The English translation of Le Grand Meaulnes is The Lost Estate, but don’t plan on finding the novel anywhere under that title. Typically, the English title given to this strange, transcendent, almost-experimental-but-not-quite novel is The Wanderer. Oddly enough, both The Wanderer and The Lost Estate are equally appropriate.
Technically, the novel belongs to the tradition of schoolboy stories, although the characters barely qualify as boys. It is the age old story of teenagers in love, but with fantastical edge and a fairy tale atmosphere that, alas, does not lead to a happily-ever-after. The lost estate aspect of the title refers to a remote manor house which Augustin Meaulnes accidentally wanders onto after running off from school one cold December day. The Christmastime setting also plays into the atmosphere of a childlike fable being told. In addition, there is a wedding feast, Augustin climbing through a window and occupying a bed for the night ala Goldilocks, an introduction to a beautiful girl who rejects a second opportunity to meet, but delivers the age-old promise to wait for his return, and a boy who runs away with gypsies. Throughout the narrative are other individual images and scenes which call to mind fairy tales.
At the same time, however, the narrative inexorably presses forward with a sense of melancholy occasioned by the passage from childishness to maturity. Characters grow older, marry, produce offspring and arrive at an emotional place that is filled with the sense of longing for the adventure and innocence of childhood. What is peculiar about this, however, is that at the very time the characters do not really seem to grow up. This paradoxical juxtaposition is foreshadowed early in the story when Augustin first shows up at the manor house where that wedding party is being planned. Here’s the thing: the estate is mostly populated by children, though there are some adults. It is the children, however, who seem to be in charge of the adults, directing the course of the festivities. The children are in charge, but there is something a little off about the kids that suggests they may not be entirely children at all.
Le Grand Meaulnes is not intended to be taken literally. It is a psychological romantic adventure and meditation upon the strains and pressures placed upon adolescents at that time in their lives when they are stuck midway between the child they were and the adult they will be come. The novel is somewhat prescient in its semi-autobiographical offering of the short life of its young author. It is a story about those who never quite make the transition to adulthood, but remain trapped in that twilight zone of adolescence written by a young man who was killed on the front lines during World War I at age twenty-seven as a just a year after his only novel was published.
