Free The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier

overcoat. He was holding a long rod hung with many-coloured lanterns and he was calmly sitting with one leg crossed over the other, watching his friend work.
    As for the actor, he cut the most pathetic figure you could imagine. Tall, lean, shivering, with dull, shifty eyes and a moustache hanging over his gap-toothed mouth, suggesting the face of a drowned man dripping on a slab. He was in shirtsleeves, his teeth chattering. Both his words and his gestures indicated the most utter contempt for himself.
    After a moment’s reflection that was at once sour and comic, he went over to his friend and, spreading both arms wide, addressed him confidentially: ‘Do you know what? I don’t know why they had to bring in filth like us to wait on people in a fête of this kind! That’s what I think…’
    But without taking any notice of this heartfelt declaration, the fat man went on looking at his work, with his legs crossed, yawned, sniffed quietly, and then, turning his back on the other, went away, with his rod over his shoulder, saying, ‘Come on, off we go! It’s time to get dressed for dinner.’
    The gypsy followed, but as he went past the alcove, he said, bowing and in a sarcastic tone of voice, ‘Mr Lie-abed, it’s about time you woke up and got dressed as a marquis, even though you’re just a skivvy like me. And you will go down to the fancy-dress ball, since that is what these little gentlemen and ladies desire.’
    And, with a final bow, he added, in the voice of a hawker at a fairground, ‘Our friend Maloyau, member of the kitchen staff, will appear in the role of Harlequin and your humble servant in that of the great Pierrot.’

XIII
    THE STRANGE FETE
    As soon as they had gone, the boy left his hiding place. His feet were frozen and his joints stiff, but he was rested and his knee appeared to have healed.
    ‘Go down to dinner?’ he thought. ‘I’ll certainly do that. I shall just be a guest whose name everyone has forgotten. In any case, I’m not an intruder here: it’s quite clear that M. Maloyau and his friend were expecting me…’
    Coming out of the total darkness of the alcove, he could see quite clearly in the room, lit as it was by the green lanterns.
    The gypsy had ‘decked it out’. Coats were hanging from the clothes pegs. On a heavy dressing table with a cracked marble top, they had laid out everything needed to transform into a dandy some lad or other who had spent the previous night in an abandoned sheepfold. On the mantelpiece were matches beside a large torch. But they had forgotten to wax the floor, and Meaulnes could feel sand and grit rolling and grating under his shoes. Once again he had the impression that he was in a long-since abandoned house. Going to the mantelpiece, he almost bumped into a heap of large cartons and small boxes. He reached out his hand, lit the candle, then lifted the lids and leant over to look inside.
    There were young men’s clothes from long ago: frock coats with high velvet collars, stylish low-cut waistcoats, innumerable white ties and patent leather shoes from the start of the century. He did not dare lay a finger on anything, but after cleaning himself up and shivering as he did so, he put one of the large coats over his schoolboy’s smock, turning up the pleated collar, and replaced his hobnailed boots with slender,highly polished pumps. Then, bare-headed, he got ready to go down.
    He reached the bottom of a wooden staircase, in a dark corner of the yard, without meeting anyone. The icy breath of night blew on his face and lifted one corner of his coat.
    He took a few steps and, thanks to the faint light in the sky, he managed at once to grasp the layout of the place. He was in a little courtyard enclosed by the outbuildings of the main house. Everything here seemed old and in ruins. The openings at the foot of the stairways were gaping, because their doors had long since been removed. Nor had anyone replaced the glass in some windows, which were just