There still seemed the possibility that the baby was due in mid-September but came a fortnight late: in that case, Célestine would just have been becoming anxious in the first days of January. The idea of this foreboding, preoccupying her even as her young cousin came demanding her hand, was an interesting one: no wonder (I thought) she did not want to give his proposal an immediate answer.
However, when I re-examined the entry in the register for the wedding, I realized that the marriage could not have been as hastily arranged as that even if some behind-the-scenes uncertainty prevailed. The bans had already been read out correctly in La Châtre, which was the bridegroom’s parish, six weeks before the appointed date and thus before any baby could have been on the way.
It is almost impossible that Alphonse Laurent, who was her cousin and who lived in La Châtre too, did not know of the proposed marriage when he came to visit her. His pleading letter ‘from the one who loves you’ takes on a more specific urgency – ‘No one yet knows about this but ourselves … if the whole idea suits you, then we must move quickly … Would you really rather have a husband eight or ten years older than you?… there is more I could say than the paper could ever hold.’
He was hopeful; she had said she would write to him. Evidently a mere fortnight before she was due to marry someone else, she was not really decided. What was behind all this? It is possible that Célestine’s father by then knew himself to be ill and was anxious to get his daughter settled without delay with the most suitable candidate. The trade of walnut-presser, always seasonal, would combine well with the running of the inn. Pierre is said, by the very few people in Chassignolles who still remember him, to have been a man with a pleasant manner. There is no letter preserved from him in Célestine’s secret cache. Perhaps he never wrote her one.
All one can say with certainty is that she was not totally wholehearted about him, that she had sufficient doubts for another boy to urge his own suit on her till the eleventh hour – but that she nevertheless married him on the appointed day and they remained together for better or worse for nearly fifty years.
* * *
The young couple went to live in La Châtre, in a street leading out from one of the old town gates that were then still standing. As well as an oil-press, the Robin parents owned a vineyard outside the town; they were not themselves innkeepers, but Pierre’s younger sister was soon to marry a man called Lamoureux and start a tavern in the adjoining house.
In the March Petty Sessions Célestine’s father-in-law was fined one franc for allowing his chickens to run about in the roadway: this practice, which would be common for another seventy years in the countryside and has not quite disappeared even today, was beginning to be frowned on in towns, along with free-roaming pigs and dogs. In La Châtre all the streets were now paved: the deep dirtiness of which George Sand had spoken with rueful affection twenty years before was a thing of the past. The remains of the town walls, and their bits of stagnant moat, were soon to be swept away. The stinking trades of tanning, wool-boiling and dyeing in the old quarter down by the river were beginning to decline with the introduction of more factory-made goods. These were sold in the shops with new glass windows on the currently named Rue Impériale, along with more exotic commodities that were imported via Paris from distant places and much advertised in the local paper: Chocolat Plantier for a fashionable morning refreshment, Kashmir shawls, Chinese fans.
The shops also held catalogues from the recently built Parisian department stores like the Bon Marché and the Samaritaine, the fantastic palaces of the new commerce as described by Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames. The time when even the gentry wore home-grown cloth, and ate from plates turned out by the potters in the next village beyond Nohant, was fast departing. Much was still made locally, but albums of fashion plates to inspire and instruct the village Jeanne Pagnards were ready to hand. For the small daughter of a prospering La Châtre tradesman there was a Parisian magazine to turn her, too, into a real lady: it was called La Poupée Modèle and featured little moral stories, advice, games and needlework patterns.
Advertised alongside this in the newspapers was a patent medicine marketed in Paris but ostensibly of English manufacture, implausibly called Revalescière. This assured perfect health if taken regularly – ‘repairs digestive organs, furnishes new blood, re-animates vital forces … cures loss of memory, nerves, catarrh, hysteria…’ Genteel complaints for a newly genteel class. A far cry from the old Almanach recipes to cure warts, scabies and lumps, involving plants picked by moonlight, earth from mole hills and la marde [sic] de chat. It was even hinted that the fabled Queen Victoria took Revalescière. Since this cure-all features in news stories as well as obvious advertisements, I rather think the editor of the Écho de l’Indre had shares in the stuff.
Share ownership, under the Second Empire, was enlarging the bourgeois rentier class. It never became as large in France as it did in Victorian England, but small provincial towns like La Châtre developed a significant number of people with some claim to education and refinement and nothing very much to do but run the place and cultivate social distinctions. The world described by George Sand, in which young La Châtre lawyers and local landowners shared the same entertainments as shop-workers, artisans and peasants, was beginning to slip into a past that already seemed the Good Old Days. The newspaper, while energetically fostering gentility, deplored ‘our new, selfish habits’.
