Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  If Allorent in Sarzay was one such black-coated foot-soldier in the Government’s campaign to ‘institute’ France into one nation of patriotic, French-speaking citizens, then Charbonnier, newly appointed in Chassignolles, was another. He too was unmarried in the early 1860s; perhaps the two young men were able to be of some support to each other across the four miles of muddy paths that separated the two villages.

  There was no doubt that the Government’s campaign was beginning to work. Teachers such as Allorent, or Charbonnier, whose ‘zeal and devotion’ were actually rewarded with extra pay by his cautious fellow-villagers, were a far cry from the drunken old soldiers and cobblers of a generation before. The Préfet of the period in Châteauroux recorded his own satisfaction with the ‘evolution’ that was now occurring in the Berrichon peasant.

  ‘His children, relegated to a solitary life, hardly clad, are now properly dressed and go to be civilized at the local school.’

  It would indeed be hard to overstate the solitary and uninspiring effect on a child of long days passed alone minding cattle or standing in a wintry ploughed field scaring away crows from a planted crop.

  The Préfet may have been a little optimistic. School was not, of course, free, then or for another twenty years. And even when it did become so (apart from the cost of books and paper) almost one-third of country children did not attend regularly, particularly in the summer, when there was much work to be done in the fields. And ‘children’ at this point meant boys; girls did not attend school officially till girls’ schools were built or special classes opened for them. Even so, according to the census taken in 1872 (which went into such detail for the first time) about one in seven of Chassignolles’ girls, including Mademoiselle Pagnard’s grandmother, had learnt to read, and someone must have been teaching them. Célestine, I assume, was taught by her father, the Secretary, and he may have taught his wife too. At any rate, Anne Laurent was to run the inn alone for years after his death.

  What is certain is that by the time Célestine was a grown girl the idea of education, if not the reality, was established in the countryside. At the same time it was being discovered that ‘evolution’ might have its disadvantages. It was not only the peasants in need of their children’s labour who regarded school as a waste of time; many of the bourgeoisie were equally disapproving, though in their case the disapproval was for the other people’s children receiving education. In 1871 the Préfet of the Cher (the northern half of the Berry) complained that if he talked about increasing rates of school attendance people were apt to wag their heads and conjure up vistas of deserted farms and flocks of sheep roaming unattended.

  Yet even then these forebodings were not new. Twenty years before, in the middle of the century, the Écho de l’Indre was writing in an editorial:

  … There are complaints on all sides that the young are leaving the land and that the rural workforce is being depleted. It is shocking the contempt that the sons of country labouring men have for their fathers’ occupations … Everything they read [sic] and hear draws them towards the big cities. There, they only work at the less arduous trades which are more highly esteemed and they have more distractions and amusements – lively, noisy entertainments unknown in the countryside. Is it surprising that so many young heads are turned and join the rush to the great centres of population? There, luxury and pleasure awaits them, but also poverty and evil …

  And so on and so forth. This peroration was written a full generation before changing farming methods, spreading communications and general literacy began to have a substantial effect on the traditions of country life, and a hundred years before the major exodus began with the coming of mechanized farming. Yet it strikes exactly the same note as the later choruses of complaint in 1900, 1920 or 1950. It might almost be Georges Bernardet inveighing against the idle young circa 1980.

  Evidently the young have always been disregarding the values of their parents, leaving the land and coming to grief among the bright lights of alien towns. They were no doubt doing so long before there was any question of education being to blame for it. In the poorer and more mountainous country immediately to the south of Berry there was already, by the early nineteenth century, a well-established tradition of men going forth to seek work elsewhere and only returning at long intervals to their own poor soil and their stoical families. The stonemasons from the Creuse formed itinerant labour gangs that were famous all over France: it was their work that transformed the major cities in the nineteenth century; much of Haussmann’s Paris was constructed by them. Sawyers and carpenters also joined them from the forests of the Lower Berry. The Préfet of the Indre, the same humane functionary who had said in the winter of 1844–5 that the poor should be allowed to continue trapping birds to keep them from starvation, wrote a few years later: ‘Each year in spring numerous workmen from the La Châtre area … betake themselves to Paris to seek a means of livelihood. This traditional custom is all the more respectable in that these labourers are for the most part decent men of tranquil habits.’

