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Le Grand Meaulnes and the End of Nostalgia 勒·格兰德·缪尼斯和乡愁的结束 From Proust, the magical power of ancient nobility was condensed in a name like “Guermantes” while, for Alain-Fournier, the sorce of fascination was contained in “Yvonne de Galais,” the heroine of Le Grand Meaulnes who embodies the fading splendor and the sexual charm (gallant) of ancient France, when it was almost Roman Gaul. This titled past was fast vanishing in 1913, as Proust and Alain-Fournier knew. Yvonne was borrowed from Yvonne de Quievrecourt, the sprightly young woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat who caught Alain-Fournier eye on June 1,1905, as she sauntered down the steps of the Grand-Palais. Entranced, he followed her to a bateau-mouche, and thence to the streets until she entered an impressive residence on Boulevard Saint-Germain. The vision morphed into fiction when Meaulnes stumbles into a masked ball and, like a sleepwalker, accompanies his lady on a boat trip. After that initial epiphany, Alain-Fournier saw Yvonne praying in church on Pentecost Sunday. The gift of the tongues was extended to him, and he confessed his love, although he was unable to overcome her resistance. His work revolves around this failure and the initial epiphany whose potentialities he teases out endlessly. He hoped to sway Yvonne when he sent her his first published piece, a slim essay from 1907, “The Body of Woman,” which extols purity and advocates that womens bodies remain clothed. The flaunting of weak Catholic estheticism allied with the idealization of motherhood turned out to be counterproductive: Yvonne, a devout Catholic, already engaged, got married in 1906, and became a mother in 1909. If “The Body of Woman” failed to woo her, Le Grand Meaulnes seduced generations of French readers. “The Body of Woman” makes the dubious claim that the vision of a woman praying in a cathedral is most propitious to shape male desire because femininity appears there “mingled with a mysterious, infantile and Christian pa