Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  If patois survives even today, then how large a part of speech it must have been a hundred and fifty years ago. But the Chaumettes, father and son, with their ambitions and their inn in the centre of the village, were probably among the more competent speakers of regular French. The reason I know they were ambitious (apart from the evidence of the inn itself) is that Silvain-Germain, the son, learnt to read and write fluently. This was at a time when fewer than one person in twenty in the Indre could read, and since this figure included townspeople the proportion of those literate in the country must have been far smaller. But it was beginning to be seen as a desirable skill: George Sand was sometimes asked for reading lessons by the individual workers on her estate, and found many of them quick to learn.

  I do not know for certain how Silvain-Germain acquired his skill, though I can make a guess (see below). He was born in 1816 or 1817 and was therefore in his teens already and past the usual age of education in 1833, when the Government passed the ‘Guizot Law’ with the intention that each Commune should set up and maintain a primary school. Till then, only sixty-two Indre Communes out of 247 had any sort of school at all, and these accounted for only about three thousand pupils. Unsurprisingly, no mention of any Chassignolles school appears in the Council Minutes at that date.

  Yet the population of the Commune, like that of most of rural France, had grown since the beginning of the century, from 673 in 1801 to 984 thirty-five years later, and much of this growth was post-Napoleonic war. In the census of 1836 over half the population were described as garçons or filles, and although these were the terms then applied to unmarried persons of any age the great majority of them were in fact young. There was no longer the high infant mortality that had kept populations down under the Ancien Régime. A run-through of the registers in the Mairie for that year (a typical one) reveals thirty-two births, six of them ‘natural’ children, as against seventeen deaths, and nine of these were those of adults well on in life. The prevalent modern idea – much pushed by at least one populist French writer – that in the past child death was a commonplace against which parents simply hardened their hearts, is not borne out by such figures. Of the eight child deaths, five were those of babies or young children from elsewhere who had been put out to nurse in Chassignolles by the orphanage-hospital in Châteauroux, and such deaths tell their own tale. Only three ‘own’ infants died in Chassignolles families that year. A fever, probably malarial, still made itself felt in the watery Berry then and severe local shortages were still occurring – the last major one in the area was in 1847 – but widespread plague and starvation were slipping into history. The young generation were surviving and multiplying and needed educating.

  But new Law or not, it does not seem that Chassignolles organized itself a school after 1833. Not till late 1841, when Silvain-Germain was a married man in his twenties, did the Council begin to deliberate the step of acquiring a schoolmaster. The inhabitants, apparently, had been ‘manifesting a desire’ for one.

  At this date teaching was miserably paid; the village schoolmaster could be anyone, including indeed the local innkeeper. Fourchon, in Balzac’s novel Les Paysans (1844), is just such a man, a jack of all trades who has learnt a thing or two while on the road or in the army, and takes to schoolmastering as another seasonal job along with rope-making. Other schoolmasters of the period doubled as cobblers or gravediggers or, more respectably, the sacristan would take on the role. In the Berry, with its strong traditions of ‘the world behind’, the mysteries beneath the surface of life, the position might be filled by someone known as a local healer and spell-caster. Evidently the concept of basic literacy as a tool of national enlightenment, in opposition to old superstitions, had not yet impinged on much of France. This was in the days when print itself was potentially suspect, or at any rate deserving of a wary respect. In Balzac’s Le Curé du Village (1839) the carefully brought-up daughter of a tradesman in what is actually La Châtre has a book bought for her, Paul et Virginie, a classic pious tale for the young. Her semi-literate mother is worried by it and suggests that it should be shown to the priest, since for her ‘any printed book appeared in the guise of a grimoire’ – the old pedlars’ chapbook. But among the more forward-looking literacy was now being seen as a tool worth having. ‘Writing bureaux’ were being set up in the towns, as they are today in Indian towns, where those who could not do it for themselves could get letters written and also forms filled in for that French bureaucracy whose wheels were beginning to turn. One advertised in a La Châtre newspaper in the 1840s was run by a local aristocrat whose family had been impoverished by the Revolution. (He is also, incidentally, thought to have been George Sand’s first lover.)

