Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  The other son became a railway clerk with the Paris–Orléans–Châteauroux line, till his mother died and he retired early to live in La Châtre with his sister – she who was ‘lame’. Needless to say, neither of these incidental casualties of nineteenth-century progress ever married. They lived in a cramped little house in a row built on the site of the one-time town moat, valiantly practising what have been described to me as ‘sordid economies’. The phrase implies worn, shiny jackets, mended grey cotton stockings, casseroles of horse-meat, heart and lights, bread always a day old so that they were not tempted to eat too heartily of it … One lamp, never lit till dark had fully come, winter nights made interminable by early bedtimes that saved on wood for the stove … All the entrenched tradition of old-style French penny-pinching frugality that still today, like a necessary shadow, accompanies that other French tradition of abundance, quality and douceur de vivre.

  It was not simply that they were poor relations, though they were. Their aim was to pay back in the end all the money owed since the 1860s failure. They saved and saved, doggedly converting their accumulated sous into gold. For the whole of the nineteenth century and even after, the value of gold was unaltered in monetary terms: 290.32 milligrams equalled one French franc, as if the franc was a fixed measure like the metre or the litre. It did not occur to most people that it could be otherwise, certainly not to this pair. The years went by, life changed around them, the Great War came and the right to exchange money for gold was suspended as a ‘temporary’, emergency measure. Four years later when the war ended the emergency did not. The cost of living inflated; the brother and sister’s resolution remained fixed. At last, one day in 1923, they achieved their goal: every debt was honourably repaid.

  A few weeks later France finally abandoned the gold standard, with a substantial devaluation. This meant that the gold with which they had paid their creditors would, if they had only delayed, have been worth far more. It also meant that the annuity they had bought to live on, by selling their one remaining piece of land, was reduced to paper francs, each worth only about a quarter of the precious gold francs that had been used to purchase it.

  Two years later they both died, within a few days of each other.

  By chance, Célestine Chaumette (who was born the same year as the crippled Mlle Yvernault) was also living then in La Châtre, in two rooms in an old house not far off. She was alone.

  There are lives that descend into silent tragedies that, piecemeal and partially hidden, never warrant statuettes or memorial histories, which have no place of honour in family lore, but whose inaccessible pain tugs wordlessly at the heart.

  Chapter 13

  In 1871, following the establishment of the new Republic, Victor Pissavy became the mayor of Chassignolles and remained so for thirty years. He was no Republican; as the family chronicler circumspectly put it, ‘his preferences were conservative and imperialist’, but evidently both he and the village felt that for him to be mayor was befitting. No doubt his dead wife would have thought so too, for from then on he modelled himself on her father, of blessed memory, who had ruled his own Commune some twenty years earlier with a degree of benevolent despotism: bourgeoisie oblige.

  Like Louis Yvernault in Crozon, one of Victor’s first acts as mayor was to offer the Commune a religiously-run school – this time a girls’ school, the one that was to be organized in her own new house by Mademoiselle Guyot. It was a common pattern in the countryside at this stage: the boys’ schooling was coming to be seen as the financial and social responsibility of the Commune, while the girls could attend only an establishment run by private charity. It may seem enlightened of Monsieur Pissavy and Mademoiselle Guyot to want the girls to be educated too, but such initiatives began to run into trouble in the next decade when, under Jules Ferry, the principle was established of secular State education for all – ‘gratuite, obligatoire et laïque’, in the ringing phrase of the time: dedicated anti-traditionalism creating its own tradition, its own glory.

  Indeed, by the 1890s, the conflict in France between Church and State was reaching its final spasm before the Church finally retreated to its own separate high ground, taking refuge in the moral and social clout it wielded. In Chassignolles, this national contest found local expression in fervent proposals for the building of a new, non-religious girls’ school on the same lines as the boys’. It therefore seems no coincidence that at this time Victor Pissavy was replaced as mayor. A letter of the period to the Préfet from the new mayor, a villager called Appé, spoke of ‘la population républicaine et clairvoyante de Chassignolles’ (‘the Republican and farsighted members of the community’) being at loggerheads with ‘the reactionary population’ who, he alleged, were campaigning in a way that showed bad faith and disloyalty towards their erstwhile fellow-councillors. It is not hard to see where the nexus of this reactionary feeling was supposed to lie.

