Madame Bonnin identified a tall girl in white in a decorated cart as the Queen of the Fête, who she knew to have been Blanche Yvernault from the café, but though she pored over the picture for some time her old eyes would not let her recognize anyone else. I felt frustrated in the same way, though my own inability had a different root. ‘Once … on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone…’ Here, among this cheerful stolid crowd on the postcard, must have been a number of people whose names I have seen so often in the records that I feel I know them – and yet I had no means of connecting these names with the faces before me. Appé, no longer mayor but the senior municipal councillor, must surely have been there, and Ageorges, the current mayor, whose relatives ran a café in the old schoolhouse, and the assorted teachers male and female, and the teacher’s daughter who had presented the Minister with flowers on the inauguration of the station half a dozen years earlier? In the interests of promoting trade, the commercial bourgeoisie of the village was seemingly out in force: surely there was a Chaumette or a Robin in an odd corner, unrecognized? And what of the less respectable element? The Écho de l’Indre did not have much occasion, apart from the Cavalcade, to mention Chassignolles that year, but the village did appear several times in relation to one of its inhabitants, call her Stéphanie, aged twenty-six. With two men younger than herself, she was arrested for drunkenness in La Châtre during the summer, and by September the citizens of Chassignolles were sending a petition to the police to complain of her ‘immoral acts’. It is hard to imagine what these can have been that so aroused the wrath of the normally rather tolerant country people. Her father was a builder: she had grown up in the village in the ordinary way among people who ‘all … shared more or less the same ideas about what mattered’. What happened there? I should like to have been able to spot her among the crowd.
Another postcard eventually proved less frustrating. It showed a wrinkled peasant woman in apron, clogs and white cap, a basket on one arm and an umbrella on the other. It seemed to be posed, and when I first glanced at it I took it as a sign that the traditional peasant world was then just beginning to slip from reality into folklore. But Denise Bonnin took it for granted that this was a photograph of a particular individual whom she ought to remember too, and spent some time shaking her head over it in irritation. Sure enough, when I came to look at the very small print on it, it read, facetiously but with precision: ‘Une demoiselle chassignollaise de 1828’. The figure also turned up, tiny but with the same recognizable stoop and accoutrements, in a general view of the church.
So, a real person with a place and date of birth. Back to the registers. These revealed eighteen girls born in 1828, of which four were still recognizable in the census for 1901. Of these four, one was Jeanne Pagnard’s great-grandmother (she who was taught to cook by the teacher’s mother). Wondering if I had achieved an identification, I took the book to her, but before I could embark on an explanation she said: ‘Oh, that’s Marie Chièbe.’
‘Marie who?’ (Chièbe is a dialect word for ‘goat’.)
‘Chièbe, Chièbe – I don’t know what her real name was, but people always called her that. A little old woman, quite alone in the world, who ran errands for people to earn a few sous. See, she trotted round with that covered basket, she came from over at Les Girauds, I think … No, I don’t remember her that well myself, but my grandmother told me that picture of her was taken by the Curé they had then. He was the only person in the village with a camera. People teased her about it afterwards, but she was that proud of having her picture taken. He gave her a copy, of course.’
‘I’ve seen that card in an exhibition in La Châtre, with a note saying she hasn’t been identified.’
‘Huh, well you’d better remember then, so you’ll know when I’m gone. Daugeron, the Curé’s name was. Very nice man, quite progressive for that time.’
I also showed Jeanne Pagnard and the Bonnins the careful drawings of Chassignolles in the 1905 school exercise book that had come my way. It had belonged to a ten-year-old girl, Adolphine, the daughter of yet another blacksmith. It had been given on to me, long after her death (‘I know you like these old things’), by the woman who replaced her at the side of her bereaved husband – an outsider, with whom the village never really came to terms. These drawings are more informative and remarkable in their way than the postcards, since they show scenes such as apple-harvesting and the interiors of houses with a child’s eye for specific physical details. Evidently no one explained to Adolphine that, in a picture, you do not draw lines with a ruler; farmhouses stand to rigid attention in her world, rain falls in regularly slanted curtain rods across a landscape of elms, sheep, ducks and Chassignolles’ unmistakable church, rising correctly from its huddle of roofs. She was evidently a perfectionist, which is why the challenge of a moving railway engine, seen in perspective, defeated her, but she was also talented and almost abnormally observant. In spite of some rather odd perspective and proportion (the houses are unrealistically high, as they would be to a child) there is an absolute authenticity about the faded crayon drawings.
Denise Bonnin and her son and daughter all remembered Adolphine (‘La Duchesse’) well, but they were less interested that day in telling me about her than they were in discussing with nostalgic appreciation her exact depiction of a reaping hook or a donkey harness or a particular make of oil lamp. They were also keen to establish where each drawing had been ‘taken’ from, arguing about changed rooflines and evoking the checker-board hedges of now-vanished vegetable gardens. Only later did Georgette remark to me that Adolphine, who married her father’s assistant, was phtisique (tubercular) and died childless in her thirties. Her mother subsequently drowned herself (said Georgette) in a water cistern in the garden behind the smithy, while everyone else was at Sunday lunch.
Denise Bonnin’s own older sister died ‘taking a cold on her chest’ during the Great War, after her husband had been killed.
I look at those busy, happy drawings and at the fresh faces of the young men and boys in the postcards of the Cavalcade, and I feel glad that the future is always hidden.
* * *
It is true that in the early years of the new century Célestine herself does not seem to have been happy. But this was for personal and particular reasons.
In 1894 her son, Charles, had married. He was then twenty-nine and his bride was a girl of not quite twenty, Blanche D, born near Tours. I have been told she had relations nearer at hand, in St Denis de Jouhet, or perhaps in Crevant towards Crozon. The wedding was not held in Chassignolles and I have been able to discover little else about her antecedents. She is said to have been a good-looking, dark-eyed girl, bigger than her slim husband. The name ‘Blanche’, then fashionable, suggests social aspirations, and apparently she was well educated and articulate. Her mother was dead and her father, who may have come from Paris, was said to be ‘a man of means’. In other words, a suitable match for Charles, as an only son.
What I do know specifically is that Blanche, although joining her husband in the family business, brought with her an extensive trousseau in a way that had not been customary when Célestine was a bride but had become so by the 1890s. The days when a new young couple simply took their places round the wide hearth with the existing household, sharing the few hand-made pots and pans, the home-stuffed goose-down quilts, were past except in the poorest families. I think it was probably to accommodate Charles and Blanche and their personal chattels in suitable style that adjacent buildings at the back of the inn were made over at this time into extra living space. With Blanche came sets of ‘best’ and ordinary sheets and frilled pillow-cases – some lace-edged, like the lace-edged petticoats, camisoles and drawers that had also now become an indispensable part of a young wife’s outfit. There were also heavily embroidered linen tablecloths and a stack of very large damask table-napkins: each of these had ‘R-D’ (the
couple’s joint initials) in the centre in red thread, each woven with minor differences, as one would expect from bespoke work. They were extremely good quality and wore very well. I know this for a fact, since we are using some of them in Chassignolles today, a hundred years later.
The carved and polished oak presses in which all the linen was kept, and which I saw in another house in the village in the 1970s, were, I think, part of the furnishings of the inn and the work of a local carpenter – perhaps of Jean Yvernault, around the middle of the century. But, along with Blanche, the family acquired a couple of spoon-backed padded chairs. There was also a padded prie-dieu, the prayer-stool that had by then become an approved article of furniture in a genteel bedroom, and a small padded footstool. Both these were worked in gros point woollen tapestry, another refinement which had by then belatedly reached the village. The footstool depicted a small, neat cat, its eyes worked in silk for greater brightness. I have been told that the embroidery of both the prie-dieu and the stool were done by Célestine as a gift to her daughter-in-law, and that the stool was intended for her to rest her feet upon both before and after her baby was born.
Zénaïde Robin duly appeared in 1895. The next thing that happened was that Blanche went mad.
That, at any rate, is how the disaster is described in village lore. Today, one might refer to post-puerperal psychosis, which responds readily to medication. Or one might speculate about its having been simply a nervous collapse, with manic features. No one still alive today remembers the baby’s christening, even Madame Caillaud was not born till two years later. But a number of people remember having heard about it in childhood: ‘There was dancing; people did then, after a christening. And although it wasn’t long since her laying-in, Blanche would join in. And she danced, and she danced and she danced all night – she wouldn’t stop…’
‘People kept saying to her, “But you must sit down, ma chère. Take a little rest. You’ll wear yourself out. Think of the baby…” But it was as if she really couldn’t stop. She just danced and danced…’
I am reminded of the bewitched girl in Hans Andersen’s The Red Shoes, whose feet were condemned to dance for ever, attached to her or not. But this story is simply a latter-day version of ones that had been current for centuries in Europe, of dancing epidemics that broke out, either in the wake of plague or as a result of individuals being cursed. Some sufferers were said to be in a state of sexual arousal; some, in the tradition of classic schizophrenia, heard voices urging them on; while others apparently believed continual dancing to be a protection against sickness. As late as the seventeenth century, in Basle, a servant girl is reported to have made herself ill by dancing for a whole month. ‘She ate and drank but little, but danced continuously till she had wasted all her strength and had to be taken to hospital, where she was cured.’
The fact that Blanche’s first disquieting episode took this form may be fortuitous, but it is also true that individuals ‘go mad’ according to the traditions and preoccupations of their particular society. Dancing, as I have said, occupied an important role at that time in the life of the village young, and the Chaumette-Robin inn possessed the village dance floor. The fact that a married woman, newly delivered of a child, should choose to assert herself by frenetic dancing hardly augured well for the future happiness and stability of the marriage.
Blanche recovered – but relapsed. Over the next few years this became a pattern. Presumably the Robin family tried to keep her away from dances, but I am told she would sometimes become ‘quite wild’, would talk incessantly and have ‘strange ideas’ – unspecified, perhaps for reasons of delicacy.
She does not appear to have received any treatment for her condition, not even the soothing bath-cures that were all that medicine could offer then besides opiates. Indeed, where would she have gone? Twenty years before, in an unprecedented move, the Préfet of the Department had asked the Commune of Chassignolles to contribute to the support of one of their fellow-inhabitants who had had to be confined in the madhouse in Limoges, but he was there because he was said to be aliéné – ‘beside himself’ – and beyond the control of his family. The ordinary hospital in La Châtre, the ancient religious establishment that put babies out to nurse, was small and rudimentary, a combination of orphanage, infirmary for simple physical injuries, and refuge for the destitute old. By the 1890s large, purpose-built asylums were rising in the French countryside as they had a little earlier in Britain, but there was none in the Lower Berry and in any case such places were merely for care and shelter. For anything resembling treatment Blanche would probably have had to go to Paris. There, at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Charcot, the high-profile pathologist and mentor of Freud, had pioneered the idea of hysterical ailments; ‘neurasthenia’ was now a fashionable concept. However, the whole subject of insanity had become caught up in fin de siècle debates about ‘decadence’, the evil influence of cities and the erosion of moral certainties among uprooted people: such causes could hardly have seemed relevant to Blanche Robin in Chassignolles.
