Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  Even if we now question some of these values and feel that much of the technology has brought ills as well as benefits, we still see the story in the same basic shape. Indeed, our perception of it as a story derives from our sense that the drama of nineteenth-century change and development was all leading to a climax that we in the twentieth century have witnessed, as the unfolding themes of a novel lead to its grand scene. The characters from the earlier chapters of this saga have all disappeared by the closing ones, but we, benefiting from an authorial overview, have been able to trace the links, the plot.

  Almost inevitably I have found myself adopting this approach, Yet, as the quintessential French historian Braudel himself has pointed out, it is possible to look at chronology from the opposite end and therefore to interpret both past and present differently – to see, not the past as prologue and preparation for the present, but the present as evidence for the persistent survival of the past.

  It has been the unbroken threads between the Chassignolles of the past and that of the present that have drawn me into the web of its history in the first place, and it is on these threads that the story is strung. The drama of change was not in the end as decisive as it seemed, nor was the movement all in one direction: rather, like the cycle of the seasons, the life of Chassignolles reached its equinox and then began to decline once more.

  But for the moment let us pick up the evolutionary story again in the heyday of Célestine’s life as a young married woman, and the beginning of its own Belle Époque for the village and for thousands of others like it.

  * * *

  The village to which Célestine, her husband Pierre and their young son returned in the mid-1870s was being documented more completely than ever before, thanks to the burgeoning Third Republic that followed the upheaval of the war and the Paris Commune. The 1872 census, the first of the new, centralized regime which was finally to weld France into one nation, was particularly detailed.

  For the first time the census-taker (Auguste Charbonnier, the energetic school teacher) was required to note literacy, or its absence. The great majority of the 590 people over the age of twenty could neither read nor write. Of those who supposedly could, fifty-nine were male and only fourteen female, but the figures have been altered to make disparate totals agree and there is a note that some could only read. Among those under twenty – nearly half the population – the literacy rate is somewhat higher, thanks no doubt to Charbonnier himself. The difference between the sexes is, however, less marked. This could hardly have been due yet to the influence of the girls’ school, since this had only started the year before. It was the project of a well-born personage, Mademoiselle Guyot, a relative by marriage of the Pissavy family, who were by then a presence in Chassignolles. It was run in her house, with the help of nuns from a teaching order; it continued even after the secular girls’ school was opened in 1904 and is still fondly remembered by old ladies who attended it. For decades during the present century it went on existing in the vestigial form of catechism classes for village children.

  The 1870s, long a watershed in folk memory between the old world that harked back before the Revolution and the twentieth-century one that was on its way, form a watershed in the records also. The Pissavys, busy turning themselves into new-style landed gentry, given to good works and improvements, coexisted then with Jeanne Aussourd, belle amie of the Sieur Vallet, who had been a Seigneur of a far older type. Jeanne’s aged cousin André was also still alive, and so were other survivors of a time beginning to seem quaintly antique. Besides André, the census records two other ‘widowers of over eighty, and four widows’ plus ‘one widow of over ninety’. This person, a Marie Villebasse, was born in Sarzay in 1781 and was evidently an object of pride: her name in the lists is written in a special flamboyant hand with thickened strokes.

  (Today’s incumbent in the role of oldest inhabitant, a sprightly and formidable person born in 1897, is similarly revered and is known, in ceremonial French style, as la doyenne de la commune. ‘I am told that I am,’ she said dismissively to me in 1992. Of course she knew she was. Years of birth, even months, are a matter of public record in France, in a way that leaves no room for the polite discretion that clouds the topic in less-documented Anglo-Saxon societies.)

  Occupations in 1872 were still overwhelmingly agricultural. But a second inn had been added, the one run by the Yvernaults that was handed down in the family, passing to the granddaughter who became Madame Calvet: it survives as the café-hotel of today. Thirty-seven men were employed up at the quarries that were owned by the family who spirited Mademoiselle Pagnard’s grandmother off to Paris to sew rosebud dresses. Mademoiselle Pagnard’s great-grandfather had opened his grocery shop some seven or eight years before; his was still the only shop in the village, but by 1876 there was a second one, run by the then-sacristan’s wife, and also two tailoring shops. No bakery as yet, though by the 1880s one was installed, worked by a man who hailed from another village and whose Chassignolles-born wife had opened a third inn. The wine trade was clearly flourishing.

  In 1872 neither the Chaumette inn nor the other one as yet had any accommodation worth describing on the census form as ‘hotel rooms’. This had to be noted because, unlike the earlier censuses, this one was an extensive, even exhaustive document that, in asking its questions, took an urban habitat as the norm – rather inappropriately, perhaps, for France was still a predominantly rural country, with half its national income derived directly from agriculture. Land was not yet accepted as security for loans: it comes as no surprise to see that there were no banks or insurance companies in Chassignolles. The population did not number any heads of railway companies (though there were two men and three women living ‘entirely from income derived from land holdings or investments’: a miniscule rentier class). No one was down as a beggar, there were no ‘acrobats, charlatans, exhibitors of wild animals or other curiosities’. And no fille publique (the dispiriting term for an officially registered prostitute). Nor, even though a certain amount of inbreeding must have occurred in all those households where both marriage partners were born in Chassignolles, was anyone listed as an idiot, mad, blind or deaf and dumb. Perhaps there were genuinely none, or perhaps it was a matter of village pride not to recognize the fact, at least in public.

  In Chassignolles in 1872 there were 42 workhorses (only the richer farmers as yet used horses), 83 donkeys, 684 bovines (which includes both milk-cows and the oxen that were still the usual plough animals), 3,498 sheep, 371 pigs, 514 goats, and ‘2,760 assorted poultry’. An ‘approximate number’ of 160 dogs was noted, roughly one dog for two out of every three households. The no doubt equally numerous cat population is not recorded, but their hundredth-generation direct descendants are there to this day. Tiny, from centuries of strenuous hunting and minimal feeding, they are still begging at the same doorsteps, insinuating themselves through the same slots in barn doors, stalking the same field paths. Their brindled coats are a race memory of the infinitely more distant wild ancestors of the forests, from which they are descended.

  * * *

  It was in these years after the establishment of the Third Republic that many of the village houses were either rebuilt or substantially improved. Floor tiles were laid over the bare soil of France, glass appeared in the window-spaces, the ox and the ass were moved to a separate stable. The first roofs of slate, imported by rail from other parts of France, began to appear, a source of pride to the occupants and a sign of their social aspirations. (In the late twentieth century slates are frowned upon, and officially banned as inappropriate to the area.) Here and there proper bedrooms with dormer windows replaced the old lofts, just as carved wooden beds with mattresses replaced straw palliasses infested with minute animal life. The chamber-pot appeared, and also the earth closet as a standard arrangement. (This remained the norm in Chassignolles for the next hundred years.) In earlier days, many houses in the village and even in La Châtre had no commodités whatsoever. Women used a bucket and made a
daily trip to a discreet hedgerow or thicket; the men of the house, less concerned with privacy, sociably availed themselves of the backyard manure heap.

  Among the new or rebuilt houses of the 1870s were ours, Mademoiselle Guyot’s, and the substantial farm on the outskirts of the village that the Pissavy connection turned into a country seat. Happily, all three houses escaped the vogue for slate and are roofed to this day with the red-brown tiles that are made in the region. In the case of our dwelling (long known as the Pope’s House, because the original owner looked like the Holy Father of the period) the availability of old materials probably played a part. But Mademoiselle Guyot’s house was raised on a field site that had previously contained only a cow-byre and a flax store belonging to the indigenous Charbonnier family. Given the status of the Guyots (the father was a lawyer in La Châtre) it must have been a conscious decision to build something that would look like a nicely converted Berrichon farm rather than the kind of alien villa that was by then beginning to spot the face of rural France. The result is a house that, externally, reminds one almost more of the country-cottage dream that was developing then across the Channel: it has dormer windows, Virginia creeper and rose-beds on the lawn. The interior, however, is resolutely French, with four undifferentiated rooms and a spacious kitchen all opening in a democratic way out of a tiled hall. It is still lived in by a member of the family, and is a repository of the bourgeois comforts and elegances of former days: crucifixes above high wooden beds, brass-bottomed pans, miniature colanders for making tisanes in china bowls, a coded royalist silhouette of Louis XVI and his queen disguised as an urn and a willow …

