Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  The tracks leading to these far settlements were as large as, or larger than, those leading in the direction of the next village and on to La Châtre. Evidently, in the 1840s, most paths were for short journeys within the Commune, from one field or neighbour to another, not for travelling from place to place in the modern sense. Indeed, in many parts of France at that time, including the Lower Berry, a general network of routes was entirely lacking. Some good long-distance highways had existed since Roman times, and others had been constructed, usually for military purposes, in the last half of the eighteenth century or during the Napoleonic wars, but these left much of the country untouched. The British traveller Arthur Young, in his enthusiastic Journals, put forward the idea that French roads were superior to English ones, but the maps of the time show this to be based on some highly selective travelling. As George Sand wrote in Le Meunier d’Angibault:

  In the centre of France, in spite of all the new main roads that have been opened in recent years, country districts still have such poor communications that it is difficult to get from the local people exact directions to another place even a short distance away … Try asking in a hamlet the way to a farm a league distant [circa two and a half miles] and you’ll be lucky if you get a clear answer. There are so many little paths, all much alike.

  I have seen it suggested elsewhere that some of these supposed paths were, in any case, not paths at all but strips of outgrown woodland between the fields, going nowhere, a snare and delusion for the wheeled traveller. They even had their own local name: ‘Mysterious retreating perspectives beneath thick shade, traînes of emerald green leading to dead ends or to stagnant pools, twisting abruptly down slopes that you can’t get up again in a carriage…’

  Today some of these old paths and false paths round Chassignolles remain as they always were, deep, green veins running between old hedges, well preserved but little used. Others have arbitrarily disappeared into the fields, while the same operation of chance has turned others again into tarmacked roads. Three proper roads lead from Chassignolles in the general direction of La Châtre, while a fourth, probably the oldest of all, descending a valley to ford a tributary of the Indre, is today almost forgotten and in places impassable with saplings and brambles.

  Each time I looked at the old map I felt myself being drawn into it, possessed by the feeling that if I studied it hard enough it would, like a photograph gradually enlarging and enlarging under my gaze, carry me deeper into those narrow lanes, allow me to see the small oblongs transformed into the shapes of roofs and doors, eventually revealing the trellises of vines, the tracery of the plough, every tree, every stone, every dung-heap …

  ‘Was it something particular you wanted to find out?’ said Monsieur Pirot.

  I did not want to appear intrusive and in any case I did not yet have a formulated plan. I murmured that I wanted to check up on one or two things. Only then did it occur to me to ask how far back his other records went.

  ‘Oh, to the Revolution.’ That magic date between Then and Now.

  ‘What – all here in the Mairie?’

  ‘Certainly. All the Birth, Death and Marriage registers going way back. They’re in that cupboard there. And we’ve got the records of Council meetings too.’

  ‘Not back to the Revolution as well?’

  ‘Well, back a long way. As long as they had Council meetings, I suppose. They’re very old books.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. May I consult them?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, surprised that I should even ask. ‘Anyone can. But’ – he added quickly – ‘it’s Silvie the Secretary you want to see. That’s her department. I don’t know much about them. Yes, Silvie my niece. She’s a Pirot too.’

  Silvie, young and pretty and soon to be the mother of a baby girl, was already showing signs of being one of those linchpins on which village life has always depended: the person of some education and energy who is nevertheless happy to remain in a deeply rural society and help it to function. There are not enough Silvies in rural France today: this lament is heard on every side. And yet there are rather more now in Chassignolles than there were in the previous generation. They, in the 1960s, were tempted away to the towns, to the shops and businesses of La Châtre or the factories of Châteauroux or yet to the more visionary possibilities of Tours, Orléans or Paris itself. Today unemployment in the towns is perhaps making the remote countryside seem more attractive again – even with omnipresent fears about the future of the traditional French agriculture on which this part of the Berry has always depended.

  Silvie was used to a trickle of enquiries about distant births, deaths and marriages. For people intent of proving that Great Aunt Marthe had been born an Aladenise and that her mother had been an Ageorges and that therefore a certain orchard should still be in the family, Silvie would copy out declarations of ancient life-events in her own French school handwriting. It was rare, however, that anyone came asking for the Minute books of the Municipal meetings, which were stacked on top of each other in the far recesses of the cupboard. She got the books out for me, blowing dust from hand-sewn covers, and seemed happy that someone should be interested enough to turn the long-unread pages. We were a long way here from microfiche readers and bar codes. By and by, when she saw that my interest in the books was not going to be assuaged in a mere hour or two’s work, she let me look at them whenever I wanted, whether the Mairie was officially open or not. She also, with patience and good humour, helped me to reconstruct several family-trees by reference to the Birth and Marriage registers. I was lucky to find Silvie, though just how lucky I only realized when I tried to consult similar documents in a much larger urban Mairie and was met by a bland refusal even to let me have the books in my own hands. Only specifically requested entries, I was told, could be delivered in photocopy form.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise you might see something relating to someone else.’

  ‘But there are no rules about what I may specifically request, are there?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Well, then…?’

  But evidently rules, however illogical, were rules. The cause of disinterested historical research was not going to be furthered in that town hall.

