Free The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier Page B

of a large hall in which a fine fire was blazing. Trestle tables had been set up, with white tablecloths spread over them, and all sorts of people were dining, ceremoniously.

XIV
    THE STRANGE FETE
    (continued)
    It was the kind of meal, in the great hall with its low ceiling, that is given on the eve of a country wedding to relatives who have come from far away.
    The two children had let go of the schoolboy’s hand and rushed over to a neighbouring room, where you could hear childish voices and the sound of spoons clattering on plates. Meaulnes, boldly and with complete self-assurance, stepped over a bench and found he was sitting beside two old peasant women. He immediately began to eat greedily, and it was only after a short time that he looked up to examine the other guests and listen to them.
    Not that much was being said. These people seemed hardly to know one another. Some must have come from the depths of the country and others from distant towns. Here and there along the tables there were a few old men with sideboards, and others, clean-shaven, who might be old mariners. Beside them were other old people dining who resembled them: the same weatherbeaten faces, the same bright eyes under bushy eyebrows and the same ties as narrow as shoelaces… But it was not hard to see that these ones had sailed no further than the parish boundaries, and if they had been tossed and rolled more than a thousand times in wind and rain, it was to make the hard but unhazardous voyage that consists in ploughing a furrow to the end of one’s field and then turning the plough around. There were few women to be seen: some old peasants with round faces wrinkled like apples under fluted bonnets.
    There was not one of these guests with whom Meaulnes did not feel confident and at ease. Later he explained this feeling,saying: when you have committed some grave, inexcusable sin, you sometimes think, in the midst of great bitterness: ‘Even so, there are some people in the world who would excuse me.’ One thinks of old people, all-forgiving grandparents who are sure in advance that whatever you do is right and proper. The guests in that room had certainly been chosen from among that breed. And, as for the rest, they were adolescents and children…
    Meanwhile, next to Meaulnes, the two old ladies were chatting.
    ‘The very best we can hope,’ the elder of them was saying, in a comical, high-pitched voice that she was vainly trying to moderate, ‘the engaged couple will not arrive tomorrow before three o’clock.’
    ‘Be quiet, or you’ll get me angry,’ the other replied, in the calmest of tones.
    This lady was wearing a knitted bonnet on her head.
    ‘Let’s work it out,’ the first one carried on, taking no notice. ‘One and a half hours by railway from Bourges to Vierzon and seven leagues by car, from Vierzon to here…’
    The discussion continued. Meaulnes followed every word. Thanks to this gentle little argument, the situation was getting a little clearer: Frantz de Galais, the son of the house – who was a student, or a sailor, or perhaps a midshipman, that was uncertain – had been to Bourges to fetch a girl and marry her. The odd thing was that this boy, who must be very young and capricious, organized everything to suit himself on the estate. He wanted the house that would greet his fiancée to look like a palace decked out for a celebration. And to mark the girl’s arrival, he had himself invited these children and jaunty old people. These were the points that emerged from the two ladies’ discussion. Everything else, they left in obscurity and constantly reverted to the matter of the engaged couple’s return. One of them thought it would be the following morning: the other, the afternoon.
    ‘Poor Moinelle, you’re as batty as ever,’ the younger one said calmly.
    ‘And you, my poor Adèle, are as stubborn as always. It’s four years since I saw you last and you haven’t changed,’ the otherreplied, shrugging