Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier who was killed in the first month of WW I. It is somewhat biographical – especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, with whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.
Le Grand Meaulnes
