Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

After all that laborious work, crowned by the chanvreur’s visit, the magic stuff still had to be spun into a continuous thread – hours and hours of female work in the firelight – before it finally reached the loom. No wonder the eventual bolt of cloth was valuable either to use or to sell, and clothes made from it were worn for decades, passed on from one member of the family to another, patched and turned and cut down at last into frocks and pinafores for the smallest children.

  I have seen the last vestige of a weaver’s loom, still clinging to the low ceiling between the beams of the house once occupied by Pierre Chaumette and his descendants. And I have been shown pieces of linen and jute woven in the Commune that are still, after more than a hundred years, surviving as useful cloths in houses in the village. But they date from the time when the cottage industry had declined into a minor one with few commercial outlets. Once, almost every sheet, shirt, smock or coat that was worn, bought, sold or bartered in the Berry would have been made there, but already by the early nineteenth century the strategic improvements in France’s main-road network, and the coming of the first steam-powered mills, were putting the hordes of cottage weavers out of business. An enquiry into their trade in 1840 revealed that the weaver ‘can no longer be rewarded as he was formerly, since mechanical spinning and weaving now creates cloth at too low a price for hand weavers to be able to compete’. Sure enough, by that time a wholesale linen sheet merchant had set up in business in La Châtre. He imported his goods by packhorse from the mountains of the Auvergne, where the rivers were strong enough to power the new mills and life had always been hard enough to make labour very cheap indeed. Of the family who started this business, prospered and so gained entry through marriage into the world of the local gentry, we shall hear again.

  It was the same story with wool. Since the end of the Middle Ages, sheep had been one of the major products of the Berry. Once the Hundred Years War was over, great flocks of them used to drift on the uncultivated uplands between La Châtre and Châteauroux; they were cared for by young pastoures, boys and girls who led a life there in summer isolated from their families sometimes for weeks at a time. Each autumn most of the rams were slaughtered for meat, because of the difficulty of keeping beasts alive in the byres through the winter in the days before fodder crops were known. But the main point of the Berrichon sheep was the fleece, and this the villagers of the Lower Berry combed and carded, spun and then wove. But here, too, by the nineteenth century progress had begun to disrupt the ancient patterns of production. The industry continued, but it became concentrated in a few centres. A factory had been set up in Châteauroux specifically to process local wool. It dealt with linen as well, prospered in the Napoleonic wars and continued to do so, with a few setbacks and changes of ownership, for the next hundred years. It was the chief manufacturer of army uniforms in the 1914–18 war, providing employment for half the country round about and sending men to die in the mud with good felted Berrichon wool on their backs. By that time the home-weaving industry of the area had been moribund for sixty years.

  So it was, I surmise, that the generation of men born around the time of the Revolution, the generation of Pierre and François Chaumette, grew up styling themselves weavers like their ancestors before them, only to find in middle life that the trade would no longer earn them or their sons a living. Most of them, as skilled artisans, possessed no land to speak of; they therefore had no resource but to hire themselves out as labourers to neighbours who, in most cases, were only peasant farmers themselves. This was a possible way of earning a living from the spring through to the autumn harvests, though it was well recognized that, even so, wages were barely enough to feed a growing family. But in the dead of winter, when the fields were bare and still, crows pecked in the snow and the owner and his family had themselves retreated to the farmhouse kitchen on a diet of stale bread, chestnut soup and hoarded potatoes, what was the landless labourer to do?

  The plight of this or that one occasionally crops up in the Minute books as someone ‘really indigent’, possibly ailing as well, and needing a hand-out to survive. Silvain-Bazille Chaumette, Pierre’s son, appears in this guise after the middle of the century, and so do more than one of his sons. ‘Le sieur Chaumette’ – another Silvain, Célestine’s second cousin – ‘day-labourer, is the father of five children, of whom two are still very young … He is poverty-stricken, without any resource but his own labour. His only son, whose work is indispensable to help raise the rest of the family, is likely to be called up soon into the Army…’ That dates from 1883. Four years later it was the turn of Silvain’s brother, Félix, born the same year as Célestine: ‘… he has asthma and a weak constitution which prevents heavy work. He has four children including two young daughters and also has to help his father, aged seventy-five, who is too infirm to work.’ The father in question was Silvain-Bazille. The very next entry mentions another of this numerous family, Louis, then fifty, a weaver with rheumatism, obliged to come to the help of the same old father and also his father-in-law. Apparently the more prosperous branch of the family, Silvain-Germain’s, was either unable or unwilling to help support these poverty-haunted cousins as they proliferated down the generations.