  The Domaine had an even more fortunate escape. With its landscaped park (more English influence) and its agricultural functions removed to a home farm with a tenant farmer, it might well have been rebuilt as one of those nineteenth-century mock-châteaux whose vertiginous pitched roofs and turrets suggest indefinable nightmares, Victorian dreams for sale that almost no one in the late twentieth century wishes to buy. However, the two principal buildings of the old farm were merely enlarged into something grander but still local in style. This transformation was underway after the harvest in the late summer of 1870: it is recounted by present-day members of the family that the men raising the roof-tree to accommodate a new upper floor said: ‘Don’t ask us to go too high, M’sieur Victor – the Prussians might see us!’ The Prussians were then on the Loire, a long way to see even with the clearest of eyes, but uncomfortably near for Berrichons who had known no invader since the British were seen off in the fourteenth century.

  How had Victor Pissavy, the son of the Auvergnat cloth merchant and one-time master of pedlars, transformed himself into a country squire? To explain this requires a brief backward excursion through the generations.

  * * *

  In 1864, the year before Célestine Chaumette had her own son, a first and only son was born to another local girl. Marie-Rachel Yvernault was the daughter of the ironmaster at Crozon, Louis Yvernault, born the same year as Silvain-Germain though into a different social class. (He was no relation to the Yvernaults of Chassignolles who were to open the second inn. The name is common in the Black Valley: it is said to be derived from Roman legionaries wintering round La Châtre.) Louis and his twin brother ran between them the water-powered foundry at Cluis, where the local iron ore was extracted and smelted, and Louis owned the forges nearby at Crozon, where the smelt was heated again to incandescence and hammered into iron for industrial use. There was another family foundry and forge in the north of the Indre.

  At Crozon a great embanked reservoir, a system of conduits and a lower pool had long been installed both to power the bellows for the forges and to cool the metal down again. Louis Yvernault put modern steam-driven hammers in place of the ones that had been wielded by muscle power on the site since the seventeenth century and probably much longer. Opposite the engine sheds of the forge he constructed a row of model workmen’s cottages. He built for himself and his bride a four-square gentleman’s residence a hundred yards off, with box hedges and a monkey-puzzle in the garden and (of course) a wrought-iron gate. This modern Master’s house superseded the seventeenth-century one right on the forge yard which, in its turn, had superseded an adjoining fifteenth-century one with finely carved stone doorways and window arches. A weather-worn coat of arms and a lookout tower on an earthworks behind hints at an earlier, feudal occupation, perhaps of very ancient date. The iron trade must always have been closely associated with power and conflicts, since weapons were forged for many centuries before the ordinary ploughshare was made of metal.

  Like the many other forges in the area, the Crozon ones became busier than ever before as France’s industries developed and the demand for iron grew. In 1840 thirty thousand tons of iron were produced in the Berry alone. According to a respectful history written in the twentieth century for circulation among Louis Yvernault’s descendants, the foundry and forges between them employed three hundred men, including the woodcutters and charcoal-burners who supplied the furnaces round the clock. At night the sky was lit with a pink glow for miles around, and the woods echoed with the clang and thump of metal and the hiss of steam.

  The authorized history is careful, however, to mitigate this picture of crude, entrepreneurial force with instances of Louis’ modern enlightenment and piety (the latter being equally modern circa 1840). He provided work for the unemployed and urged those employed on the land in the direction of crop rotation and chemical fertilizers. He built a school for the Commune staffed by nuns and also endowed a new church and cemetery. He was, of course, nominated mayor.

