Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

Sure enough, one impassioned bar-side conversation led to another, and before long, Coulaud and Planchon had devised a plan to guarantee a better future for themselves and their families. With their combined skills and business nous, they could surely fashion a coin which would pass for authentic currency. It needn’t be a large operation, just the odd coin here and there in lieu of genuine payment to the innkeeper’s wife, and soon their families could be enjoying comforts previously unknown to them. The risk seemed small. But one fateful day, Coulaud and his companion were caught.

  Towards the end of October 1856, Coulaud and Planchon decided to visit the village fair in the nearby town of Ambazac.46 Afterwards, they stopped at one of the local inns for dinner, and once they had eaten, Coulaud produced a 40 franc coin to pay their small bill, which only amounted to 5 francs. Growing suspicious, the landlady objected that she did not have enough change, and when one of the regulars entered the inn, she whispered to him to take a look at the coin which still sat in the middle of Coulaud and Planchon’s table. Coulaud immediately leapt on the coin, determined that it should not be examined. Planchon had to think quickly to explain his companion’s haste; Coulaud was not from the area and did not speak the local dialect, Planchon told them. The friends attempted to persuade the landlady a second time to take the coin, but by then, her trusted regular was certain: Coulaud’s 40 franc payment was merely a 2 franc coin on which an attempt had been made – unsuccessfully – to alter the figures. It was a shoddy counterfeit, and the man gestured to the landlady not to accept the payment. Coulaud and Planchon were outraged. They became aggressive. Ambazac was a poverty-stricken town indeed, the men declared, for the sight of a 40 franc coin to cause such a stir!

  In rural society, a slight on a countryman’s pays was taken as a personal insult. Defensive, the regular suggested that the mayor be asked to check the coin, upon which Coulaud and Planchon hastily settled the bill with legitimate currency and left. But their concession came too late. The pair had already aroused concern. The police were promptly alerted, and the friends were stopped before they could leave the town. Coulaud was found to have more false coins on him, and it transpired that the pair had attempted the same ruse in another inn at lunchtime. Things quickly spiralled. Madeleine was startled when the authorities arrived at the couple’s home to carry out a full search. Their personal belongings were ransacked, and in their bedroom, further damning items were found, including a receipt for the chemicals needed to carry out the forgery and the instructions for fashioning medals. Coulaud and his companion were certainly determined; from the evidence found in Coulaud’s workshop, it became clear that they had attempted three different methods to produce their counterfeit currency.

  In a small community like Bessines, such a crime was considered appalling. That it was committed by one of their number – an ostensibly respectable family man no less – rendered it particularly shocking. The authorities were severe. Léger Coulaud and Pierre-Louis Planchon were taken to trial in February 1857, where they were found guilty and banished to a penal colony in French Guyana to begin a sentence of hard labour.47

  Separated from her husband, Madeleine Valadon was left in Bessines to bear the shame of Coulaud’s offence and to bring up their three-year-old daughter, Marie-Alix, on her own without the support of her husband’s income. It was at such times that the strength of the Limousin family network proved invaluable. But however much pity Madeleine’s family felt for her plight, nobody had the resources to support an entire family. What they could offer was care for little Marie-Alix and employment for her mother.

  By chance, one of Madeleine’s distant cousins ran an inn at the centre of town. Although it was not an official coaching inn, when the nearest auberges at Morterolles and Chanteloube were full, Catherine le Cugy’s establishment provided travellers with a comfortable alternative.48 Separated from the road by a small courtyard, the 17th-century stone building did not appear vast from the outside. However, once a traveller stepped through the heavy front door, they would find that the rooms, divided over four floors and linked by a sprawling warren of dimly-lit corridors and passageways, were considerably bigger than those of the competitors. They were also reputed to be better kept, and the horses more spirited. Widow Guimbaud, as Catherine was known, ran the inn with a firm and capable hand, and she was helped by her childhood friend, Jeanne Dérozier, also a widow. To her mind, it was hardly heroic to assist a family member in difficulty; it was the natural thing to do. Besides, Madeleine’s training as a linen maid gave her instant value to the business. Widow Guimbaud needed someone younger and fitter than herself with Madeleine’s skills. And Madeleine needed employment which provided accommodation. It was a simple calculation.