  The chronicler of the Pissavy family remains silent on this row.

  The neighbouring Commune of St Denis de Jouhet, where Victor Pissavy possessed a farm, suggested that he might like to come and be their mayor instead, but he had the grace to decline their offer. He was then in any case in his mid-sixties, though he was to live on at the Domaine, a powerful figure, into his eighties. He is still remembered as having ‘done a lot’ for Chassignolles, though the oldest inhabitants did remark to me that he was very careful with his own money – the family characteristic, no doubt, which had made the Pissavys astute tradesmen. After the school affair the mantle of benevolence was assumed by his son Louis. He was gentler in manner than his father and less physically robust; I have been told by one person that he was ‘a bit of a soft touch’ and by another that he ‘really loved country people, understood them and knew how to talk to them spontaneously without hurrying them’. He had, of course, been reared by his grandmother, whom he is said to have ‘adored’ and whose own memories went back to simpler, less class-conscious days.

  Let us return, for the moment, to the 1860s. Once the Guyot girls’ school project had been agreed, the cause of enlightenment plus piety found its next object in the cemetery question. The time-honoured practice of inserting the dead into the open land around the church, which was not even a defined churchyard in the English style, was causing unease. Old bones surfaced every time a new grave was dug. ‘It has become impossible,’ Victor Pissavy pointed out, ‘to continue burials there without complete prejudice both to respect for the dead and to public hygiene.’

  As in other villages all over France, proposals for a separate cemetery had already been made from time to time, but had foundered on expense and on the vague feeling that the land round the church was the proper place. It was customary to stop for a brief communication with the dead on one’s way to or from Mass; with them lying hygienically in a separate plot behind a wall it wouldn’t be the same. As early as 1810 there had been discussion about extending the burying ground by the church over some vegetable gardens and a ditch – the remains, I think, of the monks’ moat and fish pool. This plan was never carried out, though the approximate site today has come into the possession of the dead by a different route: it is where the war memorial has stood since 1921 in its own railed garden.

  In the 1830s there was further discussion: a piece of land several hundred yards off was acquired by the Commune and appears hopefully marked as ‘cemetery’ on the 1843 map. However, no burials took place there – no one wanted to be the first – and eventually the site was swallowed up by a road division to avoid a steep slope on the way out of the village towards Crozon.

  In 1871 the Council reluctantly agreed with Monsieur Victor that the churchyard would no longer do and voted one thousand francs for a new ground. (At the same meeting they neatly decided that, in this case, they could not afford to contribute any more money to the long-delayed completion of the Crozon road.) Eighteen months later land was finally purchased on the western edge of the village, on a small escarpment with a pleasant view. This already, however, took up
over half the thousand francs allocated. Thereafter the progress or lack of it in the laying out of the cemetery, the need for new ditches to drain it and the raising of the wall, is an intermittent item in the Minutes for years. By 1876 the Commune had to borrow to meet a projected cost nearly three times the original one, and ‘extra expenses’ continued to surface.

  The cemetery belonged to the Commune rather than to the Church, which was another sign of the developing separation between Church and State; however, perhaps the drain it represented on resources created a general feeling that the more secular needs of the living should come first. As ever, tensions that were really about deep-seated priorities and attitudes to life expressed themselves as arguments about relatively small sums of money. The same year the Council refused a request from the village Curé for further funds to repair the presbytery. He had already had some in 1871; now he wrote to the Council pointing out that more had been promised him – that the Bishop in Bourges was ‘astonished’ that it had not been paid, that he had continued to show délicatesse and patience, but …

  Even Victor Pissavy evidently thought this letter out of order, for it was judged to be ‘in an improper tone, unworthy of priestly dignity’ and it was unanimously decided that the request would not even be discussed. The Curé of that time was a stripling of twenty-eight, born in La Châtre, replacing Jeanne Aussourd’s crony the old mass-server. He did not last long, but other Curés of the last quarter of the century were more successful at leaving their mark on the village in the form of crosses here and there, much encouraged by old Madame Yvernault.

