When I plucked up courage to visit old Madame L, Marie-Rachel’s last surviving granddaughter, in the Domaine at Chassignolles, she received me kindly in a décor of tapestry-seated chairs and family portraits. She said nothing of the black-sheep Charles or of certain other things. But she discoursed on Marie-Rachel and showed me a cabinet photograph of this girl, who seemed to have become something of a family icon: a pretty but strained little face between the lank, centre-parted hair and the bunchy dress of the period.
Marie-Rachel, who was born to the ironmaster and his wife in 1841, was the fourth daughter to arrive since their marriage five years before and the only one to survive infancy. The unfortunate mother was consoled by her husband with the thought that ‘When we lose them all we should really rejoice, since they go to swell the heavenly choirs with more voices to praise the Lord.’ This, however, was no longer a time when babies in the French countryside died off wholesale; the received version of the history goes into no details, but one may surmise that the marriages between cousins over two generations had resulted in an accumulation of recessive genes, leading to weak or malformed babies. Another pair of Yvernault cousins, though more distant ones, also married at that period, had a daughter who, while she lived a long life, was described in the census of 1861 as boiteuse, ‘lame’ – an admission that, in a genteel family, may indicate rather more than just a club-foot.
Marie-Rachel, however, was ‘a beautiful, healthy child’ who grew up in isolated Crozon as the sole focus of her parents’ tender care. It seems they had decided to have no more. Everything was to be for this daughter. Long afterwards her mother, by then the sole survivor of the trio, wrote of her ‘life so pure, so hard-working, so pious, so charitable, so gentle, so gracious … She was gifted, from her earliest years, with a tenderness which I never found wanting, she loved to give, it was one of her joys. She also possessed, from earliest youth, a sense of orderliness … She never left anything half done…’
To this holy picture of a girl too good for this world, the bereaved mother did, however, add one transforming detail: Marie-Rachel was once, as a small child, found praying in her room at an unexpected time of day, and said when questioned that she was asking the Mother of God to lower the price of wheat. Since the grain riots (see here) occurred when Marie-Rachel was six, this anecdote has an authentic feel.
It was customary for girls of good family, whom their parents hoped to marry well, to be sent away in their teens to board at convent schools. There, it was hoped, they would accumulate enough docility and expectation to co-operate in a suitable marriage, and also shed the country accents they might have picked up from peasant nursemaids or little local playmates. Louis Yvernault and his wife accompanied Marie-Rachel to distant Paris by the convenient new railway line from Châteauroux and established her with the well-born Sisters of Sainte Clothilde in the Faubourg St Antoine. According to the brochure of this establishment: ‘Nothing is neglected that may embellish their personalities. While following current developments in the education of the female sex, the school aims above all to conserve their simplicity of heart. In brief, the wish of the Ladies is to see their pupils combine firm principles with amiability and gentleness, and learning with a modest reserve.’
One cannot help thinking that life held more promise for the daughter of a local innkeeper.
The Yvernaults made regular trips to Paris to visit their daughter, and brought her home once a year for a summer holiday. In 1857, when she was rising sixteen, dysentery was widespread in the Berry. According to the chronicler:
Louis Yvernault, with his usual kindness, visited the sick to bring them moral comfort and material assistance as necessary. In the midst of this, he had to leave for Paris with his wife to fetch their daughter … carrying the disease unbeknown with him. He became ill, and on arrival at their hotel in Paris had to take to his bed. He died on 27 August, after several days of acute suffering.
