Description

RARE LARGE PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT modern print from the original negative.

Alain-Fournier, aged 19 (1905), dressed in Khâgne uniform at the Lycée Lakanal (Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine), a preparatory class for the École Normale Supérieure.

On the back, AUTOGRAPH SIGNED LETTER FROM ALAIN RIVIÈRE - NEPHEW OF ALAIN-FOURNIER :

"to Simone,
his brother in age and court
in the love of Alain-Fournier
Alain Rivière
9 March 1980".

In October 1903, Henri Alban Fournier entered the Lycée Lakanal to prepare for entry to the Ecole Normale Supérieure; he befriended Jacques Rivière, a classmate and future director of the NRF, who would marry his sister Isabelle in August 1909.
In 1905, the year this photograph was taken, "an event occurred that marked Alain-Fournier's entire life and work". On 1 June, as he was leaving the Salon de la Nationale at the Grand Palais, he was struck by the beauty of a young girl - Yvonne de Quiévrecourt - whom he followed along the Cours la Seine, then on a bateau mouche to her house on Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the boat, he feverishly wrote in a notebook the first lines that he later transposed verbatim into the Grand Meaulnes to describe his meeting with Yvonne de Galais. In the days that followed, he came back to watch and wait under her windows and received his first smile and a wave of the hand. "The next morning, Whit Sunday, I put on my uniform. I don't want to lie to her; she has to know that I'm still just a schoolboy."(letter to his sister). He follows her to the church of Saint-Germain des Près, manages to exchange a few phrases and compliments and names her Mélisande. She concludes their meeting with a sentence that is repeated unchanged in her novel: "We're children, we've done something crazy!".
He learned of her marriage the following winter to a naval doctor called Brochet, whom she followed to Brest, Rochefort and Toulon; they had two children. In 1913, a few months before the release of Grand MeaulnesAlain-Fournier saw Yvonne de Quiévrecour for the last time, having made sure to announce himself to her sister Jeanne: "I now know that the young woman has two small children. I sobbed all evening in my room" (letter to Jeanne de Quiévrecourt, Rochefort, 2 May 1913)

This unusual photograph was used to illustrate the cover of Isabelle Rivière's book, Images of Alain-Fournier (Fayard, 1989).