  France needed this mobile workforce as much as the men needed the work. The Préfet wrote as he did because spasmodic official attempts were made, from the time of Napoleon to the end of the Second Empire in 1870, to limit the labourer’s freedom to travel from one region to another; permits were required, sometimes total embargoes were imposed. Ostensibly the authorities feared the vagrancy and crime that might follow the failure to find work. The fact was they also feared, with some justification, that a large urban pool of uprooted labour would be seething with unacceptably radical ideas and potential rebellion. The life of one Creusois mason exemplifies just this and also the triumph of self-help and enterprise. Martin Nadaud started his working life as an illiterate teenage hod-carrier, travelling the whole way from the Creuse to Paris on foot in 1830. A natural leader, he set to work to educate himself and his companions. He became a banned trade-unionist under the Empire – ironically, since Louis-Napoleon initially favoured unions – but was welcomed back to France after 1870 as a celebrated figure. He ended his career as Préfet of his native pays.

  Although few economic migrants achieved quite such distinction as Nadaud, stories of people making good were plentiful throughout the century. A trawl through the Journal de l’Indre in the period when the railway was just linking Châteauroux to Paris produces the cheering moral example of another Creusois mason. He was said to have left his native land for Paris in the last years of the eighteenth century and there, through hard work, amassed a fortune, built a grand house of his own and died leaving his heirs one and a half million francs. However, other newspaper items of the same period convey the clear message that all that glittered in Paris was not gold. As a warning to the overconfident, one described the Morgue in lingering detail.

  The ambivalence then surrounding the whole subject of education, getting on in life and leaving home is clear. On the one hand the French peasant was urged to make the most of himself, to wash, to speak French, to read, to use new farming methods, to adapt to a money-based economy, to look beyond his fixed horizons. On the other hand there were many complaints when this process led him away from the land, often to settle permanently elsewhere. Despised and patronized as he had often been, the very texture of France was his creation. Who will look after the paysage when the paysan has gone to the town? The question, with modern variations, inevitably haunts this account; it is a still more crucial question at the present day.

  Even the local newspapers, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, carried inducements for fit men without encumbrances to seek their fortune at a distance – Paris, or California or the new colonies in north and west Africa. Some men were tempted; at least one member of Célestine’s own family was. Most, however, stayed more or less where they were. It is the strikingly homogeneous and stable nature of life in villages such as Chassignolles that makes it possible to trace the fortunes of whole families, generation after generation lying in the same earth and in the pages of
the same registers. And many of those names which eventually disappear from the village records – including Chaumette – did not journey far. A Chaumette breeds horses now near Neuvy St-Sépulchre, an easy ride west from Chassignolles. Another makes clogs in La Châtre to this day and sells them to a few faithful wearers, along with carpet slippers, sensible shoes pour les dames d’un certain âge and good-quality espadrilles for the more frivolous-minded. When I plucked up courage to enquire about his ancestors he was, like many people, reticent at first, uncertain of being able to provide the right answer – ‘It’s all so long ago’ – and then progressively more interested. He produced his brevet de famille, part of the documentation with which all French citizens are armed against the fear of not existing, and offered the names of his grandparents. From these, to his surprise and pleasure, I could tell him his family-tree back six generations, through Silvain-Bazille and his father Pierre to the sacristan born in 1756, his and Célestine’s common ancestor.