  * * *

  In Chassignolles, the very early ‘Deliberations of the Municipal Council’, as they are collectively called, consist of disparate sheets of hand-made paper roughly sewn together and put between covers at a later date. The pages start in the year 1810, by which point the immediate traumas of the Revolution had passed. The calendar had reverted from the single figures of the New Era to its traditional form; the Napoleonic Code was attempting to spread a homogenizing blanket over the enormously varied territories that made up France. The entries for these early years tend to be brief, the records of men with a respect both for the written word and for the expensive material on which it was set down.

  An exception to this occurred after Napoleon’s defeat and his replacement by the Bourbon monarchy, when, for a few years, the records seem to have been kept by one Louis Vallet or Vaillet or Vallete who was also the mayor. This man, alone among his fellow-citizens then and for several decades, wrote a fluent, hurried, almost modern hand in correct French. When I first identified him I guessed (what I later found to be the case) that he, or rather his father, was one of those upper-class landowners who made themselves scarce during and after the Revolution but returned at the Restoration to resume something of their old place in society. Vallet may in the long run have profited from the turmoil, for he acquired a lot of land, some of which had previously belonged to the Church; in fact he became the largest landowner in the Commune. He seems to have been inclined to treat the place as his own fief and to have had little respect for new authority. He got into trouble with the Préfet (the figure of national command in distant Châteauroux) for cutting down trees on the highway and building his own watercourse without regard for others. After he ceased to be mayor in 1825 it was stated by the new m
ayor (Pirot) that le Sieur Vaillet was known to have made off at an earlier date with the silver vessels from the church; the Council ventured the opinion that he should be invited to return them. Vallet no doubt answered that he had taken the silver into protective keeping at the time when the Church was being dispossessed by the newly formed state and its priests driven into hiding. By the 1820s Chassignolles’ church was being repaired after years of neglect: rain and bird droppings had been coming through gaps in the wooden tiles of the roof.

  Vallet must have made his peace with the others or simply been too prominent a person to ignore, for after a few years he was back again as a member of the Council. He continued, though, to cause occasional trouble. As late as 1845, when he was well into his fifties but apparently no more circumspect in his behaviour, the exasperated Council even took him to court in La Châtre ‘pour avoir fait enlever les terres provenant de la fosse publique appartenant à la Commune’. The public ditch was a remnant of moat from the medieval church fortifications. Presumably the soil in it was valuable manure and he had refused to apologize. There is no mention in the Minutes of the time he pulled down an old farm building and discovered in its foundations a hoard of eighth-century silver and gold coins: I found that reference elsewhere, in the notes on the La Châtre region of a nineteenth-century antiquary. The village must have thought that was just Vallet’s kind of luck. I wonder where those coins are now?

  For many years, both before and after Vallet’s reign, the Minutes seem not to have been kept by any formally appointed Secretary but by one or other of the handful of men in the Commune who could actually write. There was an Aussourd who filled this role at an early date. (Names beginning with ‘Ala’ or ‘Au’, meaning ‘son of’ – son of the deaf man, son of Georges, son of Our Denise – are very common in the Black Valley.) Later the books were kept by a François Charbonnier, born in 1799 – L’An VIII. He was one of a proliferating Chassignolles family of Charbonniers (‘charcoal-burner’) all called François or Jean or Denis through several generations. By the time I reached the Minute books of the later nineteenth century I needed to remind myself that the Jean Charbonnier then signing as a councillor could hardly be the one who was already there by 1810. But literacy clearly ran in this able family; I was slightly disappointed when I established that the Charbonnier who was the first effective schoolmaster circa 1860 was not one of its members and came from a different village. There are Charbonniers in Chassignolles to this day who appear, from their land holdings, to be descended from the original family; they are know collectively as the Tourangeaux because they are supposed to have come from the Touraine. Since when? The Revolution?

  The village was lucky to have the likes of the Aussourds and the Charbonniers; many Communes did not, even town ones that headed Cantons. Balzac wrote in Les Paysans, which was published in the year of Célestine’s birth: ‘Many mayors of Cantons turn the copies of the Rules and Regulations that are issued to them into bags for holding raisins or seeds. As for the mere mayors of Communes, you would be shocked by the number who cannot read or write and by the way in which the civil registers are kept.’ A modern perspective on the matter might be that it was excessively ambitious of the French government at that period to have set up all over that deeply rural land such an urban concept of local government that it required unlettered men to take time off from their land to keep civil registers at all. Why, one might wonder, have such civil and municipal responsibilities been scissored into such small parcels? Why not a more centralized system? The traditional answer to this refers to the grassroot and egalitarian basis of French democracy, but there is another answer which is probably even more relevant. For all its conviction of profound change, the Revolution simply took on the existing parish system and the secular mayors inherited exactly those duties of ceremony and record which had previously fallen to the village priests. For the first few decades of the nineteenth century there was not even a change of setting; the church continued to be, as ever, the place where assemblies took place and where the records were kept.