  Although Marie-Rachel spent her childhood in the new house within the sight and sound of her father’s modern machinery, Crozon was essentially as it had always been: a self-contained world with its own wagon routes and charcoal-burners’ paths, its own dynasties of workmen, remote from civilization amid its pools and the Spanish-chestnut forests on which it fed. There was not even a proper road there from La Châtre, and at night wolves could be heard howling close at hand. Family lore, less reverential than the official account, has it that Marie-Rachel’s mother, Louis Yvernault’s bride, whom he married in 1836, did not want to live in this savage place, and that she was only induced to marry by family pressure. They were both very young and they were first cousins; in addition, their own parents had been first cousins, but since Louis was an orphan by then and in charge of his inheritance one must suppose that this claustrophobic arrangement fitted in with his own ideas of what was appropriate and desirable. Unions of this kind were common at the time, such was the bourgeois preoccupation with keeping accumulated family wealth from being dissipated.

  Taking a further step back in time, where several different strands in the web of history unexpectedly meet, it is worth recording that the formidable Yvernault brothers had inherited not only all their father’s extensive property, much of it in land in various adjacent Communes, including Chassignolles, but their Uncle Charles’s share also. This black-sheep uncle had got deeply into debt in Paris as a young man, where he had lived dangerously in the world of Revolutionary intellectual ferment and its aftermath of outrageous, febrile fashions for red neck cords, see-through muslin and assumed speech defects. As the price of rescue from his financial predicament, and perhaps as a punishment for harbouring Advanced Ideas, he had had to surrender his patrimony to his white-sheep brother (Louis’ father). ‘But what am I to live on now?’ he asked as he signed away his income.

  The story runs that the brother replied: ‘Bah, I’m allowing you to keep our little mill over at Angibault. You can go and be the miller there.’

  ‘Me – a miller? But –’

  ‘What alternative have you?’ asked his brother rudely. There was no alternative. Black-sheep Charles betook himself to isolated Angibault, where, dressed ‘like a half-bourgeois’, he resignedly directed the operation of the mill’s great water-wheel and sluices: a far cry from the Café Procope and the Seine. The young George S
and, who met him when he had been there a good many years, wrote of him in her preface as ‘a gentleman of a certain age who, since he had associated in Paris with Monsieur de Robespierre (thus he always referred to him) decided to let nature have its way round his mill locks and streams: the alder, the briar, the oak and the guelder rose grew there in profusion.’

  In her novel, George Sand transformed this melancholy, dispossessed nature lover (who sounds more like a disciple of Rousseau than of Robespierre) into one of nature’s socialists, a young and high-minded working miller, the beau farinier of Angibault who defeats low cunning and triumphs in a pure love. Purity was not particularly evident in Charles Yvernault’s life, but perhaps the generally democratic image was further enhanced by the presence in the mill of a young unmarried peasant housekeeper who, over the course of years, became the mother of five children.

  So, at any rate, runs the alternative or word-of-mouth family history. The memory of hushed-up scandal still carried enough of a charge in the 1920s, a hundred years later, for it to be omitted by the pious chronicler of the received version; he is silent, in any case, on the whole George Sand connection, since the family traditionally disapproved of everything the writer represented, politically and socially. The chronicler’s widow, one of Marie-Rachel’s granddaughters and the teacher of catechism to the village children, was particularly firm in this view. In old age she burnt packages of George Sand’s letters to another member of the family which had come to rest in her Chassignolles attic. Their potential value, both literary and financial, was considerable even then and would today have been enormous.

  According to one of the letter-burner’s descendants, the peasant family who tenanted and worked the mill at Angibault for several generations were well known in the area to be related to the grand family of Chassignolles, though neither side ever mentioned the fact. He himself inherited the mill when young as his part of the family goods, and once said genially to the miller in the course of a conversation about funds for repairs: ‘After all, Monsieur, we are cousins, aren’t we?’ The elderly man gave him an anxious sideways look. ‘Well, yes, M’sieur Jacques … but low be it spoken.’ And moved on at once to other matters.