  Things did not move fast in Chassignolles. Two years after the subject of the school had first been mooted, and Célestine was on the way, Mayor Pirot was still suggesting that ‘the need for primary education makes itself felt more every day – that it is urgent that we provide it – that the best way would be to build a schoolhouse and that till the Commune has such a lodging to offer it will not be able to find a teacher’. It was agreed that the schoolhouse must be central and that the parents must help pay for it. However, just where this was to be and how it was to be financed was still being discussed four years later.

  By the following year, February 1848, a row had developed centering – once again – on the egregious Louis Vallet. The site that had finally been chosen did not please him and, having failed to engage public sympathy on the matter, he offered to pay the expenses that would now be incurred in changing to another site. The Council, ayant mûrement délibéré, decided by a majority of five to four to stick to the site already decided. The Minutes do not reveal where this was: they have a tantalizing tendency not to record such central facts, presumably because these were known to all already. I eventually discovered this first school’s position from a very elderly retired teacher, who had it from his grandfather who had been a pupil there. Sure enough the building there, which was later a café and is now a private dwelling, has the date ‘1848’ on its lintel.

  In May 1850 the new Government of the Second Republic had passed a law obliging each Department to help financially with the setting up of rural schools. It is probably no coincidence that by May the Chassignolles schoolhouse had finally got itself plastered and furnished and the Council was now discussing ways of paying a teacher. By October they had found themselves one, Albert Hénouville, who sounds as if he came from northern France and was thus a complete foreigner in Berrichon terms. He acquired eight pupils, all boys of course, whose parents each contributed a franc a month – which I calculate to have been roughly the same at that date as the cost of the bread a growing child would consume. As an extra sum, it was hard for the most ordinary peasant families to find, even had they desired schooling for their children as the mayor kept on insisting they did. In fact there is ample evidence that in the Berry, as throughout rural France, most parents did not. As a disapproving member of the Indre Regional Council remarked a few years later: ‘Very little improvement in the rural Communes. Poor families are indifferent to the thought of education and are more concerned to send their children out to work.’ Most of the population were then poor.

  A different teacher was there by 1852 and another again by 1856, when the census records as instituteur a Guillaume Poissonier, another outsider, aged twenty-seven, with a wife and three small daughters, one new-born. He apparently was not successful in attracting custom either; not till 1862 does cautious satisfaction begin to be expressed. The mayor (by then a local man again, Noel Yvernault, replacing the extravagantly named Geoffrenet de Champdavid) remarked that ‘since September 1859, the time when Monsieur Charbonnier was appointed teacher in Chassignolles, he has always been of exemplary and irreproachable conduct, from every point of view’. One wonders what unexemplary conduct the previous incumbents had displayed. ‘By his zeal and devotion he has been able to make the school flourish … The number of pupils, which on his arriv
al was reduced to 6, has now risen to 46.’

  It was suggested, and agreed, that Monsieur Charbonnier should receive directly from Communal funds a hundred francs annually ‘by way of encouragement’, but a cautious rider was added to the effect that no promises would be made about this to any successor ‘in case he should not deserve it’. Jacques Charbonnier, who was only twenty-one when he took the post, in fact stayed for over thirty years, acquiring a wife and children in his turn. In later censuses he drops the Jacques and calls himself Auguste, perhaps his second name which he regarded as more fitting to his position in the community. Although not one of the Chassignolles Charbonniers, he came from a village only a few miles away: no doubt, as a local lad with an accent to match, he was much more acceptable than his predecessors. But finding the money to subsidize the school and fixing its budget remained an annual preoccupation for the Commune, and continued to be so till the coming of the free and compulsory national education system in the 1880s.