  Although Pirot, who succeeded Vallet, was mayor for many years till 1846, I do not think he himself could write. His careful signature is that of someone who has learnt to do it as a trick and does not otherwise employ a pen. He could probably read a little. During his time, with the exception of the Charbonniers and of Vallet when he was there, the other nine or ten councillors all ‘declared themselves unable to sign’ and continued to do so for much of the century. This was no fiction: when the occasional councillor did decide to try his hand at a signature he did so in toppling, unformed letters – a Chaumette appears early on in this form. The cast evolves and changes over the course of time; by 1855, when this Minute book ends, several family names had appeared which are still found in the village, but non-literacy continued to be the prevailing style. These men, as municipal councillors, were the élite of the village; several of them owned substantial amounts of land for that time and place; others were millers or smith-farriers whose occupations placed them distinctly above the ordinary peasantry; all would have been accustomed to buy and sell in the local markets and keep accounts. They were no doubt skilled in twenty different ways that we have now lost and shrewd enough at deciding whether or not the cost to the Commune of replacing a ford with a bridge, widening a path or building a new house to attract a schoolmaster, would pay off in benefits. But reading and writing they did not undertake.

  In the early Minutes there are many gaps, but from 1839 the record was kept fairly regularly in a book provided for the purpose. The second book begins in 1855 and runs till 1880, the third from 1880 till 1905. Versions of schoolmasterly copperplate succeed each other, some clearer than most modern hands, some so ornate as to be semi-impenetrable. If you sit and turn the pages by the hour it can seem as if village life went round in perpetual circles. The budget for the school is regularly disputed, concern is expressed that the church tower needs repairs yet again, and the widening of this or that essential path by the purchase of strips of land from adjoining holdings seems to have got little further forward than it had seven years before. A recurrent phrase in the description of Council meetings and eventual decisions (often of a procrastinating nature) is ayant mûrement délibéré. This is best translated in English as ‘after much discussion’, but mûrement strictly speaking means ‘ripely’. It reflects the self-image of Chassignolles’ leading citizens. Pères de famille in good, locally woven woollen trousers and waistcoats, oak-green in colour, and shirts or smocks of home-grown linen, they sat round in a state of congenital Berrichon caution and hard-headedness, refusing to let themselves be hustled into anything, mature deliberation personified.

  And yet, cumulatively, as you read on page by page and year by year, the cycles modify: changes are taking place after all. The constant minor dramas about the enlargement of paths or the creation of new ones are local evidence of much more widely spreading communications and burgeoning trade. After the mid-century, demands to the Préfet to authorize the establishment of new ‘fairs’, which were regularly held cattle and grain markets, begin to appear; these demands were passed from Commune to Commune so that all parties could endorse them. Business was steadily increasing, more produce was being bought and sold instead of just consumed on the spot. And then, at the same period, there comes one entry (summer 1855) like a sudden hail from the future, or a distant whistle heard across the fields – the first excited mention of railways.

  * * *

  Of the cataclysmic national events of the nineteenth century – the successive uprisings, the overthrow of king or emperor, coups, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and its bloody repression, then the final establishment of France as a republic – hardly a direct mention reaches the Minute books. And yet hints of these events are there, like distant thunder below the horizon.

  For example, among some loose, undated papers slipped into the 1839–55 volume is the draft of a formula for swearing grovelling obedience to the Frenc
h Constitution and the Emperor. This must date from January 1852, when the hopefully entitled Prince-President, Louis-Napoleon, had managed to transform himself into the much more autocratic figure of Emperor in the tradition of his more famous ancestor. One must assume that in Chassignolles the swearing-in ceremony did dutifully take place, though on this the Minutes are silent. What is significant in the Minutes is that in 1852 the mayor changed, and the new incumbent was not, judging by his name, a villager but an old-style aristocrat: Léon Geoffrenet de Champdavid. The idealistic Second Republic from 1848 to 1851 had brought in the vote for all male householders, which was a step well in advance of other European nations. In keeping with this spirit, mayors were to be elected by the Commune. But by 1852 this had changed again and new mayors were appointed by the local Préfet.

  No sooner was he installed than Monsieur Geoffrenet de Champdavid insisted on repairs being done to the church and to the presbytery, in order to attract a priest. Chassignolles had had no resident Curé since the Revolution, but a return to old ways was now evidently to be the order of the day and what was happening in Chassignolles was just one example of a general shift. The Revolutionary, anti-clerical spirit that had flourished briefly in the area three years before, encouraged by George Sand and her progressive friends, was now very much out of fashion. The new widespread vote, far from ensuring the Republican reformers victory, had worked against them: in the Berry, in January 1852, twenty times more votes were cast for Louis-Napoleon as Emperor than for the Republican cause. Republicanism, it was now felt, was for townspeople. The word doing the rounds in the countryside was that the Republicans would force down the price of wheat, and therefore the peasants’ profit margin, in order to gain cheap bread for the big cities. La Châtre had turned temporarily against the Bonne Dame de Nohant, even demonstrating the fact noisily at the gates of her manor. It was being said that she had got local people into trouble with the authorities, and to no purpose. As a Préfet of the Indre (D’Alphonse) wrote earlier in the century: