Le Grand Meaulnes
 |
|
| Author | Alain-Fournier |
|---|---|
| Translator | Françoise Delisle |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Bildungsroman |
|
Publication date
|
1913 |
|
Published in English
|
1928 |
Le Grand Meaulnes (French: [moln]) is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.
The title, pronounced: [lə ɡʁɑ̃ moln], is French for "The Great Meaulnes". The difficulties in translating the French (meaning big, tall, great, etc.) and le domaine perdu ("lost estate/domain/demesne") have led to a variety of English titles, including The Wanderer, The Lost Domain, Meaulnes: The Lost Domain, The Wanderer or The End of Youth, Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of the Lost Contentment, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) and Big Meaulnes (Le Grand Meaulnes).
It inspired the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby.
François Seurel, the narrator of the book, is the son of M. Seurel, who is the director of the school in a small village in the Sologne, a region of lakes and sandy forests in the heartland of France. After arriving in class, Augustin Meaulnes, a bright young man who comes from a modest background, soon disappears. He returns from an escapade he had which was a nightly and magical costume party where he met the girl of his dreams, Yvonne de Galais. She lives with her widowed father and her brother Frantz in a vast and ancient family chateau which has seen better days. The garden party was held to welcome Frantz and the girl he was to marry. The fiancée, however, fails to appear, and Frantz attempts suicide.
After having returned to the school, Meaulnes has only one idea: find the mysterious chateau again and the girl whom he has now fallen in love with. However his local searches fail while at the same time a bizarre young man shows up at the school. It is Frantz de Galais under a different name trying to escape the pain of having been rejected. Augustin Meaulnes finds out and leaves for Paris in order to find Yvonne de Galais but fails. He writes to his friend Francois Seurel: "It is better to forget everything".
...
Wikipedia