Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  And I too tasted in my imagination the creamy potato-cakes of a woman born around the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

  * * *

  I had another reason for being interested in the Aussourd family. An Aussourd was among the young men who wanted to marry Célestine.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Ma chère’, he called her at the head of his letter. ‘My dear’. Or rather ‘Macher’. His written French, though fluent, shows an innocence of the correct agreement of tenses and genders. It reproduces the spoken word in such a way that some phrases are impenetrable on the page but yield their meaning when they are put back again into the human voice – of which the English version below can only be an approximate echo:

  La Loge, 19 April 1863

  My dear,

  I venture to write 2 little words to let you know my intentions [or ‘my attentions to you’, mes attensions] for my idea is to come and see you.

  For if I were to suit you as you suit me I think we could make a match of it together. Before anything else I would like to know if I suit you, before speaking to your parents that is, for I know that they have the right to decide your Destiny.

  Youve known me so long that you must know what I am like. As for yourself [temps qu’a toie] I have always known you to be a good girl [une honnaite filles] and I would do it without fear with you. And I have a feeling it might be the same way with you about me.

  [Phrase illegible from split in paper] … to accept me to wed if that suits you Ill talk to you and to your parents about it as soon as possible. If I write you these few words now, it is because I know you can read my writing. And I think you might like [sapoura te faire un plaisir] to get a letter from me, which comes to you by way of one of my good friends. If my letter makes its mark with you, you will be kind enough to write and say so. I’m just writing from warmth of feeling [amitié – the word had, like ami, a stronger and more intimate sense then than it does now]. If that doesn’t work, at least I will know. I’m doing this from the bottom of my heart and I would like it very much, when you have got this letter, if you would send me your answer at once. You dont need to be afraid that anyone but me will see your reply for theres no one else in my house who knows how to read, and you can trust me: Im not one to play tricks on you [Je suis pas pour te trempé].

  Ill close now, as I dont have anything else to note for you today.

  Except I am hoping to be your dear one for life.

  Baptiste Aussourd

  The letter is folded several times, as if to make an inconspicuous package to be slipped from one hand to another, and addressed on the outside of the sheet: ‘Amademoiselle Salestine Chaumette aubergiste a Chassignolles.’ The idea seems to have been for the friend to carry Célestine’s reply back with him, so that Baptiste would know if he should make his ceremonial visit or not – clearly ‘my idea is to come and see you’ implies more than just the suggestion that an old acquaintance should look her up next time he is in the village. The use of the intimate form tu indicates that he was a childhood friend. In the country at that date, and long after, it was common for young men and women to marry having known each other all their lives and many of the marriages within the Commune were made for material reasons – ‘Your parents … have the right to decide your Destiny’ – but this is hardly the letter of a young man who has been pushed into proposing by his family.

  Just who Baptiste’s parents were proved more difficult to discover than I expected. In the first half of the nineteenth century Aussourds were plentiful all over the Commune. In addition to Jeanne reigning with her natural daughters in the tower-house, there was her brother and two male cousins, one of whom, André, was born in the same year as Célestine’s grandfather. Though he does not himself seem to have gone in for writing, André followed his father, the register keeper, on to the Council, where he remained for decades. He came to possess a large quantity of land around a hamlet called La Loge (now on the map as La Loge Brûlée – the Burnt House). He seems to have had only one surviving daughter himself – Angélique – but by the 1840s his extended family at La Loge consisted of nephews and their wives and children. When one nephew died, another quickly married his widow and was producing twins with her within a year. By the next decade there was also an Aussourd widow there called Agathe. Like Jeanne Aussourd in the tower-house, she was one of the very few people in the Commune living on the proceeds of land worked by others. The resemblance does not end there. In 1856, Agathe, then apparently thirty-six, had one daughter. In 1861, still a widow and claiming to be only thirty-seven, she had two daughters, one three years old.

  Although no Baptiste Aussourd of suitable age to be courting Célestine figures in the Birth Registers, I first assumed, because of his letter-heading, that this suitor belonged somewhere in André’s clan. The young men of that family would not have needed to hire themselves out to strangers as teenage boys and girls from the poorer families routinely did. As Baptiste was literate – ‘There’s no one else in my house who knows how to read’ – I thought he might have been useful to the dynastic André in running the family property, even as François le Champi was to the wealthy but uneducated miller who employed him in George Sand’s story.

  In addition, I knew that an Aussourd nephew and his wife had at one time made their home next door to great-aunt Jeanne and so near also to the Chaumette inn; that this Aussourd had in fact worked for Silvain-Germain in the inn at one point and that Silvain-Germain had been the witness to the birth declarations of his children. When I saw that a boy called Jean had been born in this household the month before Célestine, I thought that I had found the person I was looking for; that the young man who later styled himself ‘Baptiste’ or ‘Jean-Baptiste’, to distinguish himself from the numerous other Jeans both in his family and in others, had indeed shared part of his childhood with Célestine. I imagined them taking their first steps together across what is now a road but was then a safe space of chicken-pecked grass with a scattering of old grave mounds.