The editor almost certainly had shares too in the Anglo-French company that, in 1865, was trying to raise capital to build the much-demanded railway line through La Châtre. The notion of British involvement made everyone feel modern and smart. (England was then the world leader in railway building, having more miles of track than even the USA, a comprehensive network at a time when both France and her close rival Germany were still only planning and slowly extending their own.) The line that was to link the Indre valley with the outside world was the one that had been projected for the last dozen years between Tours on one side and Montluçon on the other: the editor harped on the crucial importance of such a line to the area’s future and the need to allow the prospecting company to acquire the appropriate land. In the summer of 1865 an Open Letter to the Préfet of the Indre urged that a man of his ‘renowned knowledge and devotion’ would understand the necessity of compulsory purchase. This was, however, shortly followed by a wail that the company had proposed a site for the station in La Châtre that would not do at all – ‘It is near Monsieur Vincent’s limekilns, over a kilometre from the town.’
Since La Châtre is built on the side of a hill and its beaux quartiers by that time were near the top, it was inevitable that the station should be placed at a distance from them – and equally inevitable, had the newspaper only realized it, that new streets should soon afterwards cover the intervening kilometre. For the station was eventually opened on this despised site – but not for another seventeen years, in 1882. The debate about where the line should run, first in general outline and then in minutely argued detail, along with the financial and political vicissitudes of various fundraising schemes as central Government changed and changed again, lasted for most of that time.
The main problems were not, as it turned out, caused by people who resented the line coming across their land but by those who wanted it to. The days were past when the railway was accused of causing both droughts and storms and when surveyors from the unknown Elsewhere, with their spirit-levels and viewing glasses, were feared as necromancers who might be casting spells. Dissension now occurred because every Commune wanted the line to pass its way and loudly disparaged the claims of rival Communes a few miles off. The current Marquis de Villaines, whose family had exiled themselves at the Revolution, but who had inserted himself back into the local power structure as mayor of Ste Sévère, about ten miles from La Châtre, was particularly vociferous on the needs and rights of his own territory.
This long delay in linking the Lower Berry to the national network discouraged industry and confi
rmed the whole area in its deeply rural character, which persists to this day. The editor of the Écho de l’Indre had in fact been right.
* * *
It was a very hot summer in La Châtre the year of Célestine’s pregnancy. In July the local paper wrote of ‘Senegalese heat’ and by September the numerous wells on which the town was dependent for its water were running low. The Sous-Préfet ordered that no water was to be drawn for other than strictly domestic reasons; to avoid people sneaking up extra pails under cover of dark, the pumps were to be chained from sundown to sunrise. This crisis gave further impetus to the plan to install a piped water supply – which was finally carried out, to the accompaniment of leaking pipes and litigation, some five years later.
In Chassignolles (where piped water was not to arrive for another ninety-seven years) the wells that stand in every other courtyard and most of the vegetable gardens were drying up that summer too. Life in a village that is running short of water is not pleasant or healthy. On 28 May, Silvain-Germain kept the Minutes as usual at a Council meeting that was called to fix the Communal budget for the following year – a year he was never to see. After that, his writing appears no more. He did not live to see the birth of his grandson either, but died at the end of August at home in the inn. His father, dead only four years earlier, had lived to sixty-six; his grandfather had lived to eighty-eight. Yet he himself was only forty-nine. The French method of recording deaths, while it produces much incidental information on family relationships, does not offer a cause of death. A pity.
The death was reported to the Mairie at Chassignolles within hours by Pierre Robin, as a good son-in-law, and by a middle-aged Laurent cousin from a nearby farm (perhaps an uncle of the disappointed Alphonse?). Then, and at his son’s birth in October, Pierre was still giving his occupation as huilier. Since Anne Laurent now found herself, within the space of a few months, without both daughter and husband and alone in the inn, you might have expected the young couple with their baby to have moved back to Chassignolles and joined her in the business. However, they did not – or not for some years. The census of 1872 finds the widow still running the place on her own, with only an eighteen-year-old Charbonnier girl to assist her. At that time Célestine and Pierre were still in La Châtre, but now they were running an inn in their own right. I know this because the last letter in Célestine’s hoarded pack, written in 1873, is addressed to ‘Mme. Robin (Chaumette), aubergiste, Grande Rue, La Châtre’.
The Grande Rue was what everyone in La Châtre actually called the main street, whose official name was regularly altered through the decades according to the national political transformations. In the autumn of 1869 there was advertised for sale in the Écho de l’Indre ‘an hotel in this town on the route of the new railway [sic] on the Rue Impériale opposite the entrance to the market-place … This is the only inn in the centre of town.’ It was apparently a big place with fourteen rooms, including two dining-rooms, kitchens, attics, store houses and stabling, and it was advertised for weeks as if there was difficulty in finding a buyer. Presumably the fact that the La Châtre railway did not show many signs as yet of becoming a reality discouraged outside interest. By and by the advertisement was modified to ‘For Sale or Rent’.
Today, the double-fronted Quincaillerie on the Rue Nationale opposite the entrance to the market displays a mass of desirable saucepans, heavily rustic bread boxes, wedding china in ‘presentation caskets’ and lamps whose bases seethe with globules of decorative oil. Behind the cramped street and the modern façade, the large old house stretches back into rambling spaciousness. It has long ceased to be an inn but its courtyard, reached through an archway, and its irregular, red-tiled outbuildings would, in wagon days, have made it very suitable for the purpose. Earlier, I have been told, these outbuildings housed pedlars and their wares. The house numbers have changed since 1870, but I think it was here that Pierre Robin, now in his thirties, embarked as a tenant on his career in the catering trade.
