Quotes from book
Le Grand Meaulnes

Name: Le Grand Meaulnes
Author: Alain-Fournier

Alain-Fournier Original title Le Grand Meaulnes (French, 1913)

Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the first month of World War I. The novel, published in 1913, a year before the author's death, is somewhat biographical – especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, for whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship 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.

“Who can say what obscure forces were then at work in a heart that had never been tamed? I was to ask myself that question over and over before I knew the answer — and then it was too late. Some secret remorse? Some unaccountable sorrow? Fear of seeing this incomparable happiness slip away from his grasp? And in that case, some terrible temptation to smash at once, and irrevocably, this rare treasure he had won …”

Alain-Fournier book Le Grand Meaulnes

Source: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), Ch. 9.