  The more intelligent or fortunate ex-weavers were able to turn to good account the very conditions that had destroyed the weaving business. The improvement of a few roads and tracks which made it possible, for example, for alien cloth to be imported into the Berry from the Auvergne, also created new rural openings and occupations. Commerce was at last beginning to impinge on the subsistence-based rhythms of country life, and with it would come a new race of commerçants, tradesmen-villagers with special roles who borrowed a tinge of bourgeois character and practice from the local town. People began to set up as carters, as wheelwrights to service the vehicles that could now lumber along the widened tracks, as smiths to shoe the horses that were gradually becoming more numerous: till then, the work animal of central France had always been the slow-moving ox. Others opened village inns, places where travellers could find sustenance and a bed of sorts, just as in a town. The inn was also somewhere for a villager to get a drink if he possessed no vineyard of his own. The consumption of wine, which had traditionally been for feast days only, was gradually increasing in France, though the time was still far off when it would become the standard drink of the masses, automatically supplied even in the poorest restaurants. In La Châtre, by 1847, there were a score of cafés and drink shops when thirty years before there had been only one. Now the villages were beginning to follow the same trend. In Chassignolles, it was François Chaumette and his son, who were possessed of a well-situated village house and some spirit of ambition and foresight, who started the first inn.

  The Chassignolles peasant did not necessarily pay in cash for his glass of the local vin gris, any more than he paid in ready money for his ploughshare or other up-to-date farm implement now being forged for him in the new smithy. Bills were normally settled once a year, and often not in coin but in potatoes, wheat or other grains: the tradesman, since he was not a producer himself, would need these. Day-labourers were also paid in kind. Right up to 1914, country people did not handle money much. They trusted each other, with credit that sometimes ran on from one generation to another, but they did not trust, for a long time, the cash economy of the towns.

  One should not imagine either that this first Chaumette tavern was like the café of a later date, complete with bar-counter and an array of bottles, a price list and a yellow varnished notice about the suppression of drunkenness in public places. Not till later in the century were cabarets licensed and regulated by the local Préfet and his police. (Cabaret, the official designation, was then applied to any drink shop, however informal and rural. The non-French reader should suppress the inappropriate mental picture of a small nightspot, with literal folies bergères perhaps being enacted by the local shepherdesses!) Informally, the Chaumettes referred to themselves not as cabaretiers but as aubergistes, innkeepers, and their trade
would have been carried on in their own kitchen with the addition of just an extra bench or two round the oak table. A traveller of the period complained that a rural inn might consist of no more than one room beneath a loft, plus a lean-to at the side as minimal guest accommodation furnished with straw palliasses and mice.

  Another description occurs in George Sand’s novel André (published in 1851 but set some fifteen years earlier). It is about a maker of artificial flowers in La Châtre – a provincial Mimi – who falls in love with the son of a local landowner impoverished by the Revolution. They frequent the same dances and fêtes, but he is far removed from her in education and prospects. She honourably decides to resolve this situation by removing herself to the house of a kinswoman all of thirty miles distant. André, accompanied by a male friend, pursues her in the best romantic tradition and catches up with her some way along the road in a small village:

  They found the hire-carriage propped on its shafts at the door of an inn … Dawn had not yet broken. The driver was partaking of a pitcher of the vinegary local wine which he much preferred to better vintages. Joseph and André cast a hasty look round the room, which was feebly lit by the light of the fire in the grate. They saw Geneviève sitting in a corner, head in hands, bent over a table … Succumbing to the exhaustion of a night being shaken about over the stones, the poor girl was asleep.