  They may have done. But the problem with this satisfactory solution, as I eventually discovered, is that this Jean Aussourd never reached manhood. He died in November 1848 at the age of four and must have been laid under the earth and the chickens not far from his home. The living and the dead then, and for another forty years, continued to share a common habitat.

  By the 1860s the Aussourds were diminishing; whole households disappear. Old André himself finished his days well past eighty in the centre of the village near to his cousin Jeanne. Evidently the younger generation formed part of that drift to the towns that became so marked in the second half of the century. I decided that Baptiste’s parents, whoever they exactly were, had probably joined this exodus by the time he came back to live temporarily on the family land. In the twentieth century there have been no Aussourds in Chassignolles, though there is one, with a variant spelling, on the Great War memorial in La Châtre, one of several hundred names beneath the figure of a weeping Berrichonne in a local cap.

  The answer, however, was more simple, though I only came across it a year later, by chance. For another purpose, I was looking through stacks of early-twentieth-century newspapers in the hot attic of the Villaines’ town mansion in La Châtre, now the municipal library. In the edition for mid-August 1923 my eye was caught by the death announcement of a Baptiste Aussourd of Le Magny, which is the small rural Commune between La Châtre and Chassignolles.

  Back to the census, this time for Le Magny. And I realized at last that Le Magny too had a farm-hamlet called La Loge, and that I had passed by it many times walking from Chassignolles to La Châtre. Sure enough, there in 1861 was a Jean-Baptiste Aussourd, cultivating vineyards, living with his much older sister Marguerite and two elderly bachelor uncles. The family were related to the Chassignolles lot, but the connection went back to the generation of the original register keeper. By 1863, when the letter to Célestine was written, Jean-Baptiste was rising twenty-five, plenty old enough to be thinking of marriage
when he took the path over the ford to court her.

  Célestine did not write back ‘de suitte’ to Baptiste, but several days later. His response reached her, again, by hand delivery. This time he started without any formal address:

  La Loge, April 29

  I’m replying to your letter that you dated April 24. It affected me when I’d had a read of it and saw that youd spelt out plain to me that youd not decided to marry me for you must know that I can tell what that means.

  I can see quite clearly from your letter that I neednt say any more. I havent put myself about to talk to your Parents because it wouldnt be any use. I wanted to know what you thought first of all, though I do think they wouldnt a been averse to it if I put it to them properly and to my knowledge … [Illegible sentence as the paper has been torn here by the sealing-wax.]

  Listen, at the moment when it was in my mind to come and See you I really did think that we would be making a match of it. Now I think we should let some time go by. My idea is that I wont have anything to do with any other girl [pas d’ennali voire d’autre] till St Jean’s Day is past, if that will suit you. At that time you can decide if you want me after all, for I know that you will seem as good to me then as you do now.

  I can find myself a wife anytime I want. I dont say this to boast but just because these days I can hold up my Head wherever I go [pour le momen je peut passé le tete Levée]. I dont think youll meet anyone anywhere to say Ive behaved badly, I think Ive acted as right as any other tom-dick-or-harry who might be keeping company with you [aussi onnaitement que lepremier garconvenu qui pourra te frequente] but I wont say anything about that forthemoment.

  All I can say is, I wish you from the bottom of my heart a husband who will always be faithful to you, for you dont deserve to be Cheated on.

  This letter he ended with restraint and his surname only.

  The two months’ grace till midsummer did not change Célestine’s mind, but Baptiste took years before finding another girl to his taste. He did marry in the end, when he was over thirty, a girl from the bell-ringers’ village of St Chartier near George Sand’s Domaine, and had a son. But by the end of the century, when he was about sixty, we find him on his own again at Le Magny with only his now-aged sister for company, though other Aussourds still lived near. Just to confuse matters, there was another Jean-Baptiste among them, a cousin or nephew, and a visit to the Le Magny cemetery established that this was the one whose death was announced in 1923. But my Baptiste (or rather, Célestine’s) was in the family grave too. He’d died in 1909; he was not to know the trauma of the Great War that clouded the last years of others of his generation. No wife is mentioned; no son lies there. I hope, without entire conviction, that his life was by and large a happy one.

  * * *

  Those who knew Célestine in old age speak of her gentleness, goodness and ‘refinement’. Evidently she had the gift of making others feel that whatever happened the fault could not be hers; her suitors never thought she was cheating them in spite of brooding remarks from more than one about others who might be courting her. It is true that, as the daughter of the inn, she was in a peculiarly fortunate position. On the one hand she enjoyed a status which ensured respect. The central character of Guillaumin’s La Vie d’un Simple, a labouring peasant who marries an innkeeper’s daughter, remarks that ‘the daughter of the house seemed to me to belong to a station so superior to mine that I dared not lift my eyes to her’. But on the other hand a daughter serving in her father’s establishment had social opportunities that were not available to other respectable girls, who would never have frequented an inn at that time as customers. Except at fairs (eagerly awaited) and church (also popular) most country girls at that time saw no one from one week’s end to another but the people working on or near the same farm; in such circumstances they can hardly be said to have chosen their husbands at all. But Célestine’s situation was more like that of a girl in La Châtre who might have her pick of apprentices, shopkeepers and perhaps even Something Better. She could afford to wait, either for a ‘good match’, or for the luxury of romantic love on her own part to which novelists such as George Sand and Henri Murger and their imitators had given currency.

