ALAIN-FOURNIER
Le grand Meaulnes
Emile-Paul frères, Paris 1913, 14,3x19,4cm, broché sous coffret et étui.
First edition, one of 20 numbered copies on Hollande, this one specially printed for the author.
Red morocco box by J.-P. Miguet, spine in six compartments, date at foot of spine, inside of covers edged with red morocco, lined in light grey suede, slipcase edged with red morocco.
Provenance : library of R. and B. L. with ex libris.
A handsome copy presented to Madame Simone, Alain-Fournier's mistress, with the inscription "Exemplaire pour Madame Casimir-Perier. Henri Alain-Fournier [Madame Casimir-Perier's copy. Henri Alain-Fournier]." Included with the work is a moving autograph letter from Albanie Fournier, the author's mother, to Madame Simone, dated the 24th November 1917. Three octavo pages on mourning paper, the letter was written when she learned of Madame Simone's engagement to François Porché: "...I am devastated. Simone, you don't know what you are to me, what you represent, how much I love you. My Henri is incarnated in you - in loving you, it's him I love.
But why remarry, my Simone, why cast aside your freedom? You are so independent, and do well as you are!...And if he never comes back? Ah! It's so appalling, it doesn't bear thinking about!...How you must have suffered, dear Simone, to reach such a decision. I still hope it is nothing more than a lie in the paper, in
Le Sourire. But whatever you do, I will always love you - I feel that it is impossible from me to detach myself from you."
Beneath this polite inscription to the wife of Claude Casimir-Perier smolders the final passion and one true reciprocal love of Alain-Fournier's. Alain-Fournier's meeting with Pauline Casimir-Perier - "Madame Simone" - coincided with the reappearance in Alain-Fournier's life of Yvonne de Quiévrecourt.
Yvonne, "so pretty that to look upon her is almost painful," was a young lady noticed furtively in the street in 1905. Immediately and irremediably taken with this "shaft of white lilac", the eighteen year-old schoolboy followed her around the streets for a week before going up to her and declaring his love. But Yvonne was already betrothed and after a few hours of wondering through Paris with the young man, left the capital for good.
Henri Fournier never got over this amorous encounter. The young lady became Yvonne de Galais in
Le Grand Meaulnes, a cathartic novel written as much to exorcise this chimerical love as to try and win over Yvonne, whom he found once more in 1912 thanks to a detective agency.
It was during this same period, as he was completing his novel under the name of Alain-Fournier, that Henri Alban Fournier became - with the help of de Péguy - the private secretary of Claude Casimir-Perier; thus meeting Pauline, a celebrated actress under the name of "Madame Simone," and Claude's wife. So began the second and final great love affair of Alain-Fournier's life, which alone occupied eight obsessive years of the writer's life.
"Madame Simone, the other female figure in his passionate search for fusion and the absolute. Yvonne and Simone were the two sides of this singular universe, where the real and the imaginary met, exchanged pleasantries, plucked deadly passwords from the fog, incredible magic words to translate - from as close as possible - all that happened between the mortal and the immortal" (
Alain-Fournier by Violaine Massenet, p. 62)
Nonetheless, in 1913, a few months before the publication of
Le Grand Meaulnes, this nascent love affair came up against that other, which refused to die.
Even before their love affair had begun in earnest, Alain-Fournier confided the following enigmatic words to Simone, apparently intimating that with the completion of his book, he would also be setting free his heart:
"The day before yesterday, on his wedding day, the great Meaulnes left the young girl he had spent his whole adolescence searching for, loving, and chasing after."
At the same time, Alain-Fournier wrote a recently rediscovered passionate letter to Yvonne:
"It has been more than 7 years since I lost you...In that time, I have never stopped looking for you...I have forgotten nothing. I have stored away delicately, minute by minute, the little time that I had you in my life...You have left me only one way of reaching you and communicating with you, that of achieving literary fame." Nonetheless, he did not end up posting the letter, keeping it on his person for more than seven months.
