In the mid-nineteenth century bread was still by far the most important item of diet. It was rye bread – white flour was another luxury that was only grown to be sold to the wealthier townspeople. Home-grown grain was ground in one of the Commune’s three water-mills; one was near Le Flets and was kept by a Charbonnier, and another was owned by the Mercier family, who still live there today. Bread was baked at home, but only at long intervals. The batches of heavy, ring-shaped loaves were hung up to keep, safe from rats and mice and picking fingers. They continued to provide the daily ration even when stale and dry. The ceremonial, almost sacramental cult of fresh bread, the pain quotidien that today sends customers on daily or even twice-daily excursions to the baker’s for long loaves crackling with warmth in their rack, had not yet been born. Commercial baking had only reached the towns.
Those who had insufficient land to grow their own grain had to buy it, and after a bad season the prices rose and went on rising because hoarding began. This operation of market forces was not perhaps as hard on the poor as the artificially raised prices imposed by the English Corn Laws, but it could still have a devastating effect on the peasant budget and on that of town dwellers who bought bakers’ bread. Even when grain was plentiful the cost of this for a family of six accounted for about half the earnings of a labouring man.
Célestine was born in May and that summer was an unusually parched one. Some village wells ran dry and women washed linen at the rivers in a trickle of brown water that could not clean it and left a tainted scent of its own. Then the following winter was particularly hard. The temperature went down to nine and then twelve below zero (centigrade); rain turned to ice where it fell. The Mayor of La Châtre (then, as for many decades, George Sand’s Vicar-of-Bray friend, Delavau) had forbidden the trapping of larks, but the Préfet of the Indre overruled him, inviting the Gendarmerie to take no action ‘since it constitutes the only resource available to the labouring classes without work’. The larks, incidentally, were not eaten by the trappers, but sold for a pittance in the markets – to buy bread.
The following summer was wet. The Indre broke its banks at La Châtre, carrying away two houses and flooding the Rue Royale. The waters, according to the Écho du Berry, ‘rose to a height that the oldest inhabitants in the area [les plus anciens du pays] cannot recall ever having seen before’. Riverside vegetable gardens became lakes, mills up and down the river’s length were damaged. Between La Châtre and Chassignolles the stone bridge over a tributary stream (the Couarde), which had only been built the year before after much discussion, was swept away. (It was replaced by a wooden one, which collapsed ten years later under the weight of a heavy peasant woman with a basket of grapes.) Crops standing in the fields were spoiled. The harvest was poor and was made worse by storms that broke over the harvesters’ heads.
The next summer, once again, was dry. By the end of the year, the price of bread had risen from twenty-four centimes a kilo to forty-two. During the same period the wages of casual labourers in the towns had been reduced by almost a third. George Sand, at Nohant, carried a pistol in her pocket at night, and for the first time in her sturdy life she took a man servant to accompany her when she went walking in the countryside, for fear of being attacked by one of the starving vagrants who were known to be roaming about. By recent legislation, vagrancy was a criminal offence, and in an attempt to discourage begging ‘charity offices’ and workshops had been established in the main towns. La Châtre did not yet have one, but the indefatigable Delavau had plans for one. It had been noted, however, in Châteauroux, where one had been set up for several years, that its existence made citizens less inclined to give personally to the poor: the long saga of public aid to those in need, which has had such a profound and equivocal effect on all developed societies, was just at its inconspicuous beginning.
