm. The traveller had wrapped his large blanket around his shoulders, like a cape. Leaning against one side of the cart, with his legs outstretched, he must have fallen asleep for quite a long while…

And then, because of the cold, which was now getting through the blanket, Meaulnes came to his senses and saw that the landscape had changed. No longer were there the distant horizons and great white sky as far as the eye could see, but little fields, still green, with high fences. To right and left, in the ditches, water was running under the ice. Everything suggested that he was coming to a river. And between the high hedges, the road was now just a narrow, rutted lane.

The mare had slowed to a walk some time before. Meaulnes gave her a flick of the whip to speed her up, but she continued to walk on very slowly, and the tall boy, looking to one side over the front of the cart, saw that she was lame in one of her rear legs. He immediately got down, full of anxiety.

‘We’ll never get to Vierzon in time for the train,’ he said, under his breath.

He didn’t admit that what really worried him was that he might have taken a wrong turning and that he was no longer on the Vierzon road.

He looked carefully at the animal’s hoof and could see no sign of a wound. The mare was quite timid. She raised her leg as soon as Meaulnes touched it and scraped her heavy, clumsy hoof along the ground. Eventually, he realized that she had
simply got a stone in her shoe. Being an expert at dealing with animals, he bent down, and tried to take her right hoof in his left hand and put it between his knees, but the trap was in his way. Twice, the mare broke loose and moved ahead a few steps. The running board hit him on the head, and the wheel bruised his knee, but he kept on and in the end managed to control the nervous animal. However, the pebble was so deeply embedded that he had to use his peasant’s knife to get it out.

When he had finished and finally looked up, dazed by the blow and with a mist in front of his eyes, he was amazed to see that night was falling…

Anyone but Meaulnes would immediately have turned back: that was the only way to avoid getting even more lost. But it occurred to him that by now he must be a long way from La Motte. In addition to that, the mare seemed to have taken a side road while he was asleep. And, in any case, this road must eventually lead to some village or other… Add to all that the fact that when this impulsive fellow got up on the running board, while the impatient animal was already tugging at the reins, he was irritated by a growing desire to achieve something and to reach somewhere, despite the obstacles in his path!

He whipped the mare, which shied and set off at a quick trot. It was getting darker. Now, in the sunken lane, there was just room for the cart. From time to time, a dead branch from the hedge got caught in the wheel and broke with a dry snap… When it was quite dark, Meaulnes felt a pang as he suddenly thought of the dining room at Sainte-Agathe, where all of us must be gathered at that time. Then he felt anger, then pride – and a profound sense of joy at having, unwittingly, broken free…

IX

A PAUSE

Suddenly, the mare drew up, as if it had stumbled against something in the dark. Meaulnes saw her head go down, then up, twice; then she stopped dead, her nostrils to the ground as if she were sniffing something. Around the animal’s hooves, you could hear a lapping sound, like running water. There was a stream across the lane. In summer, there must be a ford here, but in this weather the current was so strong that ice had not been able to form, and it would have been dangerous to go on.

Meaulnes pulled gently on the reins to bring the horse back a few steps and, very unsure of what to do, stood up in the cart. This is when he saw, between the branches, a light: it must only have been a few feet away from the lane.

The boy got down from the cart and led the mare back, talking to her, to calm her and stop her from anxiously tossing her head: ‘Come now, old girl! Come, now! We won’t go any further. We’ll soon find out where we’ve ended up.’

Pushing the half-open gate of a little meadow beside the lane, he led the horse into it. His feet sank into the soft grass. The cart was juddering silently and Meaulnes’ head was next to that of the mare: he could feel her warmth and the rasping of her breath. He led her right to the far side of the meadow and put the blanket over her back. Then, parting the branches that lay across the further gate, he once more saw the light, which belonged to an isolated house.

Even so, he had to cross three fields and jump over a deceptive little stream in which he almost landed with both feet. Finally, after a last jump from the top of a bank, he was in the
courtyard of a cottage. A pig was grunting in its sty. At the sound of his footsteps on the frozen earth, a dog started to bark furiously.

The top flap of the door was open, and the light that Meaulnes had seen came from a wood fire burning in the fireplace. This was the only light in the room. A woman, sitting inside, got up and came over to the door, not seeming to be very much alarmed. At that moment, the upright clock struck for the half hour at half-past seven.

‘Excuse me, my dear lady,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid that I’ve trodden on your chrysanthemums.’

Pausing with a bowl in her hand, she examined him.

‘It’s so dark in the yard,’ she agreed, ‘you can easily miss your way.’

There was a silence, during which Meaulnes, still standing, looked at the walls of the room, which were papered with cuttings from magazines, like an inn, and the table, on which there was a man’s hat.

‘The master isn’t here?’ he said, sitting down.

‘He’ll be back soon,’ said the woman, more confidently. ‘He’s gone to fetch some wood.’

‘It’s not that I need him,’ the young man went on, bringing his chair up to the fire. ‘We’re out hunting and I just came to ask you for a bit of bread.’

The Great Meaulnes knew that with country people, especially in an isolated farmhouse, one had to proceed with considerable discretion, even diplomacy, and most of all to avoid revealing that one was not from the region.

‘Bread?’ she said. ‘We haven’t any to give you. The baker comes by every Tuesday, but he didn’t come today.’

Augustin, who had briefly hoped that he was somewhere near a village, was alarmed at this.

‘The baker from where?’ he asked.

‘Why, the baker from Le Vieux-Nançay,’ the woman replied, in astonishment.

‘And just how far is Le Vieux-Nançay from here?’ Meaulnes inquired, with growing anxiety.