  Entrusting the care of Marie-Alix to the child’s paternal grandparents in Le Mas Barbu, Madeleine began her new employment.

  In a large establishment, the linen maid’s role would have taken on a more administrative character, and consisted largely of checking in and distributing laundry, making minor repairs and ensuring all linen was in good order. But in a small enterprise like Widow Guimbaud’s, the linen maid’s responsibilities often encompassed those of a laundress and a chamber maid, too. These duties demanded far more physical stamina. Washing was done in huge vats known as bujardiers or bujadous, and women used a hot solution containing ash to clean the clothes.49 The linen was then rinsed in the Gartempe river before being heaped onto a cart. Heaving great bundles of soaking linen resulted in aching limbs and the task became even more arduous when the weather turned cold. However, the shared experience of this onerous duty turned the riverside into an important space of feminine sociability. As they toiled by the water’s edge, the women shared news, gave advice and gossiped to their hearts’ content. It was a place to make companions and form alliances. Madeleine was not an extrovert, and many found her taciturn.50 But if not friends, she made acquaintances, which was just as well. Madeleine needed the support of her peers now more than ever, for early in September 1859, a shocking piece of news reached Bessines: Léger Coulaud was dead.

  How Madeleine’s husband was killed remained a mystery. All she was told was that he had died on Montagne d’Argent (Silver Mountain) at five o’clock on 26 April.51 The news had taken four months to reach Bessines. Now, Madeleine was truly alone.

  But neither creditors nor hunger would show deference to grief. Madeleine had to continue working, and at Widow Guimbaud’s, there was plenty of physical labour to divert melancholy thoughts.

  Limoges had long been treated as a convenient halfway point to break the journey between the South of France and the capital. And by the mid-19th century, painters like Corot were frequenting the region in search of landscape subjects.52 Then in 1856, the Châteauroux–Limoges train line had opened, bringing with it an influx of engineers while it was worked on, and drawing even more visitors to the region once it was complete.53 Situated as it was on the main route through Bessines, the Guimbaud inn attracted many passing travellers. There was no shortage of company for Madeleine while she worked – and much of it was male.

  Madeleine turned 30 in 1860. Though a mother and a widow, she had retained the fresh-faced complexion so often associated with countryside youth, while her work had kept her body lean and supple. She was not unattractive, and as one of the younger women working at the inn, it was often on Madeleine that the roving male gaze first alighted.

  ‘Don’t go drawing attention to yourself,’ Jeanne Dérozier warned when she noticed the interest her colleague was attracting.54

  But Madeleine had no time for interference. And, just as she was inclined to become stubborn and quick-tempered when she felt cornered, it was not her way to meekly comply when others interfered in her business.55 Why should anyone begrudge her pleasure? After all she had suffered, did she not deserve the flattery of male attention if the opportunity presented itself? Madeleine was defiant. She would do as she pleased.

  The winter of 1864/65 was especially cold. Snow first fell in early De
cember.56 For much of January 1865, the sky was dreary, the snow flurries persistent and the cold unrelenting. And by February, Madeleine was pregnant.

  ‘If only you had not drawn attention to yourself,’ Jeanne lamented.57

  The riverside was soon abuzz with Madeleine’s news. A widow’s pregnancy six years after the death of her husband was a titillating scandal. But by far the most intriguing question remained: who was the father?

  Stories began to circulate. It was some local Don Juan; no, it was a painter, visiting from Paris; certainly not, it was one of those travellers who had been staying at the inn. With limited staff, a variable client base and all those dark, shadowy corners, the auberge was fertile ground for sordid affairs.

  Madeleine steadfastly refused to satisfy curiosity. Intrusion annoyed her. As her pregnancy advanced, she enjoyed goading the village gossip machine by baiting it with red herrings. She had been seduced that cold winter by a miller, Madeleine would tell some people, later adding that the offender had subsequently been crushed under his own millstone, which she felt to be suitable penance for his crime.58 Then, she would assure someone else that her seducer was a construction engineer, and that justice had been served when he fell from a bridge.