  Through her choice of husband, Célestine might have gone on to make her life far from the confines of Chassignolles. She could have become part of that great migration from the countryside that transformed the main towns of every industrializing country as the century went by. The French historian Daniel Halévy wrote in 1910:

  The peasant population … for so long mute … had its own effect, without anyone realizing it, on the heart and soul of the nation. We owe perhaps to the countryman much of what is best in Paris … The Parisian masses have come from the Upper Bourgogne via the valley of the Seine, or from the Auvergne, the Bourbonnais and the Berry via the Loire and the Beauce … The tenements of Paris are in themselves villages come from the Centre.

  Célestine might well have found herself in a Parisian tenement or in one of the newer blocks then going up as part of the Second Empire reconstruction. She had the opportunity. She did not take it; she went no farther than La Châtre and that only for a time. Perhaps this was her considered choice; perhaps it was another’s decision, masquerading as fate. As Baptiste Aussourd remarked, ‘your Parents … have the right to decide your Destiny’. And yet it is hard to believe that a girl as sought-after as Célestine did not influence her own destiny, if not by what she undertook, then by what she refused.

  Chapter 10

  In the spring of 1864, when Célestine was almost twenty, she received two more formal proposals. It was a year since Baptiste Aussourd had been courting her and six months since the school teacher had tried his chance. Another country winter had passed with its curtains of rain, its abrupt quilts of snow that cut the village off for days at a time. In the wide fireplaces, where the incongruous iron stoves of the late nineteenth century had not yet been installed, the great oak forests were being very slowly but surely consumed; for months, the fire was never allowed to die out entirely. The embers were carefully blown into life each dawn to reheat the soup that was still the standard country breakfast. But often in the dead of winter fires blazed the night away, for everyone still gathered at veillées, those night watches where some specific task was undertaken – carding wool, beating hemp, shelling walnuts, dipping rushes in melted tallow. Songs were sung and stories were told of ghosts and fairies and ‘the old days’ that, in the modernity of the 1860s, seemed to be retreating at an unprecedented rate. Later, towards the end of the century, when the traditional work parties had ceased to be central to the economy or the way of life, the veillées declined into simple card parties, pastimes for the old. But in Célestine’s youth they were still going strong, encouraged if anything by the slight increase in prosperity – more people, more spacious kitchens, mulled wine. It was a last spurt and glow of a very old practice before the same prosperity brought its inevitable extinction.

  But however much fun the winter veillées were, they were too public to further private relations. Indeed, the whole of life was public in these crowded homes where separate bedrooms, even for married couples, were almost unknown. To the young and desiring, winter was interminable and the stirring of spring a liberation that we can now, in our homogenized world, hardly imagine. Among the many blessings was that the transparent green haze on the trees would thicken into a screen, and woods would once again be fine and private places. The Chassignolles birth dates, taken over a long span of years in the mid-nineteenth century, tell their own tale. Fewer babies were born in the autumn than at other times of the year, with November, the low point, producing on average less than half the numbers born in the peak month of January. Obviously this does not relate to anything particularly propitious for birth in the dead of winter but to conditions nine months before: in February, the countryside was too inhospitable even for the most enthusiastic lovers, whereas by April the activity known ironically in the Berry as to bergerer, to ‘go a-shepherding’, was underway again.

  But this was easiest for those with good reason to be out in the fields anyway. At Célestine’s social level, the significance of spring was that once the roads and paths were drying out the fairs and fêtes began again. In the mid-century all social classes still participated: the retreat of the bourgeoisie into their new stucco villas had not yet got underway. But as the day’s business drew to a close, ‘The townspeople and others who’d come from a little way off climbed into their assorted wagons and were on their way before night came down on the rough tracks they had to follow. The small stall-holders packed up, and the local Curé went off to enjoy a supper with some friends of the cloth who had come over to watch the dancing.’ (George Sand, Le Meunier d’Angibault)

  Soon only the people of the immediate neighbourhood remained in possession of the dancing ring, all knowing each other, at their happiest now with no étrangers there. People of all ages and kinds took the floor ‘including the old fat female servant from the inn and the hunchbacked tailor’. Music was made with pipes, drums and the Berrichon version of the bagpipes, and any adjacent inn stayed open far into the night. For these special occasions the innkeepers in the Black Valley were in the habit of building small green arbours outside their doors. The most respectable customers could sit there and frumenty was served to the ladies. When it was Chassignolles’ turn to hold a fair I think it took place next door to the Chaumette inn on a convenient triangle of open land with a market cross in the middle, where today the modern primary school and playground stand. About the time Célestine turned twenty the crumbling cross was replaced by a new one, which is still inconspicuously there today, jammed up against the school wall.