Madame L of today, partisan for her own countryside, claimed that it wasn’t a local germ that killed great-grandfather but cholera picked up in Paris itself, that known centre of sickness physical and spiritual. Whatever the truth, one feels a pang for this usually masterful and energetic man of barely forty, dying of terrible diarrhoea in a hot rented room full of Second Empire draperies, with only hotel servants to wait on him and his distraught and genteel womenfolk. Marie-Rachel herself subsequently wrote an account of the whole event: ‘not a complaint nor a regret ever passed his lips … “Have confidence in God,” he exhorted us, “He is so Good!”’ When it became apparent that God was going to let His faithful servant down on this occasion, Louis changed his reflection to ‘Don’t be so distressed. What is this life compared with Eternity?’ All three of them seem to have had the absolute and concrete conviction that they would be reunited in a better world, together with the first three baby girls who had preceded them and would be waiting there – possibly transformed like their sister into perfect jeunes filles. No wonder the Catholic Church in France at this period rather discouraged second marriages: the practical problems posed in Eternity by such temporal readjustments would hardly have been manageable.
Louis Yvernault returned to Châteauroux as he had come, but in his coffin. The train arrived at four in the morning and it took a horse-drawn cortège another six hours to negotiate the valley of the Indre and reach Crozon. There, the entire workforce of the forges was lining the route to see the Master laid away in his own new cemetery.
Marie-Rachel settled once again into being her mother’s constant companion: ‘My darling girl kept away from all dangers. She never read a novel, preferring serious works; she would take my advice and have me read aloud to her while she sewed…’ In fact so serious was this paragon (as one can believe from her photograph) that the family doctor had to suggest little excursions, a change of air from time to time for her health’s sake.
The received story is that, in spite of all this, Marie-Rachel fell in love, making her own choice rather than leaving it to her mother but exercising that choice ‘keeping in view Faith, wisdom and reason’. Her intended was Victor Pissavy, one of the four sons of the energetic Guillaume Pissavy who had left the Auvergne to establish his cloth-peddling business in the Berry. All four boys had been educated as gentlemen at various religious boarding establishments, but when Victor met Marie-Rachel he was back in La Châtre working in his father’s warehouse. By one of those coincidences which are of no particular significance but please by their neatness, this warehouse was the same rambling old building that the young Robins were to take on as an inn eight or nine years later.
According to the chronicler, Victor Pissavy was ‘an attractive young man, slim, physically supple, dressed in the style of the time in either a jacket or a cutaway which particularly suited his height. He wore a high, stiff collar, a waistcoat and cravat of the same shade, spats, and always had an elegant gold-knobbed cane in his hand.’ The perfect dandy. The embodiment of the new middle-class commercial chic. One wonders if Marie-Rachel’s dead father the ironmaster would have entirely approved?
There is a hint that his widow did not. The official version, from her own pen, is that she and Marie-Rachel went to Paris to ask the advice of the girl’s erstwhile confessor at Sainte Clothilde and that the hopeful Victor accompanied them on this expedition. There seems to be something wrong with this story: suppose the confessor had been disapproving, would it not then have become quite improper for Victor to be in Marie-Rachel’s company at all, even with her mother present?
Madame L, speaking some hundred and thirty years later in the pretty drawing-room of the property in Chassignolles which Marie-Rachel brought to Victor as part of her dowry, assured me that the marriage had indeed been ‘a love match’ but said that the young man had at first asked for her hand ‘incorrectly’ (a term that would suggest he simply failed to ask Madame Yvernault’s permission before proposing) and that the Paris confessor had been called in to arbitrate and soothe everyone.
Thei
r great-grandson, my main source for the alternative family history, had a different version again. According to him, the Yvernault family did not consider a son of the nouveaux riches Pissavys a good enough match for the daughter and sole inheritor of Louis. The Master of pedlars had transformed himself into a wholesale draper, but sheets, even wholesale, were much less socially acceptable than iron, selling was inferior to manufacturing – and then there was the matter of the family’s relations with That Woman at Nohant. Victor’s doctor brother, Édouard, was known to be on cordial dining terms with George Sand. Whether or not the whisper had reached Madame Yvernault at that time that Édouard Pissavy was also the lover of George Sand’s daughter Solange, I do not know, but certainly this was a contributory factor to the indignant burning of George Sand’s letters in Chassignolles two generations later.