  Accounts varied so widely that locals had to resign themselves to ignorance. And when all was said and done, Madeleine was a local girl, and village loyalty took precedence in such cases, particularly if the culprit was an outsider as people suspected. Nobody ostracised the cartwright’s daughter, and Widow Guimbaud stood firmly by her cousin, allowing her to stay on at the inn and to see out her labour and convalescence there.

  Finally, after months of struggling up and down the hefty, dark stairs to complete her chores under the weight of her swollen belly, at six o’clock in the morning on 23 September 1865, Madeleine gave birth to a baby girl.

  That poignant first encounter between mother and child was intensified by circumstance. The baby had a strong little body, clear blue eyes and a well-defined chin – a tiny person already.59 Motherhood was familiar territory to Madeleine, but this time she was an only parent. There would be an inherent closeness to this helpless infant, a bond different from that which she had previously experienced. And yet now more than ever, Madeleine needed her child to be capable of surviving without her constant attention.

  As Madeleine lay contemplating the new bundle of life in her arms, her mother’s cousins François Peignaud and Clément Dony went to the mairie to make the requisite declaration of the child’s birth, and a neighbour, Armand Chazeaud, agreed to join them to act as a witness.60 Peignaud and Dony had performed the same service after the birth of Marie-Alix. But the sisters’ birth certificates had crucial differences. Where Marie-Alix was a Coulaud, Madeleine’s new baby took her maiden name, Valadon. She was given the forename Marie-Clémentine, combining the names of the two godparents Madeleine already had in mind, Clément Masbey and Marie-Céline Coulaud.61 But those names could not efface the significance of two other words: ‘father unknown’.

  So much importance was placed on the father’s role in the Limousin, that some parts of the region upheld the custom of the father taking to bed and receiving visitors following his wife’s safe delivery of a child.62 From the very first, Marie-Clémentine was a social deviant. Fatherless, her identity was incomplete, unstable, mercurial.

  And the only parental bond the little girl had was about to be put to the test.

  CHAPTER 2

  Places to Call Home

  Si l’un pourtàvo sà penà ô marcha per là vendre, obe là changeà, chacu s’en tornario en la souà.

  (If everyone took their troubles to market to sell or exchange, each would return with his or her own.)

  OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1

  Marie-Clémentine Valadon spent the first few months of her life in a cradle, tucked discreetly out of view at the busy Guimbaud inn. As soon as she was able, Madeleine resumed her duties, stopping every so often to breastfeed her newborn daughter before returning to her work. She tried as best she might to engineer a seamless blend between her new, unplanned role as a mature single mother and her old life as a capable linen maid without obvious attachments. But it soon became clear that Marie-Clémentine’s place at the Guimbaud inn could only be a temporary solution. A sleeping baby, recently fed and satisfied, might pass unnoticed; a tearful, hungry infant was less easily concealed. No longer the energetic girl just out of her teens who had given birth to little Léger and Marie-Alix more than ten years ago, Madeleine could not help but feel the strain. It was decided that as soon as she was weaned, Marie-Clémentine must be found an alternative home and carer.

  The little girl’s grandmother, Marie Dony, seemed the obvious choice. Lo grando-maï, the grandmother, commanded infinite respect in Limousin families. Even when she was not the primary carer, the grandmother was typically consulted on all matters relating to the successful rearing of the family’s younger members.2 In addition, Marie Dony lived nearby, and she was widowed and did not work, so would surely be glad of the company and distraction.

  And so, no sooner was she weaned from breast milk than Marie-Clémentine was separated from her mother and sent to live with her grandmother.

  At times, it seemed as though Madeleine courted tragedy. Marie-Clémentine had barely been living in her grandmother’s home a few months when the old lady died.3 Madeleine had now lost both her parents – and at only one-and-a-half, Marie-Clémentine became homeless for the second time in her life.