  Such was the nature of travel when it still took a whole day to get from La Châtre to Châteauroux, with the ever-present risk of the carriage straying from the path and overturning in a bog. Most of the poorer people never travelled at all, except on foot or, by a chance lift, up behind a wealthier neighbour on his horse. Once in their teens, a boy or girl would walk into the nearest market town for the seasonal hiring fair, where they would find themselves a situation, but before that day came a child reared in the depths of the country may never even have seen a highway, let alone used it. When Sand’s François le Champi, aged ten, first sights the lumbering La Châtre–Châteauroux coach, he thinks it is some strange beast and runs from it in terror.

  A similar coach, unheated, drawn by six or even eight horses, took three or four days to reach Paris. Not surprisingly, the English tradition of coaching as a dashing and even jolly experience, over a good network of gravelled turnpikes in a smaller country, finds little echo in French social mythology. Even the bourgeoisie of the country towns visited Paris only once in a lifetime, in order to say they had been, with much discussion about it both before and after. (The same is, however, still true today of many of the elderly in the villages.) In central France, journeys farther afield than Paris, Bordeaux or Lyons were simply not believed in; people who claimed to have been in Flanders, Italy or the Rhineland, let alone England, were hardly questioned at all, no one having any idea what to ask them.

  The Chaumette inn, in its early days, would not have seen strangers from a distance, except insofar as the double word étranger (stranger/foreigner) was then applied to people living in another pays a mere twenty kilometres away. It catered to passing chanvreurs, pedlars and stonemasons, those useful but slightly suspect itinerants who roamed France more and more easily as the nineteenth century got into its stride. For local people, the inn took messages and packages to pass on, probably transmitted money on account and made small loans. They may have stocked a few dry groceries as well. Before village shops, post offices and savings banks arrived, the Auberge was the first village link with the world beyond its borders.

  * * *

  When I first got to know Chassignolles in the 1970s, two of these old-style inns were still in existence, besides the modern Café-Restaurant-Hôtel directed with entrepreneurial zeal by Madame Calvet (‘Lunchs de Noces! Déjeuners d’Affaires! Eau Courante dans les Chambres’). They were on opposite sides of the church: one was run by Madame Aussir, whose husband was a carpenter, and the other by Madame Chauvet, whose husband had been a tailor. In this, they followed the tradition that family innkeeping was usually combined with another trade, sometimes in the past a seasonal one such as butchery or oil-pressing.

  Madame Aussir’s husband once made us an oak stool, and I used to visit her in her spacious, warm kitchen where the elderly farm-workers of Chassignolles would sit imbibing in a row. In its grander days the café, under the name Hôtel de France, had developed a formal front room for customers, but the old men preferred the warm kitchen. ‘They just pick their chairs up and bring them in here,’ said Madame Aussir in tolerant despair. Afterwards they would line up in the dark outside to relieve themselves against a stone cornice so encrusted with greenish lichen that it must have served this same purpose for generations. There was a public lavatory just on the far side of the war memorial, built by the Commune in an access of Socialist hygiene about 1968, but the old men preferred the traditional spot.

  Some used to frequent the establishment round the back of the church also, along with schoolboys with money for lemonade and table-football in their pockets, but it was clear that this Chauvet café was running itself down, subsisting quietly until its proprietors could take their formal retirement. About 1980 it closed its doors. I rarely went in there, for in those days I had no idea that this was the one-time Chaumette inn.

  It is built so close to the church that there is barely room to drive a car in between: I have been told that there was once – ‘Oh, long ago. I’ve only heard tell’ – a stone archway at that point connecting the two buildings. The inn is the obviously ancient, irregularly shaped house that appears on the map of 1843, but it has been enlarged and altered several times since. Not till I got inside it again, which was years after it stopped functioning as an inn though its bar still stood ghostly in the front room complete with ageing liqueur bottles, did I learn from Monsieur Chauvet that the house had been there ‘in the time of the monks’.

  From him I also heard that it had had a vaulted outside staircase of fine stone, roofed with tiles, leading to a large attic room where wedding receptions and the like were held. This distinctive feature, known locally with an impressive disregard for chronology as a ‘Saracen staircase’, allies the building with the fifteenth-century private mansions in La Châtre and with the ‘castle’ of Villemort. The attic, converted to bedrooms, is still there. The staircase, however, was pulled down by Chauvet in 1946 when he wanted to renovate the place.