In May 1913, after the premiere of
Sacre du Printemps, he spent his first night with Simone, writing to her a week later:
"I love you. The night of
Sacre, coming home, I saw that something had come to an end in my life and another begun, something admirable, more beautiful than anything else, but terrible and possibly fatal. I, for my part, have not recovered from this fever..."
A new love had just been born, one that would have to confront the other female figures ever present in Alain-Fournier's life: Yvonne, his sister Isabelle, and his mother Albanie.
"It was out of reach of these sacred figures that Simone took on form and spirit. It was only once his novel was finished and his final hopes dashed that Henri could devote himself to his new love, so different from the love he felt for Yvonne, so real this time. In order to do so, he had to overcome a past made of legend, an imperfect present and distance himself from his childhood companion Isabelle, to whom he dedicated
Le Grand Meaulnes; in farewell as much as in homage" (ibid., p. 227).
In the summer of 1913, Alain-Fournier, whose life was inseparable from his novel, still carried on him the letter to the woman he had himself christened "Yvonne de Galais".
Le Grand Meaulnes had begun to appear in the NRF review when he finally decided to meet the real Yvonne, married and the mother of two children: "the shock was sudden, the flesh-and-blood reality of Yvonne's life hit Henri with all its force" (ibid., p. 226).
Nothing became of these brief meetings and Alain-Fournier never tried to see Yvonne again. Finished, the novel of this illusory love appeared in October with a dedication to Fournier's other impossible love: his sister, Isabelle Rivière.
But
Le Grand Meaulnes, like Fournier's heart, would always belong to Simone, whose "monotonous existence" was transformed into a "subtle pleasure" following her reading of the manuscript at the start of 1913.
Since when, to the great irritation of Isabelle and Jacques Rivière, she had had the say-so over the future of both the work and its author. It was she who, along with Péguy, convinced Alain-Fournier to published with Emile-Paul and to try for the Prix Goncourt. It was she who gave the manuscript to the President of the
Académie Lucien Descaves, and who conducted a whirlwind campaign to obtain the prize for her lover. And it was perhaps because of the excesses of this very campaign that the jury withheld the prize from Alain-Fournier. Later, in its turn, Alain-Fournier's second book,
Colombe Blanche (left unfinished) was taken over completely by Simone, who quickly asserted herself as a central character through the traits of Émilie.
The intensity of the tumultuous and passionate affair between Alain-Fournier and Simone, both intellectual and physical, was not affected by the outbreak of war. The two lovers decided to get married upon Henri's return and Simone introduced herself to Albanie, Alain-Fournier's mother, who immediately took to the young woman despite the inconvenience of their adulterous relationship.
The two women ended up waiting together, in the house at Cambo-les-Bains, for news from the front: "how happy I count myself to be beside this woman, so good, and so devoted."
They went to Bordeaux together "in the hope of meeting Aristide Briand there and asking him to procure Henri a post as interpreter to the army." And without knowing that Alain-Fournier had been reported missing since the 22nd September, they did not stop sending him letters full of hopes and fears till the 14th October:
"I am in this war with you, I fight alongside you. Your mother...lets my tears fall in silence and only tells me every now and then: 'you know that nothing can happen to him'."
If a few days before his death Alain-Fournier, who had asked the military authorities to send his affairs to Madame Casimir-Perier in case anything should happen to him, was still concerned with his love for Yvonne, it was only to put an absolute end to it. On an undated postal card, he begs Marguerite Audoux to destroy the letters recording his final hesitation between Yvonne and Simone: "There is someone I love more than anything else in the world. There must be no risk of these letters finding their way to her one day and her thinking that my great love for her is in any way shared or restricted. I am counting on you absolutely to burn these letters."
In 1917, when Albanie learnt from the newspapers that Simone was to marry François Porché, she still believed in the return of her son, whose body had not been found, and could not comprehend this estrangement. In reality, Pauline Benda, destroyed by the death of Alain-Fournier, had found in François Porché, seriously injured, a companion in sorrow. They did not marry until 1923 in order "to salvage what could be saved" as Simone puts it in her autobiography,
Sous de nouveaux soleils [Under New Suns].
One of the most moving provenances for this copy on Hollande of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, perfectly preserved in a remarkable box by Miguet.
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