As if to confirm the family’s worst suspicions about the Pissavys, Victor (I am told) schemed with Marie-Rachel to stage an elopement. Perhaps there was indeed more courage, passion and guile than appears in the repressed little face in the photograph or in her mother’s account, for however seductive Victor was he could hardly have brought off his plan without Marie-Rachel’s active participation. Maybe she had managed to read a romantic novel or two on the quiet without her mother’s knowledge. She had probably met Victor through her La Châtre cousins, the Guyots, for it was with the connivance of one of their servants that she managed a meeting with him in the town one night. The young couple went off together, not to reappear in their respective homes till the next day. ‘And after that, of course,’ said their great-grandson gleefully, ‘they had to let the boy marry her. There was nothing else for it.’
Perhaps this was what was really covered by Madame L under the heading ‘incorrect behaviour’?
Nothing of this surfaces in the official version, where there is no hint that Victor Pissavy was ever on anything but excellent terms with his wife’s mother – as indeed he had to be. In 1864, after two and a half years of marriage, Marie-Rachel gave birth to their son, another Louis. She died shortly afterwards of what the chronicler calls ‘a crisis of albumen’, and which we would recognize today as the consequences of untreated toxaemia of pregnancy. For reasons both human and financial, the bereaved young husband and the doubly bereaved mother-in-law could only make common cause over the upbringing of another cherished only child.
At the time of Victor’s marriage the family firm in La Châtre was tactfully wound up, having served its commercial purpose in launching Guillaume Pissavy’s sons into professions such as medicine, banking and the law. Victor too, once married, embarked on law studies, which in his case were intended rather to embellish his future life as a gentleman of leisure: the young couple made their plans to remodel the big farm in Chassignolles as their country residence. When Marie-Rachel died, Madame Yvernault moved there to take charge of little Louis. He was thus brought up an Yvernault as much as a Pissavy, and eventually added his grandmother’s name to his own.
The received version is that Marie-Rachel’s death so affected Victor that he never remarried. The fact was that this handsome widower of barely thirty could hardly take a new wife without compromising his inheritance from Marie-Rachel, including the property in Chassignolles, to all of which he was entitled solely as trustee for his son. He was an intelligent and forceful man, and the role of local squire in a time of evolving rural prosperity was far too attractive to abandon: had he not in any case sacrificed a continuing lucrative career in trade to take on this role? He made sure, however, that he retained certain business interests in La Châtre which required his presence there, sometimes overnight. Later, when young Louis was sent to school with the Jesuits in Poitiers, and Grandmother Yvernault accompanied him there to ensure that his delicate health was properly monitored, Victor was able to revert to a more bachelor life and spent most of each winter in La Châtre.
* * *
In a wood of oak, ash and larch that forms part of the Chassignolles Domaine’s extensive property, a small iron Virgin with a Child in her arms stands on a stone plinth in the recess formed by three tall trees. She is a typical statuette of the second half of the nineteenth century; her pretty, impassive face is commonplace, but her lonely situation invests her with a certain austere power. I have visited her in all seasons: in summer when the woods are green and gold and alive with woodpeckers; on a day in deep winter when the hoar-frost on a spider’s web made a breathtaking lace veil against her iron cheek; and again in very early spring when the whole bare wood above the carpet of dead leaves was suffused with a blue, expectant light. For a long time I assumed that her presence was due to some half-pagan cult in this wood that a late-nineteenth-century Curé had Christianized with a new, respectable figure. Madame L, however, believed that the Virgin and Child had been placed there in the 1860s as a memorial to Marie-Rachel.
But, if so, why does the plinth bear no inscription?
Georges Bernardet – who will re-enter this chronicle as it nears his own birth date and the family from which he sprang begins to appear in the Minute books – told a different story and one whose specificity carries a ring of truth. The statue had, he believed, been put there in memory of a boy who was in some way connected with the Domaine. This child had been climbing a tree in the wood after a magpie’s nest, had fallen and broken his neck. ‘Not a child of the family, no. I think the Monsieur Pissavy of the time was his guardian, or somesuch.’
