At the time he completed one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Le Grand Meaulnes, under the name of Alain-Fournier, Henri Alban Fournier is through Charles Peguy's private secretary Claude Casimir-Perier .dropoff window It thus meets Pauline, wife of Claude and famous actress known under the stage name "Simone". Thus began the second and final great love story of Alain-Fournier, which will only result of eight years of obsession with the writer.

The meeting of Alain-Fournier and Pauline Casimir-Perier indeed coincides with the reappearance in the life of Alain-Fournier Yvonne de Quiévrecourt.

Yvonne, "so beautiful watching the suffering in touch," is a young woman peeking seen in the street in 1905. Immediately and permanently in love with this "white lilac pole," the high school student 18 years following the street for a week before the address and confess his love. But Yvonne has already promised and after giving the young man a few hours wandering in Paris, she finally left the capital.
Henri Fournier will not recover this romantic encounter. The young woman became Yvonne de Calais in Le Grand Meaulnes, cathartic novel composed as to exorcise this chimerical love to try to conquer Yvonne found in 1912 by a detective agency.

"Simone, the other female figure of his frantic search for the absolute and fusion. Yvonne and Simone are the two sides of this unique world where the real and the dream clash, exchange their prestige, are emerging from the mist fatal passwords, dazzling sesame to translate as closely what happens between mortal and the immortal. "(Alain-Fournier by Violaine Massenet, p.62)
Yet in 1913, a few months before the release of Grand Meaulnes, this budding love faces the other who does not want to die.
Even before really began their relationship, Alain-Fournier says Simone few cryptic words, seeming to mean that with the end of his novel, he also releases his heart:
"The Meaulnes dropped before yesterday, the day of his wedding, the girl he had sought, loved and continued throughout his adolescence. Do you even lift
Meanwhile, Alain-Fournier wrote an impassioned letter to Yvonne found recently: "There are more than 7 years that I have lost. [...] Since then, I have not stopped looking for you. [...] I have not forgotten anything. I held it carefully, minute by minute, the little time I have seen you in my life. [...] You had given me a way to contact you and communicate with you, it was to get literary fame. "However, it fails to send his letter and guard over him for over seven months.
In May 1913, just after the premiere of The Rite of Spring, he spent his first night with Simone and a week later, wrote:
"I love you. The night's Rite, returning home, I saw a thing in my life was over and another beginning, admirable, more beautiful than all but terrible and perhaps fatal. Of this fever then, I am not healed .... "

A new love is born, which will oppose other female figures pervade the life of Alain-Fournier: Yvonne, her sister Isabella and her mother Albania.

"It is out of the scope of these sacred figures that Simone is body and soul. It was not until his last completed novel and abolished hopes that Henry can focus on his new love, so different from that of Yvonne, so real that one. To achieve this, it took him overcome a legendary past, to conquer this imperfect away as the small childhood companion, Isabelle, to whom he dedicated The Meaulnes, farewell as a homage. "(Ibid. P.227)
We are in the summer of 1913, Alain-Fournier, whose life is inseparable from his novel, still wearing the letter that he calls himself "Yvonne de Calais." Le Grand Meaulnes began to seem review the NRF when he finally decides to meet the real Yvonne, married with two children, "the shock is rough, carnal reality of life is needed Yvonne Henry in all its violence. "(Ibid p.226).
Nothing will happen to these short interviews and Alain-Fournier never seek to see Yvonne.
Now completed, the romance of this love seems illusory in October with a dedication to another impossible love Fournier: his sister, Isabelle Rivière.
But Le Grand Meaulnes as the heart of Simone Fournier now belongs to which "the monotony of existence" was changed to "subtle pleasure" from reading the manuscript early 1913.
Thus, to the chagrin of Isabelle and Jacques Rivière, it will decide the future of the book and its author. It was she who, with Peguy encourages Alain-Fournier publish with Emile Paul and try to get the Prix Goncourt. It is she who has the manuscript to the President of the Academy Lucien Descaves and leads a frantic campaign for the prize is awarded to her lover. And it is perhaps because of the excess of this campaign that the jury will refuse the award to Alain-Fournier. Then, in turn, Colombe Blanchet, the second novel - unfinished - Alain-Fournier, will be entirely colonized by Simone that quickly emerge as the central character in the Emilia traits.

The tumultuous and passionate relationship, intellectual as much as carnal defined, among Alain-Fournier and Simone will not be mitigated by the declaration of war. The two lovers decide to marry the return of Henry, and Simone is then presented to Albania the mother of Alain-Fournier, who immediately falls in love with the young woman, despite the impropriety of their adulterous relationship.
The two women will then live together in the house of Cambo-les-Bains, the long wait for news from the front: "How I consider myself fortunate to be with this woman so good and devoted. Do you even lift
They go together in Bordeaux "in the hope of meeting Aristide Briand and ask for an interpreter Henry the armed".
And without knowing that Alain-Fournier has been missing since September 22, they continue to send until October 14, of hope and fear letters:
"I am at war with you, to fight with you. Your mother [...] let my tears flow quietly and told me just now and then, "you know that it can happen to him. "dropoff Window
If a few days before dying Alain-Fournier, who asked the military authorities to return her things in case of misfortune Madame Casimir-Perier, still cares about his love for Yvonne is to put an absolute term. On an undated letter-card, he implores Marguerite Audoux destroy two letters expressing its last hesitations between Yvonne and Simone:
"There is someone I love more than anything in the world. It should not be that one day these letters may fall into his hands and make him believe he could be shared or restrictions in my immense love. I count on you in an absolute way to burn those letters. Do you even lift
In 1917 lorsqu'Albanie learned from the press that Simone should marry Francois Porche, she still believes in the return of his son, whose body has disappeared and can not understand such disaffection. In reality, Pauline Benda shattered by the death of Alain-Fournier is with Francois Porche, seriously injured, in pain companion. They will marry in 1923 to "save what was left to save" as Simone recounts in his autobiography "Under new suns."

Alain-Fournier leave a seemingly polite tribute to the wife of Claude Casimir-Perier as an autograph on a vellum copy of Holland Grand Meaulnes . But under the laconic dedication smoldering fire of passion and ultimate one true love shared by Alain-Fournier.