  The time had not quite arrived when a country instituteur automatically took on the job of Secretary to the Mairie as well. The whole saga of the school’s establishment was in fact recorded by the busy pen, with its emphatic down-strokes, of Célestine’s father, Silvain-Germain Chaumette. He is identifiable by his signature, which is in the same hand. He had already replaced François Charbonnier as keeper of the Birth, Marriage and Death Registers for a while around 1840, and the handwriting reappears in the Minute book in 1848, when he had become a member of the Council. He did not remain a councillor after the upheaval of 1852. The oath of allegiance to the new Emperor is not made out in his hand, nor is the rough draft of a sycophantic letter congratulating His Highness and wishing him a long life. From this I conclude that Silvain-Germain had Republican sympathies, that he had come to the fore in 1848 (when George Sand and her friends were trying to rally the conservative Berry to the cause) and that he retreated again when reaction and the Second Empire set in and Geoffrenet de Champdavid was put in charge of the Commune. But he did not retreat far. Clearly a man who wrote with such ease was too useful to lose. The Minutes resume in his hand, for it seems to have been that same year that he moved into a new role as Chassignolles’ first paid Secretary. This no doubt provides a useful secondary activity to subsidize that of innkeeping, and where in any case would the Council meetings have been held but in the inn’s large upper room? He remained in the job till his death.

  As to where he learnt his skill, I came across a possible answer in the first census, that of 1836. The family were living in the house that had not yet become the inn: François, then down as a smallholder, his wife Marie Petitpez (‘smallfoot’, a name still current in the Commune), Silvain-Germain, who was then aged about twenty, a young sister apparently known as ‘Felissé’, and a lodger. This was François Hélion, aged sixty-six, styled ancien militaire de marine retraité – ‘retired from the fighting navy’. The name first struck me as implausibly Greekish for central France until I noticed that, in that census, Elizabeth is commonly written ‘Hélizabette’ and Étienne ‘Hétienne’ and I saw from a later census that the Commune also contained an ordinary farming family called Elion. So this old sailor of Copenhagen and Trafalgar was a local man, come home after many years of bachelor existence to finish his days in the village. This is just the sort of person who, at that period, had acquired literacy on his travels as well as much other general knowledge. In view of his age in 1836 he must have been there for most of Silvain-Germain’s childhood, and it does not seem fanciful to suppose that he may have been the boy’s teacher and mentor.

  Apart from the tributes to the Emperor, the other odd papers that are slipped between the pages of the Minute book for 1839–55 are in Silvain-Germain’s writing. In April 1849 he certified that one Jean Moulin had that spring destroyed two litters of wolf cubs in the woods of the Commune and was owed the monetary reward the Préfet then offered. Jean Moulin (a name with a dramatic but irrelevant twentieth-century echo) was the local man charged with wolf-hunting under the direction of the Lieutenant de la Louverie in La Châtre, who was a swashbuckling but ageing local notable. Moulin’s exploit dated from the same year as the celebrated hanging of wolf carcasses on the oak in the Bois de Villemort. The drive to eradicate the wolf from the Berry had begun. The creatures were said to have increased in the Indre and to have become more ‘bold and desperate’ during a couple of bad winters in the mid-1840s, but the symbolism and passion with which the hunt was pursued seems to indicate a wolf phobia going beyond the rational, with its roots in tales of werewolves and diabolic pacts between man and beast.

  There is also a paper by Silvain-Germain dated 1850 which sets out a formal complaint about the garde-champêtre, the local gamekeeper cum village constable who was paid by the Commune: he was said not to be doing his job properly and to be taking – or extorting – bribes from malefactors. He was also said to be an habitual haunter of cabarets (in the plural, so presumably the reference was not so much to Chaumette’s own inn as to the cafés in La Châtre) and a scrounger of drinks. The Commune proposed to remove this gentleman and replace him with another, a retired soldier who was generally respected (‘lequel jouit de l’estime général des habitants’). But, frustratingly, both the name of the disgraced guard and that of his successor are left blank.

