On a cold November Sunday in Sainte-Agathe, fifteen-year-old François Seurel and his parents live in the large brick schoolhouse where his father directs the Cours Supérieur and his mother, Millie, teaches the primary class. While François attends vespers and watches the local fire brigade, Millie spends the day working on a winter hat in her bedroom. Upon returning home, François finds a distressed elderly woman peering through the dining-room window and anxiously searching for her wandering son.
The woman explains that she is a wealthy widow from La Ferté-d’Angillon who has brought her older son, Augustin, to board at the school after the tragic death of her younger son. As they talk, heavy footsteps echo through the abandoned upstairs granaries. Soon after, seventeen-year-old Augustin descends the stairs and enters the dining room wearing a peasant felt hat and a belted black schoolboy blouse.
Augustin immediately invites François outside to the school courtyard, where he produces a blackened wooden wheel from the previous July fourteenth fireworks that he discovered in the attic. Without hesitation, he plants the wheel in the sand, lights two unspent rockets with smuggled matches, and pulls François backward as red and white stars burst into the air. Millie and Meaulnes's mother watch the display from the doorway in silent astonishment before finalizing the boarding arrangements, and Augustin shares his first quiet family dinner with his head bowed while the others stare at him.