  The year before Baptiste Aussourd’s attempt, she had already had one serious proposal of marriage. She may, of course, have had other, verbal ones, but the formal love-letter was then just beginning to take its place as a part of ordinary courtship: it was a sign of serious intent commensurate with the effort it cost most of the writers to put pen to paper. However, Célestine’s first proposal came from someone well accustomed to written communication, and it arrived in one of the new ‘envelopes’ and by the post. In 1849 France had copied from England that system whereby all letters were paid for by their senders with a flat-rate stamp, and the price of postage fell to a level many more people could afford. Twice as many letters were sent in France in 1860 as in 1830, and the number increased each year. But village post offices had not yet come: this letter to Célestine was posted, in October 1862, in the small town of Ste Sévère, about ten miles away. With an impressive regard for middle-class correctness, it was addressed to ‘Monsieur Chaumette, Secrétaire, Mairie à Chassignoles’. On opening it, Silvain-Germain would read on the blank side of the sheet folded within: ‘Would you be so obliging, Monsieur, [Veuillez avoir l’obligeance] to hand this letter to Mademoiselle your daughter, who will tell you the contents thereof.’

  The correspondent’s writing is as elaborate as his syntax, with huge curling capitals as in a school copybook. He was in fact the schoolmaster at nearby Sarzay. He puts this beneath his signature, either from pride or from anxiety that Célestine might not know. With a touching bogusness he has also put a PS in a less elegant hand, ‘Forgive my ugly scrawl’, as if hoping belatedly to create the impression of a spontaneity that is totally absent in this careful production. If Aussourd’s letters read, paradoxically, like age-old peasant inarticulateness finding its own voice, Monsieur Allorent’s composition seems redolent of the self-conscious world just being born: that of the rentier and the white-collar workers, of the ladylike wife and the jeune fille bien élevée, of trains and newspapers and morning coffee; a world in which eloquence was to be cultivated and yet where taboos and reticences unknown in simpler days were cultivated also. To Allorent, Célestine is ‘Mademoiselle’, of course, and vous.

  ‘I did not want to write to you,’ he begins. ‘As I said, when we were together at the wedding, I wanted to come and visit you.’ (One is not surprised to hear that their previous contact was the supremely respectable one of being guests at the same wedding. I cannot imagine Allorent being a regular customer at the Chassignolles tavern, or yet joining in the boisterous dancing at village festivals.) ‘However, I must bring myself to tell you that I have remained inert in this respect without being able to explain why…’ He continues in this vein for a number of lines before speculating tortuously, ‘if, through your good-heartedness, I will find with difficulty an answer to my question?

  ‘My hand trembles as I trace these few lines. I can hardly write to you at all when I remind myself that when I was with you I could barely speak – hardly stutter a few phrases, on account of the state of my heart. I felt you must have a bad impression of me [J’ai cru que vous pouviez avoir bien mal jugé de moi].’ He goes on, however, to hope that in spite of his silences she may have realized his admiration for her. Since then his feelings for her have grown from day to day ‘without my thoughts, crossing the distance which separates us, being able to question yours and form a chain of affection, one to the other…’

  He is afraid of boring her, he says. He is, never fear, about to explain in one sentence his feelings for her – if she will allow him to. Since talking to her he had come to love her with l’amour le plus tendre, le plus pure et le plus sincère – ‘the strongest desire and greatest happiness of which I could ever dream is to be alone with you in the gentlest of bonds. One word from you, Mademoiselle, will decide my fate �
��

  ‘Will you have the goodness to pass on my deepest respects to Monsieur your Father and Madame your Mother. I am impatient to come and speak with them and with you.’

  Against his signature he has written further, as if afraid he still had not made his point clear: ‘I am most tenderly devoted to you.’

  Impossible as it is not to be touched by such tender devotion, one can see why Célestine was not drawn towards marriage with him. She may also have suspected that, for all the underlying distress, some of his fine phrases were lifted from one of the letter-writers’ manuals that were then in circulation.

  ‘Allorent’ is a local name; Ste-Sévère was probably his family home. It seems likely that in spite of his formality and his literary airs he was quite an ordinary young man whose new-found status had left him socially isolated. Cut off geographically and by lack of income from the town bourgeoisie, and by education and dress from their rustic neighbours, French country school teachers classically suffered in his way. Then and for most of the next hundred years, the Government policy was that there should be schools everywhere in the countryside, so that even children in remote farms might make their way there on foot. By the mid-1860s the Indre had 225 schools and there were over four hundred by 1870, most of them with one lone teacher (instituteur) in sole charge. It was the situation described, unchanged, at the turn of the century by Alain-Fournier in his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, which is set at the other end of the Berry: ‘… my appointment [is] as schoolmaster in the hamlet of Saint-Benoist-des-Champs … It comprises a few scattered farms, and the schoolhouse stands alone on a hillside near the road. I live a solitary life there, but if I take a short cut through the fields I can be at Les Sablonnières in three quarters of an hour.’