In Chassignolles, those landowners who grew enough grain to sell on the open market presumably benefited from the rise in prices, but there must have been many affected by the general, absolute dearth. Fortunately, among the woods of the Black Valley were – and are – plantations of Spanish chestnuts, and the harvest of these had always been important as an alternative basic foodstuff. But even in a small town like La Châtre troubles and confrontations were occurring. Already, earlier in the year, the real miller from the mill at Angibault a few miles away (who should not be confused with the one in George Sand’s story or yet with an earlier one who was a personal friend of hers) had been convicted of abstracting another miller’s bags of grain in the market-place. In the Berry millers were paid not in cash but in kind – a proportion of what was given to them to grind – and it was by selling their percentage in the towns that they made their money. Though peasants, they tended to be richer and more worldly-wise than their neighbours; in time of shortage they became natural targets for resentment and were suspected of taking more than their share and of hoarding. This miller was imprisoned for a year. In the autumn, when the harvest had now been inadequate for three years, another resented figure in La Châtre, a grain merchant called Gaultier, said to the would-be customer who complained to him of his rising prices, ‘You haven’t seen anything yet, you’ll find yourselves eating grass’ (‘Vous n’avez pas fini; on vous fera manger de l’herbe’) – a direct reference to the traditional bogey of starving Ancien Régime serfs from which the spirit of the Revolution had been created. This was in late 1846; within fifteen months the collapse of the July monarchy was to take place in the ‘Revolution of ’48’, followed by the short-lived Second Republic. Gaultier’s words nearly produced a riot on the spot.
An actual, more serious grain riot occurred in 1847 in the small town of Buzançais in the northern Berry. There, women selling produce in the market were said to have worked on a group of day-labourers and incited them to stop a cartload of wheat that was setting off to Issoudun, the nearest town of any size. Issoudun was then one of France’s smallest Préfectures: Balzac wrote that its drowsy airs would have turned even a Napoleon fat and lazy. But in Buzançais the cry went up that the sharp townsfolk were taking the bread from the mouths of the country people who had grown it. This was the age-old peasant fear, but it may have been exacerbated by the fact that Issoudun had recently acquired a railway station. Was the wheat going to be sent to the undeserving, alien people of Paris?
The affair escalated. The men raided the grain stores and houses of several well-to-do local landowners. Hostages were taken. One of these shot at rioters with his carbine and was in turn set upon and killed. At the noisy trial that followed, three of the rioters were condemned to death and twenty given life sentences. This was considered excessive even at that time, and was evidently an attempt to impose exemplary order in a situation that was, in any case, to be the last of its kind. Only the exceptional string of bad harvests could have produced this crisis at a time when local famines, let alone widespread ones, were becoming a thing of the past.
In a country as large and variegated as France, food lacking in one area could nearly always be supplied from another one if only it could be transported, and transport was slowly improving. Bad and rough as the cart roads were in the 1840s, there were simply many more of them, at least from one town to another, than there had been a hundred, fifty or even thirty years before. There was now, along the valley of the Indre between La Châtre and Châteauroux, a road of sorts and a stagecoach service, whereas in George Sand’s childhood there had been ‘no road, or rather there were a hundred … a labyrinth of twisting tracks, of marshy ponds and great heathlands … people continually got lost’. The plots of two of her stories involve the extensive night wanderings of strayed travellers in this will-o’-the-wisp landscape. (Much of it today is a terrain of intensive cultivation, shorn of its old hedgerows, along the straight, modern Departmental road.)
The old rural idea had been that roads from one pays to another were unnecessary and even undesirable: they might bring strangers in who would eat up your food. There was clearly a final echo of this paranoi
a in Buzançais. Even in the well-established rural towns the belief was that the coming of a main road would bring higher prices for basic commodities, though, if anything, the opposite was the case. Before the railway had linked it with the world, Issoudun itself had been resistant to invasion. Indeed its bourgeoisie were so determined about this, according to Balzac (in La Rabouilleuse), that they actually succeeded in getting the chief road from Vierzon to Châteauroux, which should logically have gone via Issoudun, diverted through Vatan – where it remains to this day.
But once a few more routes had been constructed country people discovered that they could use them to take their own produce to markets farther afield, and the notion of the desirability of communications was gradually born. In 1817 the Council in Chassignolles had refused, to a man, to contribute towards the cost of building a stone bridge over the large River Creuse twenty miles to the south-west, on the circular argument that there was ‘no trade with those parts’. (This is one of the oldest Minute records.) By 1836, however, when a new law provided for subsidies to enlarge paths that linked one Commune to adjoining ones, they were keenly in favour of this, and contributed to the building of the ill-fated stone bridge over the Couarde in the early 1840s even though it was outside the Commune.