  Becoming a full-time mother was not an option, and so Madeleine took the only choice available to her: Marie-Clémentine would have to be sent to Le Mas Barbu to be cared for, just like her half-sister. Little Marie-Clémentine would be looked after by Madeleine’s ‘cousins’, a deceptive term, since it was often applied loosely in rural society to refer to a relative so distant that nobody could recall the precise connection.4 The move would take Marie-Clémentine even further from her mother. Le Mas Barbu was situated only two miles out of Bessines, though working long hours and lacking transport, daily trips down the winding roads between the town and the commune were out of the question. Still, Madeleine’s determination to keep her child, even at the cost of physical separation, was valiant under the circumstances. In the first half of the 19th century, there was one infanticide every 320 births in the department of the Haute-Vienne, and one in 24 infants was abandoned.5 Those figures were startlingly high by comparison with the neighbouring departments of the Corrèze and the Creuse. The offenders were nearly always impoverished single mothers. Poverty and shame could be a deadly combination, enough even to override the usually unshakeable Limousin sense of family. But Madeleine held firm. She would not give Marie-Clémentine up.

  Marie-Clémentine’s new home was a substantial commune, a cluster of stone cottages, farmhouses and barns clinging to a steep hillside. At the entrance to the village was an ancient stone cross, an edifice used in times gone by to mark the first stopping point of both funeral processions and the ceremony of Rogations, when the priest would bless the crops before Ascension.6 The main road running through the village twisted and turned its way up the hillside, weaving around the buildings and creating a network of sloping streets and narrow passageways. It could be perilous underfoot when the first frosts arrived, but on fine days, the views down into the valley below were glorious, while the steep incline of the streets provided the perfect terrain for simple children’s games. Buttons, stones, marbles, and for the more fortunate, even coins, could be rolled down the hill.7 Streams provided hours of entertainment when frozen in the winter and refreshed hot little feet in the summer. Boys would play catch around the buildings and in the road, while girls sat in doorways nursing crude corn dollies. This was where Marie-Clémentine would take her first uncertain steps, where she would be introduced to many local peasant foods and would make her first social encounters.

  The toddler had a rounded face with clear skin, a pretty little mouth with soft, rosebud lips, and that firm jawline. Her
enormous eyes were an exquisite shade of light blue, becoming darker at the edge of the iris, and above them, her jet black eyebrows gave her a dramatic appearance. Her hair soon settled into delicious tones of golden brown, which fell in soft, loose curls about her face. Though still only small, it was already clear: Marie-Clémentine was going to be a striking child.

  As Marie-Clémentine grew and discovered more of the world, Madeleine continued to toil to pay for the upkeep of her two daughters. Had the girls been closer in age, Madeleine might have had the consolation that they would offer each other companionship. But the twelve-year age gap was a frontier between two distinct worlds. Increasingly, the family was functioning as three individuals, with separate lives and concerns. For Madeleine, all other immediate family ties had expired, while her work, already irksome, was only becoming more so with age and growing resentment. Madeleine was tired and embittered. She longed for some relief.

  It came as no surprise, then, when word began to spread in Bessines that Madeleine had been seen with one of the engineers employed to work on the new railway in the nearby town of Saint-Sulpice-Laurière.8

  At the end of 1865, an influx of some 50 able-bodied men had given cause for great excitement among the single women of Bessines.9 The following year, the number of employees had increased to 500.10 It was a matter of considerable interest among locals. Everybody was talking about the new railway.

  Since the first tracks were laid in France in the early 19th century, the railway had revolutionised national travel and transformed conceptions of space and time. Until that point, a man could not conceive of travelling any faster than his horse might gallop. Now, suddenly, huge steaming monsters of iron could take him to towns and cities that he had heard of, but never dreamed he might one day visit.11 In just a few hours, a train could travel the distance it would take a diligence or stagecoach more than two days to cover. Although the French rail network was slower to develop than its British counterpart, steadily, surely, the capital was reaching arms of modernity out to the comparatively regressive provinces, beckoning country folk with the promise of opportunities, advancement and adventure.12 Of course, like any newfangled invention, the railway had its adversaries. Being subjected to such a rapid change of climate would be catastrophic for the respiratory system, doctors warned.13 And that was to say nothing of the detrimental effect of the change of diet. Some peasants too remained incredulous; what use was the railway to them when they only need travel as far as the next town? What business did they have going any further?