He must have realized that oil-pressing on its own did not offer much of a future. Walnut oil was still the basis for most home cooking and seasoning in the traditionalist Berry: indeed parties to crush walnuts have been described to me as still taking place in the twentieth century. But whereas it had once provided the fuel also for both street lamps and domestic ones, nut oil was being replaced by the cleaner, brighter kerosene (pétrole) that was now widely on sale. What was more, by the early 1870s the amazing modernity of gas lighting had come to La Châtre – although at first it was said that, as with the equally new water supply, the pipes leaked: ‘Gas in the water and water in the gas…’ A French joke about marital discord.
Did Pierre and Célestine make a success of the inn in the Grande Rue, I wonder? It was far larger than the Chassignolles inn, and though the La Châtre census confirms that they were by then innkeepers their one living-in servant does not sound sufficient staff for such a place. At all events, by 1876 they were back with Célestine’s mother in Chassignolles, accompanied by Charles, who was now eleven years old.
Chapter 11
‘I never heard tell of any brother or sister to Célestine.’ Even Jeanne Pagnard said that when I first asked her. In fact I knew, when I thought about it, that this could not be right. Célestine had had at least one brother: his brief letter to her in the Grande Rue in La Châtre is the final one in the little cardboard case and dates from almost ten years later than the others.
It is addressed on one fold with copybook capital initials, but the letter itself is written in the careless hand of a young dragoon (trooper) who is in a hurry or slightly drunk or both. In the big northern towns, wine brought in by railway from the traditional wine-drinking areas was by then down to two sous – ten centimes – a litre: even on their miserable wages soldiers could afford a great deal of it. The letter is headed from Meaux in the Seine-et-Marne, a grandiose but unlovely city due east of Paris which was, and is, a major garrison town of France.
29 October 1873
Dear Sister,
The ten francs you sent me came as a great relief to me. I had some small debts that I couldn’t get out of paying at once, seeing as we are leaving on Sunday. Now I find myself totally skint again. I did the whole journey back here on foot. The day before yesterday, I was appointed to a headquarters platoon.
I beg you, send me ten francs more in postage stamps, or, if you can’t see your way to sending me such a sum, at least send me five francs. But I promise you that ten francs would be of the greatest use to me, and let’s hope that one day I’ll be able to let you have them back [faut espérer qu’un jour je pourrai te les rendre].
If you see Mother, will you tell her that I am very hurt by her letter, she has misunderstood what I said. And tell her that I will write to her when I get back from this tour on 17 November.
I end this letter by embracing you with all my heart,
Your loving brother, Chaumette, A.
PS. We are leaving Sunday morning, so I hope you will reply post-haste. Here’s my address –
Chaumette, au 13ième peloton hors rang, 8ième dragons, Meaux.
I traced Auguste’s birth record. He was born in Chassignolles to Silvain-Germain and Anne Laurent in November 1848. He was therefore four and a half years younger than Célestine and in 1873 was rising twenty-five. As you would expect, he appears on the village census for 1856 and 1861, but by 1866, when he was barely eighteen, he is gone, although his father had died the previous year and his mother was managing the inn on her own.
He figures no more in any Chassignolles register. This inelegant little letter cannot particularly have pleased his elder sister at the time she received it; it is not of the sort that would normally become a keepsake. I began to wonder if it was preserved because it turned out to be the last communication from a soldier who did not live to come home. The Franco-Prussian war was over, but skirmishes continued till late 1873 on the ceded territory of Alsace-Lorraine and round Metz, and a large number of men were still with t
he army.
The call-up for military service directly affected only a minority of Frenchmen for much of the nineteenth century, but it played a very important role in the collective imagination. Men were taken from all over France, speaking different patois and with varying customs, and were, in theory, summarily transformed into standard French citizens. It was due to military service, as well as to the great machine of French national education that was also getting into gear, that the concept of La Patrie was gradually being imposed on that of the pays.
But those actually conscripted were far from being a representative sample of the general population. Napoleon had introduced the system of drawing lots, and only those drawing a number low in proportion of the total (les mauvais numéros) were called to serve, usually about one quarter of the manpower available. In intention, this was a most egalitarian method. But in practice the intake was unbalanced by the substitution system, which flourished for two generations, till it was swept aside by the Franco-Prussian war and finally abolished by the new Republic. ‘Substitution’ meant that when a boy drew a losing number his family was allowed to pay, if they could, for another to take his place. Célestine’s cousin probably had this in mind when he wrote to her: ‘I know I haven’t yet taken part in the draw, but you mustn’t be bothered about that.’ The result was that, for much of the century, about a third of the army consisted of bought men – ‘the poor, the landless and the roofless’, as a commentator on the quality of the troops sniffily remarked. ‘Selling’ a boy to a wealthy neighbour was often the only way a poor peasant family with many mouths to feed could get its hands on a sum of money for some badly needed purchase, such as a new cart or iron harrow. The going rate for decades was five hundred francs – a fortune to those who rarely dealt in money at all.
Celestine Page 16