Childhood
Henri Alban Fournier was born on October 3, 1886 in La Chapelle d'Angillon, in Sologne, in central France. He has a sister, Isabelle, three years his junior. It is to her that his only novel will be dedicated. He grew up with parents who were teachers and studied in their boarding school until 1898, when he went to secondary school at Lycée Voltaire in Paris. As he dreamed of traveling, he wanted to become a sailor, and prepared for the entrance exam to the Naval School of Brest in 1901. But he gave up, preferring to give up the sea rather than the campaigns of his childhood in Sologne. Haunted by the memories of his past that he seeks to rediscover, Henri Fournier speaks of his native town in a letter dated August 13, 1905, addressed to Jacques Rivière:
La Chapelle d'Angillon, where for eighteen years I have spent my holidays, seems to me like the country of my dreams, the country from which I am banished - but I see the house of my grandparents, as it was in my grandfather's time:smell of cupboards, creaking of doors, little wall with flowerpots, voices of peasants, all this life so special that it would take pages for the evoke a little.
He then began studying philosophy in Bourges and obtained his baccalaureate two years later. Deciding to follow the path of his parents and teach Literature, he devotes himself to his studies which will allow him to become a teacher. It was at Lakanal high school that he met Jacques Rivière, his close friend and future brother-in-law, with whom he would maintain a long correspondence. They share a taste for aesthetics in art, as well as the quest for truth. Rivière will marry Isabelle Fournier in 1909.
Meeting Yvonne de Quièvrecourt
On June 1, 1905, Ascension Day, Henri Fournier met the one who would become the great love of his life:Yvonne de Quièvrecourt appeared to him in front of the Grand-Palais in Paris, after he had visited the "Salon de la Nationale". . It is while going down the stairs that he sees her and her image is engraved in him, that of a blonde, elegant and slender woman:the young girl of his dreams. He then follows her and embarks with her on a fly boat, then locates her house. The following days, he watches her under his window. He finally approaches her on June 11, and begins a long and mysterious conversation with her. Despite the brevity of the meeting and a single tete-a-tete as a memory of her, he nourishes a deep love for this woman of whom he no longer has any news and whom he has been looking for, since then, desperately. As with his hero, it only took one conversation to haunt him:
However, the two women passed near him and Meaulnes, motionless, looked at the young girl. Often, later, when he fell asleep after desperately trying to remember the beautiful faded face, he saw in his dreams rows of young women who looked like this one. One had a hat like hers and the other her slightly slanted look, the other her look so pure; the other still had her slender waist, and the other also had her blue eyes:but neither of these women was ever the tall young girl.
A year later, on Ascension Day, he returned to wait for her in front of the Grand-Palais. "She didn't come," he wrote to Jacques Rivière the same evening. Besides, had she come, she would not have been the same. »
The memory of Yvonne de Quièvrecourt and the design of Grand Meaulnes
Henri Fournier interrupted his studies in 1907 to begin his military service which lasted two years. That same year, he chose the half-pseudonym of Alain-Fournier, and thus signed his poems - as well as essays and stories - which appeared in magazines. Subsequently, he kept a "Literary Courier" in which he published the poems that would form, after his death, the collection Miracles . These poems were written in the same years during which Alain-Fournier constructed the story of Grand Meaulnes . The writing of the novel will be completed in January 1913, and the novel will appear between July and November of the same year in "La Nouvelle Revue Française", over five issues.
Despite the charm he exerts on women, Alain-Fournier remains haunted by Yvonne de Quièvrecourt and tirelessly continues his quest for the young blonde girl in the hope of finding her. She inspired the heroine of Grand Meaulnes , and embodies the figure of the dream he pursues. After eight years of arduous research, Alain-Fournier found the “Beautiful Young Girl” in 1913:he then learned that she was married and the mother of two children. In the height of despair, he writes a letter for the one who tormented him for eight years, and puts words to this dreamlike woman who escaped him:
I lost you more than 7 years ago. […] Since that time, I haven’t stopped looking for you. […] I've not forgotten anything. I have treasured, minute by minute, the short time that I will have seen you in my life. […] You granted me only one way to reach you and communicate with you, it was to obtain literary glory.
He will never send this letter.
Madame Simone
In 1913, a year before the start of the First World War, he became the lover of one of the greatest actresses of the time, known as Madame Simone, having succeeded Sarah Bernhardt:Pauline le Bargy. She was Fournier's last love, the one he should have married after the war, after fulfilling his duty as a French soldier. But it was as a martyr that he died for his country on September 22, 1914. In one of his letters to her, dated August 20 of the same year, he said to Pauline:
Think that there have been portraits of you in hundreds of magazines and that I don't even have on one of these scraps of page cut with scissors this face of angel next to whom there is no beauty, this figure that I kissed, kissed, squeezed in my hands, beat, shook, caressed, adored, possessed.
Their affair remained secret and lasted a year, during which Pauline became pregnant. She had an abortion in 1913 to preserve her career as an artist. Alain-Fournier and she planned to get married after the war.
Death of Alain-Fournier
Raised to the rank of corporal, Alain-Fournier refused the exemption generously offered to him, the recognized author who narrowly missed the Goncourt prize, and he enlisted in August 1914. While he was going to have 28 years old, Alain-Fournier was killed on September 22, 1914 in the little wood of Saint-Rémy, near Verdun. His body was found in May 1991 in a mass grave, then identified in 1992. He now rests in the military cemetery of Saint-Rémy-la-Calonne. It was Jacques Rivière who brought together, in 1924, a year before his own death, the poems that now constitute the collection Miracles . Isabelle Rivière, in the same spirit, publishes their long and soon famous correspondence, as well as her brother's letters to the front, and her memories of him. She devotes herself fully to the maintenance of the memory of her brother and her husband.