‘Which Monsieur Pissavy? Monsieur Victor or Monsieur Louis?’
‘Ah, I couldn’t say that. My grandfather, he could have told you.’
Another entire, intricate story, irrecoverable now as last year’s dog roses.
* * *
But meanwhile what of the forges of Crozon?
After Louis Yvernault’s abrupt death in Paris, they were directed for several years by his twin brother with the help of a resident manager. But at that time the local iron trade, which had flourished so in the new industrial area, suddenly began to fail, victim of the very same forces of evolution and change. Just as the new roads that had been a boon to pedlars ended up making them unnecessary, so the proliferating railway lines, which demanded iron for their own construction and carried it to all parts of France, began to bring in iron from elsewhere in competition. Cheap imports from neighbouring countries undercut the product of central France, even though overproduction had already driven down the domestic price. In addition, veins of ore were being worked out and the forests themselves were being cut for charcoal at an uneconomic rate. In any case charcoal-firing was out of date and had elsewhere been abandoned. On the Loire, Henri Martin’s coke-and coal-fired forges were turning out a new, superior material – tempered steel. All over the Berry by the 1860s small, undercapitalized forges, which had been working for hundreds of years but could not afford to convert their machinery to use coke, were going bankrupt. As a contemporary wrote: ‘The workshops are shut, the paths are abandoned, the buildings crumble, the teams of workmen are disbanded and the woods grow thick once more … Silence is re-establishing itself in the forests and the villages of the Berry.’
The Yvernault family, or at any rate the Crozon branch of it, saw what was coming and got out just in time. In the same year, 1861, that Victor Pissavy abandoned the cloth business to marry Marie-Rachel, her family were liquidating their own interests and placing the money in land. The forges of Crozon were sold (I was rather surprised to discover) to the Parisian engineer with the Creole wife, who already owned the quarries. Perhaps it was an asset-stripping exercise; at any rate even he could not make them profitable, and in 1868 the furnaces were at last allowed to go out. The night skies were dark now above Crozon. Weeds and water birds colonized the great pools.
The forge still bears that name today and the various buildings stand, not so much ruined as fossilized by time, by more than a century of summers and winters and the endless altered people that have come and gone. The house with the monkey-puzzle is tidy but shuttered; nettles grow in the k
itchens of the workmen’s model cottages under the broken slate roofs. Straw, sacks, barrels, discarded harrows, a rusty Deux Chevaux and an antique tractor occupy the echoing works. In the yards where the conduits ran and heavy trucks were pushed around on Louis Yvernault’s modern rails, chickens and geese wander. The fine seventeenth-century house is smothered in flowering creeper, its hand-wrought roof shingles perilously sagging. It is occupied, more or less, by an elderly couple engaged – more or less – in subsistence farming. The fifteenth-century house next door gapes roofless to the sky, a shelter for rabbit hutches; while the medieval lookout tower on the mound, from which the forge foreman used at one time to observe his workforce in the yard below, has become a territory for goats.
Thanks to the mining engineer, Marie-Rachel’s inheritance was secure, but another branch of the family was not so lucky. The foundry in Châtillon, on the far side of the Department, was not sold in good time: in 1866 it was advertised fruitlessly for weeks in the Écho de l’Indre. The business went down with many debts, a burden that was to haunt the younger generation for the rest of their lives. A retreat into formal bankruptcy would have been a relief but this they refused, either to avoid the shame or from a highly developed sense of honour toward their creditors. One daughter escaped into marriage, one son emigrated to Minnesota, where he apparently prospered. The official chronicler remarks regretfully: ‘He was on the point of coming back to France in 1890 when he died, leaving no children, and his family in France who should [sic] have inherited were unable to recover a penny.’
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