The hunger experienced in the Berry between 1846 and 1848 was not a matter of absolute lack of food but of the number of people who, always near the breadline, slipped below it in times of shortage and raised prices. The new administration of the Second Republic, bent on humanitarian reform, including the creation of work schemes, did a survey of the poor: it found that the Indre alone had over five thousand ‘absolutely destitute’ people out of a population of about two hundred and seventy thousand, which is approaching two in every hundred. Only half of these were considered fit to work, always supposing they could find work. Many of the rest were probably old, or very young. In its numbers of abandoned babies and small children (always a good index of general poverty and of particular years of crisis) the Indre was the third-worst Department in France.
But at the same time the very fact that the destitute could now be counted and, presumably, helped by the new charity offices, shows what a long way central France had come since the starving serfs and brigands of a hundred years earlier. By the same token, the unmarried girls who abandoned their babies did so knowing that they would probably be found and taken off to the local hospital run by the Sisters. If the infant perished before being found and the mother was officially identified, she might be charged with infanticide. If it were retrieved dead from a place where it was never meant to be found, such as under a pile of straw or in a stream, she could be punished with half a dozen years in prison. The fact that such cases were now brought to Court is itself an indication of the way society was evolving and becoming more ‘civilized’. In the Berry there had always been a popular horror of the crime of child-slaughter, but that was probably because it had also been rather common. The ‘midnight washerwomen’, whom the late-night traveller was apt to see as he weaved his way home from a celebration, were authoritatively stated by some to be ‘the souls of mothers who have killed … They incessantly beat and wring what looks like wet linen but which, seen close up, is revealed as a dead baby … They are condemned to wash the corpse of their child until the Last Judgement.’
Those unwanted infants who escaped this apocalyptic fate and survived to reach the hospital were presently put out to nurse. The census for 1846 shows quite a few of these foundlings placed in Chassignolles households. They were known locally as champis, children found in the champs, the fields, and though they seem to have died off rather more than legitimate children, many did live and flourish. One of George Sand’s novellas is a sentimental but well-documented tale of such a foundling making good. A real-life example appears in the Chassignolles census for 1846, having already grown to manhood. The seductive name of Valentin Aimable had been bestowed on him. He worked as a labourer and, at twenty-three, was married and already had two small children.
There are also examples of much more recent date, including the father of the present baker. A foundling in the streets of Paris circa 1900, fostered in the Black Valley and later apprenticed to a miller, he saved up to buy the goodwill of the Chassignolles bakery, and became a linchpin of the village. His son (the devoted Monsieur Mayer) took on the business after him.
By the middle of the nineteenth century France had the means for relieving absolute want and suffering, but the memory of death by starvation continued for a long time in popular myth and political propaganda. In a paradox which is not uncommon, the symbolic figure of an emaciated peasant driving his worn plough team, silently attended by a still more skeletal being with a scythe, received fresh currency in the 1840s in a popular print after Holbein, just at the time when the reality was passing into history. But not till the generation that had known real hunger at first hand had died off, around the end of the century, did the fear of it die out also. It is customary to speak and write as if, in any one era, the population expressed homogeneously the attitudes and expectations relevant to that era, whereas in practice the world is always well supplied with people and prejudices of the time that is past and with half-formed expectations of a world yet to come.
When Célestine appeared she was no doubt placed ceremonially in the arms of her great-grandfather, Silvain. His birth, counting back from his declared age on his death registration, took place in 1756. All his ideas and assumptions were therefore formed in the feudal, pre-Revolutionary era when the monks were still occupying the church and the houses round it. After the changes that came, even in the conservative Berry, in the wake of the Revolution, the Directoire and the Napoleonic wars, this lost era must have seemed as quaintly antique as the time before the First World War now seems to us. I see Silvain Chaumette in my mind’s eye clad to the last in the wool-and-goat-hair breeches that were by then obsolete wear and with his thin old hair in an eighteenth-century pigtail under his round black Berrichon hat.
