Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  In the 1850s he set up as a travelling grocer, the forerunner of the modern vans. That is to say, he used to walk into La Châtre to buy his stock and then trudge with it in a pack round the countryside. As this was the period when such extras as sugar, spices, candles and even chocolate and coffee were beginning to be appreciated on the more prosperous farms, his enterprise was opportune. Later – I afterwards confirmed from the census records that this was in the early 1860s, just as Célestine had grown to womanhood – he opened his village shop.

  ‘See that little place at the end of the run that’s empty now and got a great big poster on it for a supermarket? Yes, beside where the elm used to stand before it was cut down…’ It was here, in this miniature, dimly lit dwelling more like a stable than a house, that he carried on a business that thrived and continued to do so even when competition came. Although he was illiterate, he kept accounts in picture code, thus reinventing writing from first principles. ‘He was canny,’ said Mademoiselle Pagnard. ‘Sugar came in triangular loaves in those days, like small pyramids – you had to break bits off. Well, often people couldn’t afford a whole loaf, they just wanted a little. So my great-grandfather used to break it up, and he charged a little less for the bits from the bottom of the loaf because they weren’t quite so sweet. People knew and they came to him for that. ’Course, he charged other customers a bit more than the standard price for the pointed bits that were the sweetest.’

  The progression from itinerant packman to shopkeeper typifies what was then happening for the first time all over rural France. The trade of pedlar went back hundreds of years. In the centuries of little or no communication between one pays and another the pedlar was the only source of news, a breath from elsewhere. A sighting of the solitary figure, bent under his pack, moving at the field’s edge against a line of trees, brought the children of the farm running and the women from kitchen and cow-shed. It has been suggested that much of the peddling that went on was not especially lucrative, but it gave the chance to see the world to men too restive by nature to be content with the deadening rhythm of the fields. It might also provide a boy from a poor home with a pretext to seek his fortune, leaving the family with one less mouth to feed. But peddling, like all adventures, could be hazardous. Some men became victims of criminal assault on lonely roads, or were attacked by wolves or drowned in flooding rivers or were found dead of exposure in the winter snows. Others drifted into crime themselves or descended to begging. Begging was long a feature of the French countryside, and sometimes it took on a menacing aspect.

  The poorer peasants, locked in the struggle for sheer survival with their annual purchases of iron and preserving salt, may not have had much use for the pedlar’s wares, but there were always more prosperous families to be tempted. By the nineteenth century, in spite of Jacques Lafitte’s discouraged remark about half of France still being stuck in the fourteenth century, the demand for made goods was inconspicuously growing. A description of the contents of one pedlar’s pack at the time of Célestine’s birth lists thread, cotton, quantities of needles, pins and buttons, thimbles, scissors, hooks-and-eyes (a newfangled extravagance), ready-made braces (ditto), knives and combs. There were also more frivolous items such as snuffboxes and ‘Limoges ware’ (small, decorative china boxes given as keepsakes), and cakes of soap. Other records mention pencils, penknives, quills and notebooks, for those whose skills now extended to the keeping of accounts, in pictures or otherwise.

  Reading matter and religious pictures were also staples of the early-nineteenth-century pedlar’s trade, along with religious medals and chaplets. The books were usually little ‘Almanachs’ bound in blue paper: they contained a mixture of religious and folk aphorisms, home remedies, hints on etiquette of the Don’t-belch-at-table variety, potted histories, descriptions of famous trials and fairy tales. It was from such books that people like Pirot the Mayor and François Chaumette became acquainted with the alphabet. (France being a Roman Catholic country, there was never the encouragement to Bible reading that characterized Protestant rural life in England.) Earlier, the Almanachs were called grimoires (grammars) and contained both prayers and spells: they seem to have been acquired as talismans even by households where there was no one who could decipher them.

  The construction of some new main routes in the later eighteenth century and under Napoleon was done for nationalistic reasons, not with the aim of benefiting the regions through which they passed. They did, however, make it possible for pedlars to go further afield more safely and to get their goods from more widespread sources. Troops of pedlars were organized by masters in the towns. By the 1840s it had even become possible for them to deposit their takings safely in savings banks in the main towns on their route, rather than running the perpetual risk of being robbed for the cash they carried.

  But that was the Indian summer of peddling. The same advances that made life easier for the solitary trader with his pack ended by making him obsolete. Country footpaths were widened into tracks for carts which could carry more goods more easily. Shops multiplied in the towns. In La Châtre, the Pissavy family, who had set up to sell cloth from the Auvergne after the Napoleonic wars, and who at first sent pedlars with bolts of it all over the Berry and the Touraine, found by the mid-century that they could deal more profitably by acting as wholesalers selling to traders in fixed premises. By the later part of the century the men on the country roads with packs or baskets were still selling their wares, but those from afar were now more marginal, gypsy-style figures – chair-caners, china-menders, illicit sellers of non-Government-manufactured matches done up to look like cheeses. The more regular and respectable sellers on the road were now, like Mademoiselle Pagnard’s great-grandfather, local tradesmen making deliveries: the village shop had been born.