  Not till 1884 was the new cemetery finally completed, just in time for Anne Laurent, veuve Chaumette, to move into one of the first grave-plots. It is conveniently situated near the main gate, where the rings for tethering horses are still set into the wall.

  Individually owned graves were in themselves a novelty to the ordinary people of rural France. This is clear from the discussion when the Council fixed the price of concessions – something that, as the Minutes cheerfully remark, would ‘allow families to satisfy their feelings of pious respect while at the same time procuring an advantage to the Communal coffers’. In the past, when one generation succeeded another in the same space of earth, and the wooden crosses above ground decayed with the passing seasons as did what lay beneath, a true levelling in death had taken place. For a few years, a grave-mound might be known and recognized, but as time passed a democratic oblivion took over. As a Berrichon novelist (Raymonde Vincent) has recorded: ‘Among the very old, an occasional person would still know who was buried where from way back, but most of these dead were effaced from the memory of men.’ Only with the new cemetery, in Chassignolles as all over France, was the family tomb to become another piece of property, to be marked, fenced, tended and decorated accordingly.

  Yet ironically, though the new Chassignolles cemetery inaugurated the era of permanent personal memorials, it hastened eradication of older markers in a way that caused suppressed resentment and grief. I know this from Denise Bonnin, who was born Denise Apère or Apaire (even in the twentieth century the family had not quite decided how to spell its name) in a very old, one-storey farmhouse where she is still living ninety-odd years later. I have, cumulatively, spent many hours with Madame Bonnin, while waiting with my milk can for the cows to come home. Deaf, heavy, lame and a little resentful of age but perfectly sensible, she has always been ready to talk about her family. One summer evening, when light streaked the sky long past ten by the double-summertime clock that ‘the cows don’t understand’ and the milk had still not been brought in by her harvesting son and grandson, she told me: ‘My father would never drive his cart through that narrow place by the church – there, where the café on the corner of the square used to be.’ (She meant the Café Chauvet, the one-time Chaumette inn.)

  ‘… Why? Why, because he knew his mother was buried somewhere down there. That’s what he said anyway. And he didn’t want to drive over her bones.’

  Denise Bonnin did not locate this fact in any chronological framework. The time before the cemetery existed was just the mythical Olden Days, static as a tapestry, as in Georges Bernadet’s view of the monks, the hawks and the hounds. But she vouchsafed the fact that she had been the youngest child, with both her parents turned forty when she was born.

  What she did not know was that her father, Jean Apaire, carpenter, usually known as Jean Beaumont, had also been a late child. From the records in the Mairie, I established that he had been born in 1859 when his father, another Jean, was forty-nine and his mother was forty-two – elderly parents for that or any other era. His mother was a Geneviève Pirot – a sister, it turned out, of the luckless convict Antoine – and she died, aged fifty-three, in September 1870. Her youngest son was then two months short of his eleventh birthday, so he would indeed have seen his mother put into the old ground beside the church. Later, when still a young man, he saw this same ground levelled and then, as the village changed and prospered and carts and gigs multiplied, surfaced with gravel and subsumed into the roadway.

