Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  Today, and for the past two generations, marriages and deaths anywhere in France are automatically reported back to the Commune where the birth was registered and noted in the margin of the original entry. So a completed twentieth-century entry encapsulates at a glance the life journey, both actual and metaphorical, of that particular individual. But during the possible life span of Ursin, or indeed of Auguste, this coherent system was not yet in force. Just once or twice I found pasted into the register a declaration from a distant Commune concerning the death of someone ordinarily resident in Chassignolles. For instance, a Charbonnier son died in Versailles in 1843 at the age of nineteen while working there as a builder’s labourer, and even at this early date the Versailles Hôtel de Ville efficiently sent notification of this to his native village. But there is no such document at any date relating to Ursin, any more than there is for his younger brother. Nor, needless to say, is Ursin mentioned on the family grave.

  But surely, one might say, the most likely explanation is that Ursin, like so many countrymen in the latter half of the nineteenth century, took himself and his particular skill off to a nearby town where he could hope for a more comfortable and modern existence? That is entirely plausible as far as it goes, but as an explanation for his complete disappearance it does not go far enough. Metal-working was an expanding trade; developments in agriculture were requiring more elaborate tools. By the 1860s the first of the horse-drawn reaping machines were beginning to clack in the fields that, for a thousand or more years, had been harvested with sickles and scythes. The earliest (hand-operated) mechanical thresher was actually invented locally, in Vierzon, during Ursin’s childhood, a small but distinct advance on the exhausting flail. If Ursin had opened a Quincaillerie Agricole in La Châtre, Ste Sévère, Neuvy, Issoudun or any other of the small towns around, he could have done nicely. But in that case he would have remained locally known, returning to Chassignolles at times of death and marriage, a continuing if off-stage presence in the family history.

  Even if he had gone much farther away, to the growing industrial town of Nantes or to the Atlantic seaboard or to Paris, he should not have been totally lost to his own pays. Most nineteenth-century migrants to the big cities joined kin or friends there, a network that linked certain jobs or trades with specific country areas of origin, so a sense of regionalism was retained. (‘The tenements of Paris are in themselves villages come from the Centre.’) Often such migrants returned in old age to their childhood home, having inherited and kept their part of the family goods. Even today, the habit is not lost: people in the Berry cling tenaciously to small pieces of land or redundant farm buildings deriving from share-outs several generations back. The way in which property is necessarily allocated helps to perpetuate ties that might otherwise have been relinquished. Proprietary reference is made to ‘cousins’ even when these are several times removed, and they are always addressed in the intimate tu form in spite of the fact that they may be virtual strangers.

  In this way, Ursin’s existence and that of his descendants, if any, should have remained a matter of oral record. I should have been told: ‘He let his sister have the inn, as she was there, and he kept an orchard they had as his share.’ Or yet: ‘Célestine and her husband must have bought the brother out’, or even: ‘She had a brother, I seem to remember, but he was never interested in the inn.’ Instead, where Ursin should have been, in however shadowy a form, I encountered only empty space. Many years later, when Célestine became a widow without resources, it was as if this brother, like the younger one, had never been.

  I began to form the theory that that able and respected man Silvain-Germain, who seems to have had a strong personality (‘Your mother tells me she let’s you make your own choices but … I certainly can’t believe it of your father’) somehow alienated both his sons as soon as they reached manhood, and that each left home with sufficient drama and decision that even his death could not bring them back. Or was it their mother, Anne, who was the real cause of tension: might she have remained on reasonable terms with her ‘sweet-natured and good’ daughter but driven the boys away? (‘If you see Mother will you tell her I am very hurt by her letter…’) Either way, it cannot have been a happy story. It also looks, on reflection, as if the period of nearly ten years following Silvain-Germain’s death, when Anne ran the inn on her own before Célestine and Pierre joined her, may represent a continuing uncertainty as to whether either of the absent sons might not after all reappear and reclaim the succession. And, perhaps, a reluctance on the part of Célestine and Pierre to go and live with her themselves.

  Célestine’s own son, born after Ursin had gone, was initially registered as Ursin Charles. Perhaps the intention was that brother Ursin should be godfather, as was the custom of the countryside. But later the boy was always referred to as ‘Charles’, as if the very name of Ursin was forgotten.

  Many months after I had consigned Ursin, like Auguste, to the file of unprovable supposition, I received some confirmation from an unexpected quarter. I was visiting Suzanne Calvet in the neat turn-of-the-century house by the main road into Châteauroux, where she and her husband have finally retired from the hotel trade. (This move is explained by the fact that Châteauroux was Monsieur Calvet’s pays, for which he developed a yearning in old age.) Madame Calvet received me with warmth and huge slices of a local delicacy called clafoutis, a confection of cherries in a paste of flour, eggs and sugar. The daughter of generations of Chassignolles innkeepers, she brought out for me rolls of old legal documents which she described as mortgages taken out by her grandfather, Ursin Yvernault, ‘Because he spent all his money treating conscripts going off to the war to white wine and oysters in Tours!… He was a very generous man, but had no head for business.’

  Madame Calvet has always had an excellent head for business, allied to a capacity for work undiminished by her substantial size, but she was not in the habit of looking closely at obsolete legal documents. While a couple of them did indeed indicate forced sales of property to meet loans taken out 1915–20, the rest were much older papers; they related to the original acquisition of these lands or houses by Ursin’s father, Jean, some fifty years earlier. I pointed this out. ‘Oh yes, him. Well, he wasn’t nearly such a good-tempered man as my grandfather. When he was in a sulk about something he wouldn’t speak at all – he used to write instructions to his servant boys in code on the door of the barn instead … Or so I’ve been told.’

  ‘His poor wife.’

  ‘He had two. The first one died. She was my grandfather’s mother. He had a whole lot more children with the second. Sulks or no sulks, he was un chaud lapin.’

  But, while I was interested in Jean Yvernault, my attention had been caught by another name that stared up at me out of a document – Ursin Chaumette.

  The date was 1868, four years later than any other trace I had found of this Ursin and three years after the death of his father. In that year, it appeared, he was selling up the Chassignolles property he had inherited as his share of Silvain-Germain’s estate, consisting of a house somewhere in the village and two pieces of land elsewhere in the Commune. Silvain-Germain had acquired part of these from his own father, François, and had added to them by further purchases: the inn, even in those early days, must have been profitable.

  The fact that Ursin was in sole possession of these properties would suggest that the inn itself had not been left to him. The sale – to Jean Yvernault, carpenter and cabinet-maker – was registered by the La Châtre lawyer whose name appears on most conveyancing documents at this period, but Ursin did not return to the area to sign the agreement of sale in person in the way that was, and is, customary. Instead, he nominated his mother to act for him – at some stage in her adult life she had acquired some degree of literacy, or at any rate she could now sign her name. It rather looks as if he wished to liquidate his Chassignolles interests without further involvement.

  So he had indeed gone off elsewhere, but the mere fact of his doing so does no
t in itself explain his complete severance from his pays. He was by then living at an address in Bourges about forty-five miles away. Such a distance was much less significant than it would have been twenty years before, but it was still some seven hours away by the once-daily coach and train connection. In other words, it was far enough to allow him to cut his links with home if he was so minded, but quite near enough for him to have kept in touch had he so wished. All in all, it seems that he did not.

  He was still a tool maker and had taken a wife, a girl born in Bourges.

  The temptation to pursue this wraith further through the late-nineteenth-century census records of Bourges, a town larger than Châteauroux, is one which, in the interests of my own sanity, I shall resist.

  Around the time I picked up Ursin Chaumette’s scent again in Suzanne Calvet’s sitting-room, Jeanne Pagnard said to me: ‘About Célestine Chaumette being an only child … I told you that, but it does come to me now there was some story … About a brother who disappeared.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That’s the point. He disappeared. No one ever knew what became of him.’ But she could not tell me any more. The period was just that much too remote, too far over the rim of memory, even that of her grandmother who had been such a mine of information on the last quarter of the century. Ursin Chaumette’s defection dated from the mid-1860s and Grandmother Chartier herself was not born till 1857. And if the story of disappearance into the blue related rather to Auguste, he apparently disappeared from Chassignolles at the same time, only revisiting briefly on leave from the army in 1871 and 1873.

  Even folk memory, so durable, eventually blurs and fades, conflates two people into one, telescopes generations and at last extinguishes. The most colourful, long-mythologized figures pass in the end into the great, quiet dark, becoming as if they had never been born: even family ties, so tenacious in rural France, are eventually relinquished. I have said that Chassignolles people will happily claim cousinage with remote connections, but it is evident that, by unspoken consensus, a halt has to be called somewhere. All those whose roots in the Commune go back far enough are probably related to one another in some measure, but once the link goes back beyond great-grandparent level oblivion begins to descend.

  As a footnote to the family-tree of the Chaumettes, I happened to notice from Madame Calvet’s documents that the Jean Yvernault who bought Ursin Chaumette’s village property was in fact the young man’s uncle by marriage. The dead first wife of this sulky but persistent progenitor turned out to be the young sister of Silvain-Germain, she who as a child was called ‘Felissé’. So Madame Calvet, whose café-hotel led us to Chassignolles in the first place, is herself a direct descendant of the Silvain Chaumette, the sacristan, who was born long before the Revolution, who lived to be eighty-eight and died in the year Célestine was born.

  Chapter 12

  In departing for Bourges, Ursin Chaumette was very much a figure of his time, though not necessarily a laudable one. In France as in England, the idea of the village as good and the town as intrinsically evil was appealing to a growing nineteenth-century romanticism.

  Once changes were working away elsewhere, a static rural existence without the possibility of improvement or social mobility came to be seen as desirable, healthy and ‘natural’. In contrast, urban life was allegedly ‘sick’ – this vague sickness comprising everything from alcoholism, gambling and loss of religious faith to snobbery, adulterated milk and bad drains. From the Second Empire onwards, life on the land was less apt to be described as a matter of harsh conditions and brutalized feelings: a softer and more positive image took over. It was given wide currency in Millet’s two phenomenally successful pictures, ‘The Gleaners’ (exhibited 1857) and ‘The Angelus’ (1859), which between them conveyed an impression of the thrift, piety and generally unchanging values of an adequately fed and decently clad peasantry. These portrayals, apparently of timelessness, actually of a particular moment in France’s evolution, were distributed in the form of cheap prints (thanks to new processes) to homes all over France. It is significant that they caught the popular imagination so strongly just when the age-old practice of gleaning for grains was declining because of the new and more efficient reaping machinery. In both pictures, and most obviously in ‘The Angelus’, the light is that of the day’s ending which carries its own subliminal message: the paintings, apparently naturalistic, are elegiac in mood. The fictionalizing effect of nostalgia is already evident.

  The reality was that both town and country were, in their own ways, part of the same evolving pattern, and the opposition between them was more complex than popular art or laments about the young deserting the land could suggest. Indeed, had rural life continued at the same deprived level, dominated by the need to eat, with all other considerations secondary, arguably more peasants would have been leaving the land, from simple necessity. At the time Célestine was born, Balzac wrote, referring to the Berry: ‘country people have a profound aversion to change, even to changes which they acknowledge might be useful to them’. But this very remark indicates that change in the countryside was stealthily on its way. A generation later the industrial and commercial development that was transforming urban France was introducing new skills, trades and amenities not just in country market towns but in the villages as well.

  Land, too, was being regarded as more valuable now that it was being more productively used, and those in possession even of a smallholding found themselves in slightly easier circumstances. Most of the unused heathlands in the Berry disappeared between 1860 and 1880, apparently without the traumas and class conflicts of the British Enclosures of a hundred years earlier. In Chassignolles, grazing held by the Commune was auctioned off in lots in 1870, on the grounds that ‘most of the inhabitants get no benefit from it’. The money was put towards that perennial community expense, the improving of roads and paths; that same year the road between Chassignolles and La Châtre was at last being widened and made up with hard core. Needless to say, there were complaints that the process was taking too long and that meanwhile the right-of-way was ‘so full of pits and piles of stones’ that its state was much worse than it had been before and ‘dangerous to both horses and carts’.

  In another ten years the right of vaine patoure, the grazing of flocks on tracts of ownerless land, was formally abolished. At the same period the more intense land use seems to have put an end to rural squatting and begging, driving the remaining paupers into the towns. From then, too, attempts were made to chase gypsies into the towns. The continuing fear des nomades et des forains probably reflected, and reflects, the ancient fear of strangers in one’s ‘own’ countryside, but the more specific sense of the ownership of land that came in after 1870 gave the old, superstitious dread a new rationale. Gypsies were widely accused of stealing animals and crops and lighting fires: they still are today. They seem to raise an atavistic loathing, even in normally tolerant people.

  The woods, also, had been gradually cut back, partly to claim more land for agriculture and partly to supply building materials and other needs for the growing towns. In the Berry, wood fired the new local industries such as cloth-, glass- and china-making. The forges and foundries that had traditionally absorbed much wood in their furnaces, keeping whole tribes of woodcutters in full-time occupation, continued to use even more between 1840 and 1860, though this turned out to be their final spurt: the collapse of the ironworks of the Berry, when it came, was swift and complete.

  The erosion of the deep forests and deserted moorland had its effect on the wolf population. There had, as well, been an indiscriminate campaign against them since the 1840s, with a bounty paid for wolf or cub carcasses in any season – the same myopic obsession that is currently eradicating the last wild predator, the fox, from France’s countryside. Wolves became rare in the Indre after the 1870s, and by the 1900s the Department could no longer realistically be regarded as a wolf zone. Yet wolf stories, scares and sightings continued up to the First World War and e
ven beyond: the wolf lived long in the imagination of rural populations and is not quite extinct even today. I have talked to old people in Chassignolles who, while they know that ‘the last wolf in the region’ was killed in the Bois de Villemort in the year of their birth or whatever, believe that the archetypal enemy is still to be found somewhere in France – in the next Department or ‘in the mountains’.

  Daniel Bernard, an historian of the Berry who interviewed a number of old people who were still alive in the 1970s, the last generation who had heard wolf stories directly from their own parents and grandparents, found that in the collective memory the disappearance of the wolves was put down to the coming of the railways. In particular, the line from Tours to Montluçon that arrived at long last in the Lower Berry at the beginning of the 1880s was perceived as having been the literal engine of change: ‘When the trains came, that frightened the beasts and they took themselves off.’

  * * *

  When Balzac wrote of the Berrichon’s inherent aversion to change, almost as a matter of course he equated material change with improvement. This view was, in one form or another, almost universal among educated people for the whole of the nineteenth century. Even those who bewailed the passing of the Good Old Days in certain defined ways, did so without any formulated idea that the march of progress could be impeded or that progress in general was anything but a Good Thing, a journey out of darkness into light. This assumption has, in turn, informed our own historical perspective. The nineteenth century saw a physical transformation of every country in western Europe on a scale unknown before and unrivalled since, even after another hundred years of continuing change. Traditionally, therefore, the history of the nineteenth century tends to be recounted as a series of staging posts on the long route to present-day technology, expectations and values.