  Another paper is more remarkable for the light it sheds both on village life and on Silvain-Germain’s own capacity to express views in writing. It is the undated rough draft of an impassioned appeal destined to be sent all the way to Paris:

  To the Minister of justice –

  Monsieur le Ministre,

  The undersigned inhabitants and members of the municipal councils of the communes of Chassignolles and la châtre beg you, on behalf of a certain pirot [un nommé pirot] to grant him pardon or at least to mitigate the life sentence to which he has been condemned in the recent session of the Assize court of the Indre. In support of their request they have the honour to present to you the following considerations: Pirot belongs to an honest family of the commune of Chassignolles of which his father was for a long time the mayor. He has exercised the trade of locksmith with a certain skill [avec assez d’habilité] and has even invented a new design of plough which has been favourably received by the Agricultural Committee of the Indre. He has been generally liked and esteemed in his village and the municipal council have set forth the proof of this in a certificate which is here enclosed along with that relating to his criminal conviction. Pirot has thus lived quite peacefully till the age of over 45 when following a discussion on monetary affairs [à la suite d’une discussion pour des affaires d’intérêts] after several attempts to bring back to his house his wife who had left him, he was led to commit the action for which he has been condemned and which has been punished as attempted murder.

  The circumstances are set forth in the court’s papers: it is therefore useless to reproduce them. It is simply necessary to state that no one has been injured or killed by him. We the undersigned know what respect is due to the Justice of the country but beg to say that his condemnation has produced a painful effect on the entire neighbourhood where he is known [une impression douloureuse dans le canton où il est connu] and that many persons still doubt whether Pirot had any other intention than to frighten his wife’s family who seem to have been encouraging her not to return to the marital home.

  Whatsoever the truth of the matter [Quoi qu’il en soit] we the undersigned invoke as reasons to your good will and your sense of justice a peaceful and honest life of 45 years, a gentle and affectionate character, a habit of sober work [un caractère doux et inoffensif, des habitudes laborieuses] which has inspired feelings in others in a way a violent or dangerous man could not do …

  The letter continues in this vein. When I discovered it, I longed to know just what had taken place and when. I had not at that point come to recognize Silvain-Germain’s handwriting, but by chance soon after I came upon what seemed to be an echo of the drama in the local paper of th
at name. In August 1850 it was announced, among brief legal items, that a séparation de biens (separation of property) had been pronounced at the request of a Marguerite Charbonnier from her husband Antoine Pirot, both of Chassignolles. A formal separation was the only divorce then available to the ordinary person, but it was quite an effective one. I assumed at first that this would have been a sequel to the attempted murder and the court case, perhaps taking place some time later, but at least I now had a full name for Pirot under which to seek further details.

  Taking his stated age, forty-five, as a clue, and assuming that the events referred to in the paper dated, like most of the Minute book, from the 1840s, I was looking for a birth some time around the turn of the century. Sure enough, in the register for autumn 1803 (7 Brumaire l’An XII), Antoine Pirot made his appearance. His father was Silvain Pirot, ‘Propriétaire et maréchal’ of Le Flets, one of the Commune’s outlying hamlets. So Silvain, like François and Denis Charbonnier, owned enough to qualify as a landowner and was also a blacksmith – a person of some substance, as you would expect of a future mayor. At Antoine’s birth Silvain was stated to be ‘at the wars’, a sign that the Napoleonic levée of young men to fight battles such as Austerlitz and Jena was making a sweep even in this remote countryside. The birth was announced, and the baby presented in person, by his maternal uncle and by the midwife Marie Chaumard, whose name often appears at this time.

  ‘Over 45 years’ on from 1803 takes us to 1849 or 1850. So the gentle and inoffensive Antoine had evidently committed his unprecedented act just when France herself was passing through one of those periodic re-enactments of revolutionary emotion and countermeasure which are the chief milestones of her nineteenth-century history. It was also just at the time when the active Silvain-Germain Chaumette, then in his early thirties, had become a councillor.