Quarrels and Indiscretions Concerning Alain Fourneir and le Grand Meaulnes

Abstract

This article aims first and foremost at restoring to Alain Fournier’s true face – disfigured by a family hagiography and a strange fanaticism for much too long a time – as well as bringing to light the real meaning of his famous novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913).Alain-Fournier was not the saint or the mystic his sister Isabelle Rivière (1889-1971) and so many catholic biographers – whom we may call "sacristy biographers" – have portrayed until his death at war in September 1914 and after 1905 when at the age of 18 he met and fell in love with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt (1885-1964), he did not spend his life like a somnambulistic among men, ready to become a priest, indefectibility faithful to his "great and impossible love". On the contrary, he had several mistresses among whom a young working woman, Jeanne Bruneau (1885-1971) – who appears in the novel as Valentine Blondeau, Augustin Meaulnes’ "fiancée" – from 1910 to 1912 and, from 1913 to 1914, the world famous actress Madame Simone (1877-1985), wife to the politician Claude Casimir Perier, and whom he wanted to marry once the war would end. Le Grand Meaulnes, which he called an "adventure story", does not describe the drama of every human life soiled through sexuality and its need of God’s help – such as it was once, from a Christian perspective, said to be – but puts the reader on his guards against a dangerous tendency which Alain Fournier had himself shared and pushed away, and common to so many catholic adolescents before the first world war : that of idealizing women as mothers or sisters, and in thus refusing to imagine or to accept that they could ever have a human body. At the same time, this article introduces the reader to the pitiable quarrel which had opposed for many years Isabelle Rivière and Madame Simone, and therefore gives some fresh information on Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, the model for Yvonne de Galais, and on Jeanne Bruneau, model to Valentine Blondeau.