  * * *

  Jeanne Pagnard was described to me by a contemporary as ‘the daughter of peasants – but rich peasants’. The family had been in the wheelwright and saddlery business. When I first got to know her I called her ‘Madame’, assuming that the elderly man I saw coming and going from her house, wearing clogs and accompanied by the last working horse in the village, was her husband. In fact he was her brother. Another brother had died before we came to the village, and this younger one was to drop dead of a heart attack in her kitchen a few years later. The three Pagnards had all been born between 1906 and 1910 and none had ever married. Perhaps they had seen enough of the financial and physical burdens of large families in their youth to be wary of marriage, or perhaps the three of them simply felt complete in themselves: they lived together all their lives. After her second brother’s death, Mademoiselle Pagnard (as I now knew her to be) became more confiding. She has always had the capacity to make friends, and now she missed her lifetime’s companion.

  ‘People say, “After all, losing a brother isn’t quite like losing your husband,” but for me, at my age, it has been exactly like. Being alone … From time to time an idea passes through your mind and you want to share it. But you can’t go knocking on someone else’s door just with an idea, so if there isn’t anyone on hand it just goes away again and is lost…’

  Ideas figure distinctly in Jeanne Pagnard’s mental landscape. She told me another time that she did well at school and was particularly good at maths: no doubt the account-keeping great-grandfather’s genes making their appearance. After completing the village school course and attaining her certificate by the age of twelve, she would have liked to go on to some further education and there was talk of her doing so, but ‘our father had had bad luck during the War. We owned a plantation, and he’d just cut down a lot of wood to sell when war broke out and he was called up. He was away four years and by the time he came back the wood had rotted where it lay and was unsaleable.’

  This, at any rate, was the story. The First World War is commonly credited with having ruined even more lives and institutions than it did in practice: it has become the new divide between the chronologically moving Now and the static Olden Days.
Nevertheless it is literally true that conscription in France was implemented in 1914 in such a summary and dramatic way that the men who were carried off to war were forced to leave all manner of unfinished business behind them. Even the harvest had not been got in – a mistake that all parties concerned were careful not to repeat the second time round, in 1939.

  Baulked of the course in bookkeeping in La Châtre or Châteauroux which might have carried her, as it did Zénaïde, into a different way of life, Mademoiselle Pagnard settled for becoming a dressmaker – a couturière, in the rather grand French term that is employed even at village level. In this she was following her father’s mother, the daughter of the grocer and the person who became a model for her. Her own intimate knowledge of village events that had taken place well before her birth derives from a childhood spent largely in her grandmother’s workshop. ‘There were always several girls there sewing, employed by her. It was jolly.’ (C’était gai.) ‘More fun than my own home. And Grandmother loved to recount things.’

  This grandmother, Catherine Chartier, had also achieved an education ending in a school-leaving certificate, a rare thing for a girl born in the 1850s. ‘She could write a really good letter. And she could add up and subtract. But I don’t think anyone had ever shown her how to multiply. Because when she wanted to work out how many metres of cloth were needed for something, she used to put the price of each metre down in a column and add them up like that. When I got big I tried to tell her the proper way to do it, but she just laughed and did it her way.’

  The man Catherine married, Charles Pagnard, was a gardener who worked for several local notables, including the engineer who owned the stone quarries in the next Commune. These quarries employed thirty or more men from Chassignolles, according to the census, and were worked with the latest machinery. It did not take long for young Madame Pagnard to make herself indispensable to this family. ‘The lady of the house was a Creole, from Dominique, very beautiful, and she used to get my grandmother to make copies of the latest Paris fashions from magazines for herself and her two daughters. There was one muslin dress I always heard about, with silk and lace rosebuds all around the skirt. Pastoral style, it was called. Pastoral!’

  Madame Pagnard’s grandmother, who had not at that time acquired one of the new sewing-machines, stitched away at this fabled dress while clad herself in a genuine Berrichonne peasant’s cap. Her devotion paid off, for the family spent two to three months every year in Paris. This was ‘for the Season’ and to allow its head to pursue Parisian engineering interests, including assistance to Monsieur Eiffel in designing the Tower that was raised for the first centenary of the Revolution. Their Chassignolles’ dressmaker used to accompany them there, having become an indispensable, unofficial ladies’ maid: in this way she experienced the Paris of Zola, of Haussmann, of opéra bouffe and sensational posters by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was a remarkable journey from one world to another at a time when, out of the thousand-odd population of Chassignolles, only ten had been born outside the Department of the Indre and most of these had come from the Creuse only a dozen or so miles distant.

  ‘What about her own children?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh, she left them with her mother,’ said Mademoiselle Pagnard with a note of admiration in her voice. ‘You understand, she was much more advanced (beaucoup plus évoluée) than the typical country women of that time. She really made the most of herself.’