‘By the road, I couldn’t rightly tell you, but across country, it’s three and a half leagues.’
⁶

She started to tell him how her daughter was in service there and how she went by foot to see her on the first Sunday of the month and how her employers…

But Meaulnes, who was entirely bewildered by now, interrupted her to ask if Le Vieux-Nançay was the nearest village to there.

‘No, that’s Les Landes, five kilometres away. But there’s no shop there or a baker. There’s just a little fair every year on Saint Martin’s Day.’

Meaulnes had never heard of Les Landes. He realized that he was so completely lost that it was almost funny. But the woman, who had been busy washing her bowl at the sink, turned round, curious in her turn, and said slowly, looking directly at him: ‘Does that mean that you’re not from hereabouts, then?’

At that moment an old peasant man appeared at the door with an armful of wood, which he threw down on the tiles. The woman explained to him – very loudly, as though he was deaf – what the young man was looking for.

‘Why, that’s easy,’ he said simply. ‘But come in close, Monsieur, you’re not getting the fire.’

Shortly after that, both of them were sitting down next to the andirons, with the old man breaking up the wood to put it on the fire and Meaulnes eating a bowl of milk with some bread which they had given him. Our traveller, delighted at finding himself in this humble abode after so many uncertainties, thought that his odd adventure was over: he was already planning how he would come back later with his friends to see these good people. He didn’t know that this was just a pause and that his journey would shortly resume.

He soon asked if they could put him back on the road to La Motte. And, reverting bit by bit to the truth, he told them how he and his carriage had been separated from the other hunters and that he was now completely lost.

The man and woman were so insistent that he must stay overnight with them and only leave at daylight that eventually Meaulnes accepted and went out to look for his mare to put her in the stable.

‘Look out for the holes on the track,’ the man told him.

Meaulnes did not dare admit that he had not come by ‘the track’. He almost asked the old man if he would go with him. He hesitated for a moment on the doorstep and was so undecided that he almost reeled backwards. Then he went out into the dark yard.

X

THE SHEEPFOLD

To get his bearings, he climbed up the bank off which he had earlier jumped.

Slowly and with difficulty, as he had done the first time, he made his way through the grass and past puddles and across willow fences, towards the trap, where he had left it at the far end of the meadow. But it was no longer there… His head pounding, he stood quite still and tried to recognize the sounds of the night, thinking at every moment that he could hear the clinking of the mare’s bridle not far off. He went all round the outside of the meadow. The gate was half open, half lying on the ground, as though a cart wheel had gone over it. The mare must have escaped through there on its own.

He walked a little way back up the lane and stumbled over the blanket, which must have fallen off the mare’s back. He concluded that it had set off in this direction and started to run after it.

His only thought was a mad urge to recover the carriage at any cost, and this furious determination, which was something like panic, sent all the blood rushing to his head as he ran. From time to time, he stumbled over a rut. When the road bent, he stumbled into the hedges in the total darkness and, already too tired to stop in time, fell on the brambles, with his arms outstretched, tearing his hands to protect his face. Sometimes, he stopped, listened and then set off again. Once, he did think he had heard the sound of a carriage, but it was only a noisy cart going by a long way off, on another road, to the left.

Eventually, his knee, which had been hit by the running board, was hurting so much that he had to stop. It also occurred
to him that if the mare had not run off at a gallop, he would have caught her up a long time ago. He also thought that a carriage could not get lost in that way and that someone would be bound to find it. So, at length, he retraced his steps, exhausted, angry and barely able to walk.

Eventually, he thought he had returned to somewhere in the vicinity of where he had started and soon saw the lights of the house which he had been looking for. There was a sunken path through the hedgerow.

‘This must be the track that the old man mentioned,’ Augustin thought.

He set off along it, happy at no longer having to climb over hedges and banks. After a short while, the path veered off to the left, and the light seemed to move to the right, so that when he got to a crossroads, Meaulnes was in such a hurry to get back to the little cottage that he did not think before taking a path that seemed to be leading directly to it. But he had hardly taken ten steps in that direction than the light vanished, either because it was concealed by a hedge, or because the peasants had grown tired of waiting and closed the shutters. The boy bravely set out across country, walking straight towards the place where the light had been shining a short time earlier. Then, after crossing another fence, he found himself on a new path.

And so it was that Meaulnes lost his way and cut the ties that bound him to the people he had just left.

Depressed and almost exhausted, he decided despairingly to follow this new path right to the end. A hundred yards further on, he came out into a wide, grey meadow with what appeared to be juniper trees spaced out in it and a dark building in a fold of the ground. Meaulnes walked across to it. It turned out to be just a sort of large, abandoned cattle shed or sheepfold. The door creaked as it opened. When the wind drove away the clouds, the moonlight shone through gaps in the walls. Everywhere, there was a musty smell.

Without looking any further, Meaulnes lay down on the damp straw with his head cradled in his hands and his elbows on the ground. After taking off his belt, he curled up in his
smock, with his knees up to his belly. It was now that he thought of the mare’s blanket that he had left on the road, and felt so miserable and annoyed with himself that he had a strong desire to weep…

So he tried to think of other things. Chilled to the bone as he was, he remembered a dream, or rather a vision that he had had as a small child – something he had never mentioned to anyone. One morning, instead of waking up in his room where his trousers and his coats were hanging, he found himself in a long green room with tapestries like forest greenery. The light flowing into this place was so sweet that you felt you could taste it. Beside the nearest window, a girl was sewing, with her back turned to him, as though waiting for him to wake up. He had not had the strength to slip out of bed and walk through this enchanted mansion. He had gone back to sleep. But the next time, he swore that he would get up – tomorrow morning, perhaps!