Henri Alain-Fournier
Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier (1886 – 1914), a French author and soldier. He wrote a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), which was adapted into two feature films and is considered a classic of French literature.
Alain-Fournier was born in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, in the Cher département, in central France, the son of a school teacher. He studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris, where he prepared for the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure, but without success. He then studied at the merchant marine school in Brest. At the Lycée Lakanal he met Jacques Rivière, and the two became close friends. In 1909, Rivière married Alain-Fournier's younger sister Isabelle.
Alain-Fournier interrupted his studies in 1907 and from 1908 to 1909 he performed his military service. At this time he published some essays, poems and stories which were later collected and re-published under the name Miracles. Throughout this period he was mulling over what would become his celebrated novel, Le Grand Meaulnes.
On the first of June 1905, Ascension day, while Alain-Fournier was talking a stroll along banks of the Seine, he had met Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, with whom he became deeply enamoured. The two spoke, but he did not manage to win her favours. The following year on the same day he waited for her at the same place, but she did not appear. That night he told Rivière, "She did not come. And even if she had, she would not have been the same". They did not meet again until eight years later, when she was married with two children. Yvonne de Quiévrecourt would become Yvonne de Galais in his novel.
Alain-Fournier returned to Paris in 1910 and became a literary critic, writing for the Paris-Journal. There he met André Gide and Paul Claudel. In 1912, he quit his job to become the personal assistant of the politician Casimir Perrier.
'Le Grand Meaulnes' was finished in early 1913, and was first published in the Nouvelle Revue Française (from July to October 1913), and then as a book. 'Le Grand Meaulnes' was nominated for, but did not win, the Prix Goncourt. It is available in English in a widely-admired 1959 translation by Frank Davison for Oxford University Press.
In 1914, Alain-Fournier started work on a second novel, 'Colombe Blanchet', but this remained unfinished when he joined the army as a Lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-lès-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on the 22nd of September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, at which time he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne.
Most of the writing of Alain-Fournier was published posthumously: Miracles (a volume of poems and essays) in 1924, his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 and his letters to his family in 1930. His notes and sketches for Colombe Blanchet have also been published. From Wikipedia
“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”
“Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time - a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence - and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period ... what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.”
“I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.”