  So, in her own way, did Jeanne Pagnard. Grandfather Pagnard also gardened for the family at the Chassignolles domaine, the Big House set in its own grounds to one side of the village. Young Jeanne Pagnard began sewing for them and formed a relationship with the family that has lasted a lifetime.

  The Domaine is owned, and has been since the 1860s, by successive descendants of the Pissavys, who set up as linen-merchants in La Châtre. (By the inter-war period the ramifications of this traditional, Mass-going family had spread all over the Berry. Today they are proudly said to number 450 ‘if you count all the attachments’ – one of whom is the local MP.) Mademoiselle Pagnard has been called on by the occupants of the Domaine over the years not only to sew for them but on occasions to act as responsible overseer for children and servants. She has a detailed knowledge of several generations of the family and speaks of them in the intimate and slightly possessive way of a retired nanny. They have become her own people, as significant to her as her cousins and their progeny and somewhat more special. Both her vocabulary and her rolling local accent have been modified by decades of educated conversation. She and old Madame L (née Pissavy-Yvernault) have spent their lives observing discreet but fixed lines of social demarcation, but today, hearing them talk together, the impression is of two old ladies who can speak more frankly to one another than to almost anyone else – two survivors of a world that is now disappearing in its turn over the horizon of history.

  Chapter 7

  In her stories, George Sand had to make her peasants speak more or less standard French to be understood by her readers. She explained in a preface that their real speech would have been impenetrable to an unaccustomed ear. For the remarkable thing about early-nineteenth-century France, compared with a more compact and unified country such as England, was that most of the population did not speak recognizable French. The Bourgogne, the Auvergne, the Cévennes, the Limousin, the Guyenne, Provence, the Berry and numerous other smaller areas each had its own language, which might be incomprehensible to the people of the next pays only twenty or thirty miles off. Just before the Revolution, an investigation revealed thirty distinct different patois in France plus many more local variants, and an encyclopedia of the period roundly declared: ‘Patois – a corrupted tongue spoken all over the provinces. The true language is spoken only in the capital.’

  That is a nationalist and Paris-centred view. Patois was not a faulty version of ‘real’ French; it had its own genesis. Medieval France had had two equally important tongues, both descended from soldiers’ Latin: the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl. The langue d’oïl was the language of northern France, from the wealthy plains south of the Loire up through Paris and Reims till it petered out in Flanders. Once the centre of power was concentrated in Paris, this tongue therefore became the basis of standard French. The langue d’oc, which was spoken over most of central and southwestern France and gave its name to a substantial area, lost status and, without any cohesive force, fragmented into numerous versions. It was, however, extremely long in dying, as were the other local languages of entirely separate origin such as Breton and Basque. In Eugène Le Roy’s famous novel about a Périgordine peasant, Jaquou le Croquant, a Gendarme comes to interview a little boy and does so in the local tongue. The child’s comment is that the man ‘spoke the patois like the people do in Sarlat’ – not as in his home village. That employé of the State may not have spoken French at all at that early-nineteenth-century date, or, if he did, he would not have spoken it as his first language. The historian Weber calculates that even late in the century, when improved communications and the reforms of the Third Republic were between them revolutionizing country life, French was still a foreign language to a good half of France’s citizens. Many would say this situation continued to a much later date.

  The Lower Berry lies just, though only just, within the area where the prevailing tongue belonged to the same family as standard French – the langue d’oïl. This meant that the patois, in all its variants, died out earlier there as a separate language, merging more easily into the mainstream language than the distinct southern dialects would do. In 1835 the newly formed Ministry of Public Instruction, whose great mission was to make the disparate citizens of France all speak one tongue, published a report. This noted that the Department of the Indre was French-speaking, but the other part of the Berry – the Department of the Cher – was less so and that in the Creuse immediately to the south hardly any French was spoken at all. The term ‘French-speaking’ should, in any case, be treated with more caution than the optimistic Ministr
y inspectors may have applied. Understanding questions in French and producing a few adequate answers for the alien gentleman in the black jacket and riding boots is one thing; talking the language round your own fireside is another.

  The fact that early minute-takers such as Aussourd or Vallet or Charbonnier recorded Council business in French does not necessarily tell us about the actual words used round the table, for there was then no set formula for writing patois. Any written record had to be in French, more or less, and this applied also to private correspondence. What, then, did the Chaumettes and their neighbours speak among themselves? I think it was recognizably French of a sort and could be turned into ‘proper’ French by education; but in everyday conversation it would probably have been so peppered with local words as to puzzle a listener from Châteauroux or Bourges, let alone from Paris. Even today I notice people in Chassignolles, those born in the first three decades of the present century, taking care in conversation with me to select the standard words for ‘beans’ or ‘barrel’ or ‘wasp’ or whatever; talking to one another they will use a country term. Or a child, whose everyday talk is of international futbol matches and video games, will unself-consciously use an archaic term in some such sentence as ‘The cow’s had her calf.’