So the husband puts his pride in his pocket, and reconciles himself with his neighbours; and things soon right themselves. Only a child has apprehended that which does not belong to the world of a child, only a boy’s lofty pure-minded ideal has been injured by contact with the hard realities of life.
Madame Tinayre, in a volume of stories, L’Amour Pleure (1908), took up the tale a few years later. Robert Marie is a lad of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, regarded as a ward by the notary of Beaugency and his wife, Uncle Bon and Aunt Belle. He has no relations, only his godfather and godmother, M. and Mme Cheverny, who live in Paris, and who from time to time come down to see him. Robert can remember a time, long distant, when there was no uncle Bon, no Aunt Belle, but, so far back as his mind can carry, there have always been a M. and Mme Cheverny, and always they have come to see him together.
He knows there is a mystery about his real parents; and the different suppositions he makes concerning them, the gradual growth of his desire to know who he really is, are the substance of this haunting story; but not for a moment does he suppose that M. and Mme Cheverny (who seem the sole links between him, poor waif, and those other boys who have a place in the world, parents, a name) are not really M. and Mme Cheverny, are not married: they whom he has not ever seen apart!—are each of them married to another. And he is their son, brought up by stealth, visited in mystery. The contrast between the passion of these unhappy, charming parents and the robust indignant innocence of their unconscious son is told with a sincerity and a romantic realism peculiar, I think, to the work of Madame Tinayre.
About the same time—a year later, I think—in 1909, a young writer from Marseilles, M. Edmond Jaloux, published his Le Reste est Silence, which obtained the Prix Vie Heureuse for that year. There are many points of contact between this novel and L’Enfant à la Balustrade; but M. Jaloux has not the more than feminine delicacy, the subtle moral tenderness of M. Boylesve. He, too, tells the story of a small boy, the surprised, half-unconscious involuntary witness of the growth of an unlawful love. Madame Meisserel is a less innocent, less charming Tantine, and here, too, there is a dull, awkward, not unpathetic husband.
The delicate sky, the gracious landscape of Touraine are replaced by the busy brilliance of Marseilles; the key is higher, the sonority is louder; and it is well that this is so; we need a dose of southern brutality—or at least callousness—to enable us to digest the supposition that it is the son of Madame Meisserel (now grown up) who revives in reminiscence the history of his dead mother’s guilty passion, as he witnessed it in his seventh year. How wise was M. Boylesve to make his little boy a stepson, and the charming stepmother almost innocent—a little frivolous at worst. We suspect Madame Meisserel of having gone to greater lengths and yet we scarce forgive her son his tone of superiority.
The same theme, in 1912, furnished M. Gilbert des Voisins with the matter of L’Enfant qui prit Peur. Here the plot is pushed to a tragedy; the child, aghast to find the serpent rampant in his little Eden, and his father’s friend his mother’s lover, commits suicide. We are still further here from M. Boylesve’s exquisite moral delicacy.
We neighbour it again in L’Élève Gilles, the first novel of a young schoolmaster which, in 1912, obtained the new great prize of the French Academy—the prize of £400, as yet only twice bestowed: once on Jean-Christophe and once on the too-slender but charming book before us. (I mention all these prizes to show the undoubted popularity of the theme, and may add that M. des Voisins’ book very nearly obtained a Prix Vie Heureuse.)
Gilles is a little boy suddenly sent from home to live with an old aunt in the country because his father is suffering from neurasthenia and needs a complete rest: no noise, no movement about him. The child’s mother takes him and leaves him with her aunt and the old servant, Segonde, whose portrait is one of the charms of the volume; and though the lad is happy enough with them, we feel there is something poignant behind—something we do not know, and that the child does not even suspect. He is sent to the grammar school of the little town near his aunt’s property, and we feel that the shadow—the unsuspected shadow—hangs over him, there, too, increasingly evident to those about him, though still invisible to the child narrator.
Little by little, by a word here, a silence there, by the sensitive temperament of the child himself, by the strangeness of the father (who has come for rest and change to the quiet country house) we learn the truth: the man is mad. Gilles never knows it; but if he is so quiet, so sensitive, and so solitary, it is because the whole little world around him marks him for the madman’s child; a being to be spared, respected, but not played with like another boy. He is a child apart.
No chapter in my book has a more delightful choice of reading than is offered by these Novels of Childhood. And among the most enchanting of all I would place Le Grand Meaulnes. Henri Alain-Fournier leapt into being (from a literary point of view) in 1913 with this strange romantic little novel. The book is not of our time in the least, though without any affectation of archaism. It appears related far more nearly to George Sand’s Petite Fadette, or to some tale of Musset’s, or to Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie, than to any Twentieth Century production; and I think the closest we can get to it in our own times would be one of the more poetical of Hardy’s Wessex novels, before he fell into the tragic pessimism of Tess or Jude. The poetry, the fantasy, is all in the author’s imagination; for what, I ask you, could be less romantic than the setting of his tale—a Training College for Primary Education, or rather a large village Board-School, with a class reserved for future teachers,—even though it be situate in the very heart of Berry? And yet over every page of Le Grand Meaulnes there slips and trembles the light that never was on sea or land. The heroes are two lads of fifteen and seventeen; and rarely has any author rendered more delicately the prestige of the big boy for the little boy, and the chivalrous half-mystic hero-worship in which he walks enveloped. The mystery, the beauty, the wonderfulness of the poet’s world transfigure the homely story, which is merely that of a schoolboy of fifteen who runs away from school, who misses his way and gets caught up in the whirl of a large country wedding at a quaint half-ruined manor-house whose name he does not know. Never again can the lad find that manor or that beautiful girl who was the bridegroom’s sister, with whom he has fallen in love. And at last his boy friend, ‘le grand Meaulnes’ discovers her, but keeps her for himself; the capricious, fascinating Meaulnes marries that fairy Princess and deserts her on the morrow, leaving her for all companionship and consolation the adoring devotion of the humble friend, who tells the story.