  A letter that Célestine received from a young man in Crozon in March 1864, and one from another boy elsewhere in early May, both refer to the big traditional festivals of the season which, under the guise of religion, marked the coming of spring: Palm Sunday and Easter were followed by the more obviously ancient May Day. Similarly the fête of St Jean at midsummer and of St Martin in November – quarter days when debts were paid, leases renewed or ended and hiring fairs were held in La Châtre – related to a pre-Christian calendar, only lightly disguised. A character in Le Meunier d’Angibault remarks that ‘superstition is the only religion accessible to the peasant … God is nothing to him but an idol who bestows favours on the crops and flocks of anyone who lights a wax candle for him.’ Certainly, decorated oxen and dances round purificatory fires, sometimes described by shocked observers as ‘obscene’, still figured larger in Célestine’s childhood, than the catechism classes administered by the local gentry that were later to become a feature of Catholic revivalism.

  Yet organized Christian religion was becoming more present again in country villages than it had been all the first half of the century. In Chassignolles the unsolved question of repairs to the church, first raised by Geoffrenet de Champdavid, continued to haunt municipal meetings. It was still on the agenda in 1864, and by the following year the new mayor (another gentlemanly figure imposed by the authorities in Châteauroux) was declaring that the church was ‘in a state of dilapidation and old-fashionedness [vestusté] which might not only have an evil influence [un
e influence facheuse] on the religious sentiments of the population but also endanger their security’. In brief, the old, squat belfry looked as if it was going to fall down. Steps were finally, expensively taken and the result was a tall spire pointing the way to heaven and a new, vaulted roof covered in brick-earth tiles rather than the old wooden ones. The spire itself was grandly covered in slate – only to be partly demolished by lightning twenty years later, when the whole saga of repairs and wrangles about cost was set off again.

  The letter from the young man writing to Célestine from Crozon ‘Mlle. Chaumette, habergiste à Chassignol … Pour être remis qu’à elle-même’ (personal delivery only) – is the only one in which a specifically Christian education seems to surface. Not that there is any overt religious sentiment, but the writer has a tendency to speak of ‘confessing his fault’ to his beloved (for not turning up to see her at Easter) and of receiving Grace by her kindness to him. The letter ends with a hope that he may love and cherish her for life, accompanied by a sketch of a flaming heart which appears to share the iconography of the Sacred Heart. Henry Lorant (for such was his name) seems to have conflated sacred and profane love into one.

  Crozon-sur-Vauvre, some half dozen miles away, had been the site of iron forges for centuries. A Pissavy son from La Châtre had recently been paying court to the daughter of the ironmaster there; we shall revisit the place. Apart from the forges and the foundry, which employed many scores of men, Crozon was a tiny little village lost in the beautiful wooded valley of a tributary of the Indre, with its own miniature cliffs and deep pools left by past iron-smelters. In spite of the substantial trade, there was no proper road there even in the 1860s, though plans were at last being made to enlarge the path from Chassignolles at the time Lorant was visiting Célestine. He wrote a fairly correct French in a slightly careless hand, and at first I supposed him to be a clerk at the foundry. However, a reference in his letter to not being able to get away on festival-days because of the Grande occupation in his house at such times led me to wonder if he too was the child of an innkeeper, and so he turned out to be. The widow Lorant was running the inn in Crozon in the 1860s with the help or hindrance of several young sons. For an exact social equal, Henry’s address to Célestine seems a little ceremonial: