The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier Read Free Book Online

in the face, he could be heard, in the few seconds before a banging ruler signalled the start of the lesson, proclaiming loudly: ‘He’s getting really touchy. He’s pretending to be so clever. Perhaps he thinks we don’t know where he’s been!’
    ‘Idiot! I don’t know myself,’ Meaulnes retorted, in what was by now a deep silence.
    Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he put his head in his hands and started to learn his lessons.

VII
    THE SILK WAISTCOAT
    As I said earlier, our room was a large attic under the roof – half attic and half bedroom. There were windows in the other rooms for assistant teachers, so there was no telling why this one was lit by a skylight. It was impossible to close the door entirely because it jammed on the floor. When we went up to bed at nights, our hands shading our candles from all the draughts assailing them in that large house, we would try every time to close the door and every time had to give up the attempt. So, around us, throughout the night, we could feel the silence of the three attic rooms seeping into ours.
    That is where Augustin and I got together on the evening of that same winter’s day.
    In no time, I had taken off all my clothes and thrown them in a heap on a chair at the head of my bed, but my friend started to undress slowly and in silence. I was already in my iron bed with its cretonne curtains in a vine-leaf pattern, and from there I watched him.
    At times, he would sit down on his low, curtainless bed; at others, he would get up and walk up and down, still taking off his clothes. The candle that he had placed on a small wicker table made by the gypsies cast his gigantic shadow on the wall as he went back and forth.
    Unlike me, he was folding and stacking his school clothes carefully, but with an absent-minded, sour look. I can see him laying out his heavy belt on a chair, folding his black smock (which was extraordinarily creased and stained) over the back of the same chair and taking off a kind of short, dark-blue jacket that he wore under this smock, then leaning over withhis back turned towards me as he spread it out on the foot of his bed… But when he stood up and turned towards me I saw that, instead of the little waistcoat with bronze buttons that we were meant to wear under our jackets, he had a strange, silk waistcoast, very open, which fastened at the bottom with a tight row of little mother-of-pearl buttons. It was a delightfully quaint garment, of a kind that might have been worn by the young men who danced with our grandmothers at a ball around 1830.
    I can remember the tall, peasant boy as he was then, bare-headed – because he had carefully placed his cap on top of his other clothes – his face – so young, so brave and already so hardened. He resumed his pacing across the room and started to unbutton this mysterious item from a wardrobe that did not belong to him. And it was strange to see him, in his shirtsleeves, with his too short trousers and his muddy shoes, fingering this aristocratic waistcoat.
    As soon as he touched it, he was startled out of his daydream and looked round at me anxiously. I felt like laughing. He smiled at the same time as I did, and his face lit up.
    ‘Do tell me about it,’ I said quietly, encouraged by this. ‘Where did you get it?’
    But he immediately stopped smiling. He ran a heavy hand twice over his short hair and suddenly, like someone giving in to an irresistible urge, put his jacket back on and buttoned it down over the elegant waistcoat, then put on his smock. After that, he paused for a moment, looking sideways at me. Finally, he sat down on the edge of his bed, took off his shoes, letting them fall noisily on to the floor and, fully dressed like a soldier on alert, lay back on his bed and blew out the candle.
    Some time in the middle of the night, I woke up with a start. Meaulnes was standing in the middle of the room with his cap on, looking for something on the clothes rail – a cape, which he