In contrast, the next generation, that of Célestine’s grandfather François, of Antoine Pirot and also of Louis Vallet, grew up in a time of unprecedented change and this too must have gone on informing their hopes, expectations and fears throughout life. The anti-monarchist coup of 1848 took place, it has been said, essentially because people still living remembered 1791. By the same token, that brief Republic failed and was replaced by a more autocratic, Bonapartist regime because people also harked back to the days of Napoleon.
What did François wear when his granddaughter was a child? (He died when she was seventeen.) Almost certainly, the dark-blue linen smock of the region and, by this date, dark woollen trousers, all woven in the family. Clogs on his feet, inside them thick wool chaussons, half socks and half slipper, dyed brown with walnut juice. He probably never owned a pair of boots though he, like his father, would have had the round hat and a brightly coloured cravat for Sundays. Waistcoats in quilting or sheepskin, extra shirts and the like, even extra pairs of trousers, were piled not over but under the smock in cold weather.
With Silvain-Germain, however, we move into a different era. Born just as the destructive wars had come to an end and a monarchy had been restored, he seems like a harbinger of the future, an example of the kind of man who was then rather rare in a village but who, by the end of the century, would be found on every corner. Even if he wore the standard smock and clogs during his working day, his status as an innkeeper, man of letters and presently Secretary to the Mairie is likely to have been reflected in a set of more bourgeois clothing for best, in the factory-made cloth that was now obtainable locally. These could have been made up in the village, where someone who styled himself tailor (son of the Garde-Champêtre) had set up by 1846. With the new cloth came more closely fitted town styles; dark cutaway coats were being seen in the countryside, along with gaily checked or striped materials worn for stylish contrast. A young master blacksmith who, like Antoine Pirot, was admitted to Châteauroux prison in the early
1850s, was brought there from the Court in what were evidently his best clothes, including a black suit, leather boots, a black cloth cap and a waistcoat striped black, violet, blue and white. Another skilled man arrived with proper shoes, an assortment of colours in his trousers and waistcoat, and a cravat in ‘brown cotton with flowers’ – this at a time when the more ordinary inmate appeared in much-mended wool and goatskin.
The difference from one generation and/or social class to another was still more marked in the women. The girl from a neighbouring village, working as a servant in Chassignolles, who was sent to prison for theft and took her illegitimate baby in with her, entered gaol in standard peasant garb: a ‘coarse’ chemise, a blue cotton dress, a grey checked apron, a linen underskirt, a cloak, a black fichu and white cap, blue wool stockings and clogs. This outfit, plus some swaddling clothes for the baby, was all she possessed in the world.
In Le Meunier d’Angibault, the miller’s old mother wears on Sundays a small apron of Indian-printed calico ‘which she had looked after carefully ever since she was young, valuing it greatly because in those days it had cost four times as much as finer stuff would have cost today’. In the same book, the social and chronological evolution of another family, the on-the-make Bricolins, is indicated by the way the women of the family dress. The grandmother appears ‘as a peasant’ and is illiterate; the mother is dressed ‘like a priest’s housekeeper’ – that is to say, in a dark dress of bought stuff, made up with some regard to the prevailing style, and probably worn over the stays (corsets) that were unknown to the peasantry but obligatory among genteelly bred women. ‘She knew how to sign her own name legibly, and could find the time of sunrise and the moon’s phases in the pedlar’s Almanach.’ Meanwhile her daughter Rose, in keeping with her modish name, reads novels from the same source, does the housekeeping accounts for her father, and has learnt new dances such as the polka as well as traditional folk ones. For dancing and for church she wears a pink muslin dress copied from a fashion plate. She probably, though George Sand does not say, wears several layers of petticoats under this and even drawers – also unknown in traditional peasant society.
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