At any rate, she stayed at home. Balzac’s remark, made earlier in the century, was no doubt still appropriate: ‘Who has not encountered the admirable devotion that people in rural areas show towards the sick, the sense of shame lying in wait for a housewife if she should abandon her child or her husband to the care of an institution? And then again, who is not aware of the reluctance of rural families to pay for the keep of one of their number in a hospital or asylum…’ (L’Illustre Gaudissart)
When Blanche was in a particularly wild phase she had to be locked in her bedroom. Later, when it became apparent that the situation was not going to improve, part of the stabling at the back of the inn was made into a small garden room for her, separate both from the family quarters and from the inn. Zénaïde, an intelligent and sweet-natured child, was brought up largely by her grandmother. By the time she was in her teens she was sent to board, first in Châteauroux, and then in a convent school in Bourges to become a demoiselle, away from her mother’s influence.
The choice of Bourges seems to have been merely the obvious one: the town, the old religious centre of France, was full of convents. If Ursin Chaumette was still there, the family in Chassignolles did not know it, but I think it far more likely that he and his weak constitution had been inconspicuously extinguished some time in the 1880s or ’90s and that his widow had maintained no contact.
The long-term effects of Blanche’s condition on the Chaumette-Robin establishment can be only too well imagined. Pierre and Célestine were in their sixties by now: logic and tradition would have suggested that the day-to-day running of the inn should be progressively handed over to Charles and Blanche. But – to use Jeanne Pagnard’s turn of phrase – ‘For the innkeeper’s wife to be mad is most inconvenient’ (‘Ça n’arrange rien’). Although Blanche was indisputably intelligent, and not malevolent, her nervous, intense manner, even in her more peaceful times, put people off. Customers drifted away to the other inns. The Chausée establishment, on the other side of the church, near the Pagnards’ various workshops and the corner where the male clientele liked to relieve themselves, had been rebuilt as a four-square, slate-roofed house with proper bedrooms: it now called itself ‘L’Hôtel de France’. Jean Chausée had become the prime organizer of village festivities and was generally considered very go-ahead. He even drove – for a while, till an unfortunate accident – the first petrol vehicle the village had seen.
Business declined at the Chaumette-Robin inn. Its stables were little used now: that is how the space could be spared for Blanche’s bower. It wasn’t, however, all Blanche’s fault, says Jeanne Pagnard. Charles was a good cook: he had been sent away in his teens to do a course as a chef and he had, like his father before him, a pleasant manner ‘at any rate with outsiders’. But, as the only son and sole inheritor, he had been spoilt. And he was lazy as a dormouse. Mademoiselle Pagnard used the word that, in correct French, is spelt fainéant – ‘do nothing’, but which in the coun
try accent is transformed into feignant, which has overtones of pretending to be busy while achieving little.
Madame Caillaud, of the same generation as Zénaïde, also remembers the family well. Her own family, the Graizons, had been on genteel visiting terms with the Chaumette-Robins for half a century.
‘I don’t think that Célestine – well, I knew her as Madame Robin of course – ever said anything about her daughter-in-law and the way things had turned out. She put a good face on it. Quite right too. But all the same…’ Charles, according to Madame Caillaud, was undoubtedly amiable but unrealistic, a dreamer – ‘a little cracked [fêlé] himself, actually, as if madness was catching!’
She added a terrible detail. When she was a child, accompanying her mother to church on Sundays, they would usually encounter Célestine. More than once, outside the church, Madame Caillaud saw her mother slip money from her own gloved hand to Célestine’s shrinking one with a sympathetic murmur: ‘Take it, ma chère, please take it.’ It was not the country custom to make such a gesture. The danger of absolute want was still perceived as being too close at hand for general peace of mind. Literally anyone might be at risk, and so most people, in atavistic fear and self-protection, preferred to look away. Perhaps, in fact, Célestine herself would have preferred it so.
To her, the sought-after girl from the prosperous family she had once been must have seemed very far away by then. As far as the two brothers who should have been there to buttress her: gone their ways these thirty or more years. She had, as the implacable French saying puts its, mangé son pain blanc en premier – eaten the white bread of life first, so that only the bitter rye remained for her in her later years. She could not possibly have foreseen this.
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