The Wanderer

Collection "Bibliothèque rouge et or". Fifty-third in the series.

"At the end of the 19th century, on a cold Sunday in November, a fifteen-year-old boy, François Seurel, who lives with his teacher parents in a long red house – the village school – awaits the arrival of Augustin, whom his mother has decided to board there so he can attend advanced classes: the arrival of the great Meaulnes in Sainte-Agathe will upset François's fading childhood…"

When Alain Fournier's novel was published in 1913, many of the themes it explored – street performers, children's parties, mysterious domains – belonged to past literature, and the reader thinks of Nerval and Sylvie. But by moving beyond 19th-century realism to establish itself, between adventure and nostalgia, on the borders of the marvelous, it opens up a world of ever-vibrant sensibility that has not aged.