  The formal confirmation of Grandma’s story was received with wondering pleasure by the assembled Bonnin family: it might almost have been a tangible object. It was as if they had, till then, believed that the past was a private and fragile place of which they were helplessly inadequate custodians, and that, like them, it would pass away utterly. The further information that, according to the record, the mythical mother under the road by the church had died here in the farmhouse, and therefore no doubt in the large, dim, several-bedded chamber which is still a shared bedroom today, produced a thoughtful hush, a faint shiver. The Bonnins are probably the only family left in the Commune whose occupancy of the same house runs back in a straight line from child to parent into the era before the Revolution, and they are given to dynastic axioms (‘In our family, we have never liked going upstairs’). None of them, even teenage Francis, can be unfamiliar with the face of death. A few years ago Grandpa, a survivor of the Great War and a renowned singer at the Third Age Club in the Mairie, went to join his fathers: he lay in state in the farmhouse while all the neighbourhood trooped in to visit him. Yet evidently the thought of all the earlier births and deaths that must have taken place within the walls of their home, crowding it with the noiseless ghosts of people with hair and gestures and voices akin to their own, struck them now with unaccustomed force.

  To pin down the past before it escaped again into myth, Georgette Bonnin (in her sixties, and the current family linchpin) fetched a pencil and took a piece of paper off the back of the kitchen calendar. With some discussion about spelling (one ‘s’ in naissance or two?), the facts I had garnered were recorded. The paper was then put back in the table drawer where there also turned out to be Jean Apaire’s military papers, lying there as peacefully as when they were stowed away on his death sixty years ago, along with a few of his ironmongery bills for nails and screws. ‘He was called up for military service, see, like everyone.’ (This was true after 1873: one of the democratic reforms of the Third Republic was to abolish the lottery system.) ‘But he never did more than a few weeks’ reserve training, because both his parents were dead by the time he was twenty and he had to support his sisters. Also, he’d had an elder brother killed in the army.’ Presumably in the Franco-Prussian war.

  Over the course of time, I was to hear a good deal of this Jean Apaire. Poor in land, he sowed his first crop of wheat with a bushel gleaned – goodness knows with what labour – by his wife and sister from the stubble in other men’s fields. But he was rich in skills. He specialized as a scieur de long – a long-sawyer, a trade for which the Berry was known. In the days before sawmills, it was the long-sawyers who reduced tree trunks to planks in the first place, and who were called in halfway through the construction of a house to cut the roof timbers to size once they had been installed. I heard how he used to walk all over the district to different jobs, sometimes many miles away, carrying his saw and its trestles on his back, at
a time when the labourer’s day lasted from sun-up to sun-down however long the hours. How he could ‘turn his hand to anything and was always ready to do a favour for a neighbour’. How once Monsieur Victor himself, seeing him at work on the new girls’ school, jovially gave him a hand with an awkward beam (considering what had passed concerning this school, this seems extra good-natured of Victor Pissavy) … How another time Monsieur Louis took a picture of him up repairing the church tower, small as a sparrow … How once he broke his leg, falling from a roof in La Châtre, and was laid up for a long time, his leg weighted with sandbags, and the doctor said he should go away to hospital in Paris, but instead he saw a local bone-setter and after that the leg healed although he was left lame.

  ‘The bone-setter said that if he’d gone to Paris like the doctor wanted he’d have come back with a wooden leg,’ concluded Madame Bonnin triumphantly. She has never been to Paris herself, though she did once go to Lourdes in the 1950s, when the Curé organized a trip there that included a whole, epoch-making night on the train each way. She has only once, in her entire life, been to Châteauroux, less than twenty-five miles away, and that was on a school trip when she was twelve, organized courtesy of the Domaine.

  Jean Apaire is another of those vanished personalities, like Bernadet’s grandfather, of whom it is recalled that he could neither read nor write ‘but could calculate anything inside his head’. He must have been a man of determination and natural aptitude, for he taught himself what numbers meant by observing the kilometre posts on his long forced walks. It is remembered in the village that he once figured out, with the assistance of diagrams he drew in the white dust by the roadway, how to build a spiral staircase to fit into a corner in an old house that was being renovated. Since he was unable to consult any handbook, he must have had to work out the necessary geometry from first principles. ‘And the foreman on the job, who was a stranger, was amazed that this little fellow in clogs knew so much!’