  ‘I was rebuilding the main café-room entirely then, you see,’ he explained with a hint of apology which suggested that he might, today, have spared the staircase. ‘The ceiling was so low – great, black old beams. Made the place so dark.’ He is a small, stocky man but he raised a hand to indicate a height barely above his own head. There, under that vanished low ceiling, several generations of Chaumettes ministered to the needs of the village. I also, for a reason that will become apparent, believe that for many years before the Mairie was built the Council held their meetings in the attic up the stair.

  The whole house is roofed today with the neat slates of the late nineteenth century, but at Célestine’s birth it had wooden shingles or thatch. A great many of Chassignolles’ houses and barns would originally have been thatched, but so many fires started in their roofs and went on to consume entire properties that a series of prefectural regulations were passed which gradually excluded the use of thatch. So, in an uncharacteristic quirk of modernity, the thatched cottage passed away from central France where it had once been as common as in rural England.

  The Chaumettes also owned property in the run of smaller houses and one-time workshops on the far side of the church, the buildings that follow most clearly the curve of the original monastery-fortifications. Here, by one of these mouselike dwellings whose floors lie well below the level of the present roadway, is another outside staircase – a modest wooden one this time. In this house, Célestine’s mother died.

  She was an Anne Laurent. She came from Nohant, George Sand’s village, and her occupation in the Marriage Register of 1838 is given as ‘bergère’, shepherdess, thereby completing the fleeting mental image
of her and Silvain-Germain as characters in one of George Sand’s rustic idylls. I know that she eventually died in that house rather than in the inn across the way because I was told so by the present occupant. Mademoiselle Pagnard has been for many years the chief repository of Chassignolles lore. In childhood she was an admiring younger-sister figure to Zénaïde Robin, Célestine’s granddaughter, and she liked to talk about Zénaïde, whom she felt had had a more adventurous life than she herself had.

  ‘Zénaïde’s great-grandmother died in this very room we’re sitting in,’ she remarked to me conversationally one day. ‘Of cancer of the breast, poor woman. She tried to treat it by putting a slice of best raw steak on it that she got from the butcher. People believed, in those days, that that was what you did to draw a cancer out; it would feed on the steak so not on you. They didn’t go in for doctors much, then.’

  She spoke with such authority that at first I assumed she had seen with her own eyes the desperate lady in an unbuttoned linen camisole, applying the unaccustomed luxury of butcher’s meat to a white bosom defaced by an ulcer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mademoiselle Pagnard continued, musing, ‘how long the meat was supposed to stay there. It would have Turned, of course … Perhaps it had to be renewed regularly? Expensive, if so.’

  ‘And it couldn’t have worked.’

  ‘Of course not. Made things worse, if anything. Maggots and so on.’ (‘Les vers se sont installés.’)

  ‘How simply awful.’

  ‘Yes. Well.’ Herself a brisk survivor of one modern operation for cancer, Mademoiselle Pagnard explained with an echo of horror in her voice from another time: ‘They thought so too. They called it the Evil Sickness.’ (‘Le mauvais mal.’)

  Only later did I realize that the death of Zénaïde’s great-grandmother, even if it took place at an advanced age, must date back well before Mademoiselle Pagnard’s birth. In fact it occurred in 1884. But to Jeanne Pagnard the personalities and actions of those who inhabited her world before she did, walking on the same stones, sleeping under the same rafters, have always been as real as the events of her own long life. Another of those she cannot have known in person, but presented to me just as if she had, was her own great-grandfather on the maternal side, François Chartier, who was Chassignolles’ earliest shopkeeper. If, as she agreed with me once we got down to dates, her own parents were born in the 1870s and her grandparents (roughly the same generation as Célestine) around the middle of the century, then the entrepreneurial Chartier was, like Silvain-Germain, born during or just after the Napoleonic wars and, like the innkeeper, made the most of what the time might offer.