Village of Secrets

by Caroline Moorehead

  If the Protestants regarded themselves as rather more prosperous than the Catholics, their children more literate and their farms cleaner, there was very little animosity between them. The Catholics, it was said, voted more to the right, the Protestants more to the left, and the Darbyists seldom voted at all. None of them had much time for Pétain, Vichy or the Germans. The words of two local pastors, Jean Perret and Roger Casalis, in the late 1920s were applicable to them all. If any one of them were really tested, they had remarked, they would surely ‘once again find, under other forms, the heroism of their fathers’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A pure spirit

  It was perhaps not all that surprising, given the defiant nature of the plateau, that when the incumbent Protestant pastor of le Chambon, Roger Casalis, decided to retire in 1934, his post should have been offered to a controversial pacifist, a man of uncompromising and outspoken views called André Trocmé. For the Protestant Church, pacifism and conscientious objection were not acceptable views. But the parish council of le Chambon had taken to this ardent preacher and his Italian wife Magda and bypassed the authorities by offering him a year’s contract, providing he agreed not to proselytise. Of all the figures involved with the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon during the war, the Trocmés are among the most intriguing. That they later became legends, largely on account of Trocmé’s own memoirs, thereby somehow losing their very defined personalities, should not obscure the fact that they were also complicated, overbearing and strong. They were both more and less important to the story than people would choose to believe; but they were not saints.

  André Trocmé came from Saint-Quentin, near the Belgian border. His French Huguenot father owned a successful lace and textile business; 56 when André was born, he was vigorous, grey-haired and authoritarian and ruled over his household and 10 children, from his two marriages, with inflexibility and meticulous adherence to tradition. Family reunions were more like conventions than parties. ‘If you always do your duty,’ he told his children, ‘then you will never make a mistake.’ André’s mother, a reserved German woman who wore a pince-nez and her hair in a tight chignon, was killed in a car accident when he was 10. His father, who was an irascible driver, had given chase to a smaller car; when the left wheel of their own car hit a pile of loose rocks, she was thrown out on to the road. All his life André would be haunted by the memory of his mother lying there covered in dust, blood pouring from her mouth. ‘I understood then,’ he wrote many years later, ‘that there are some merciless things against which one cannot fight, decisive moments that no one, not even God, can undo.’

  His father resumed his life as if the accident had never taken place. His elder sister, who took over the running of the house, was severe and cold; the atmosphere of piety and duty was so pervasive that it left little room for love or tenderness. As a boy, André thought of himself as timorous, impressionable and proud. He shared his bedroom with an older brother, a studious, humourless boy ‘whom I never got to know’. The Trocmés read the Bible; they did not drink, smoke or dance. It was not, as André observed, ‘a cheerful house’.

  Saint-Quentin lay 20 kilometres from the battlefield of the Somme, and during the Great War the 13-year-old André saw wounded soldiers, heavily bandaged, struggling through the streets of the town. He watched the trains carrying corpses to the crematorium to the south. His father, briefly, was used as a human shield when French snipers began to shoot from the rooftops. André became intensely aware of the notions of identity and loyalty, his mother’s German relations serving on one side, his French half-brothers on the other. His pacifism was born when a young soldier billeted on the family talked to him about non-violence; when the boy was subsequently killed, he took up his cause.

  André’s first break from the ‘monotonous, disciplined, tamed and smothered life’ of his family came when he attended a meeting of young Christian Socialists and heard people talking warmly and openly to each other about evangelism and poverty. More understanding came when Saint-Quentin was evacuated and he experienced for himself life as a refugee. It gave him a sense of what it meant to be poor, and he was struck by finding that the poorest were sometimes the most generous. Already what he most deplored was stupidity and ‘boundless naivety’, which were, as he saw it, far greater sins than wickedness.

  Through a Christian youth movement, André became a theology student in Paris, but in spite of his very public pacifism, he insisted on doing his military service, saying that he needed to experience what others went through. There was an incident when he might have been court-martialled for refusing to carry a gun on patrol, but nothing came of it. Not a particularly brilliant scholar, he was turned down on graduation for the best jobs, but accepted a one-year bursary offered to young French theologians by the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was a tall, serious-looking, almost heavy young man, with bright blue eyes, and he wore a pince-nez. He was already thinking of his future in the Church as that of a friend and brother to his flock, and his temple as a communal, egalitarian place.

  To pay his way in New York, André became tutor to John D. Rockefeller Jr’s children. It was at the international student house that he met Magda Grilli, whose family was made up of Russian Decembrists and Italian aristocrats; both of her grandfathers had spent time in prison for their political views. Magda had lost her own mother at three weeks and grown up with a stepmother she did not get on with. A trained teacher, she had come to New York to attend a course on social work and to escape the confines of her unemancipated family. Like André, she spoke several languages fluently, though her French was coloured by a strong Italian accent. It made her deep, almost staccato voice somewhat raucous. By 1926, they were married.

  Somewhat similar in temperament, both impatient, short-tempered, outspoken, highly educated and apparently sure of themselves, their approach to religion was strikingly different. Where André felt a deep religious commitment to orthodoxy, Protestantism and a faith rooted in reality, and agonised over questions of peace, poverty and social service, Magda’s years at a convent school had left her imbued with a hotchpotch of Protestant and Catholic rituals and a profound scepticism. In Magda, André would say that he had found someone to shake him out of his ‘somewhat sterile and egotistical meditations’. Both saw themselves as rebels. Both were marked by having lost their mothers young. Already they conducted their daily lives at frenetic speed, packing their days with worthy activities. Neither was ever quite what he or she seemed, but in each other they appeared to have found exactly what they needed.

  André’s first post as pastor was at Maubeuge in northern France, a town of steel mills largely destroyed by the Great War. Many of his parishioners drank heavily. Though conscientious objection remained forbidden to pastors, on the grounds that while Christians should not promote violence, neither should they shrink from resisting evil, if necessary by violent means, he came out strongly in support of those who refused conscription.

  During their seven years in the north, Magda gave birth to four children, Nelly, Jean-Pierre, Jacques and Daniel, but by 1932, the smoggy, dust-laden air was taking its toll on them all and they began to look for a healthier parish. The first two that André applied for turned him down. The third, le Chambon, had a more robust attitude towards pacifists and, having listened to him preach and admired his ‘overflowing faith’, they offered him a one-year contract. A colleague writing about him to a friend observed that Trocmé possessed an openness and a courage ‘unusual, alas, in our churches’, and that he had rarely met a Christian ‘so little frightened of the consequences of clarity’.

  The Trocmé family, arriving in le Chambon

  The Trocmés, bringing with them an au pair girl, arrived on the plateau at the end of September 1934. It was raining, and the first snows had already fallen. On the journey Jacques developed acute earache and he and his mother stopped in Saint-Etienne to see a doctor. The family’s first glimpse of the fifteenth-century presbytery, once the winter home of the
local counts of Fay, was profoundly depressing. A three-storey house built like a tower of three-foot-square blocks of dark grey granite, with a porte-cochère through which Louis Comte, bringing his sick son to le Chambon in the 1890s, had driven his horse and cart, it was filthy and full of junk deposited there by neighbours. One wall of the kitchen was carved directly out of the hill. It was damp and very cold, and little light was filtered by the narrow windows. Having asked that the rotting floorboards be mended, and a bath and central heating installed, the Trocmés lodged in one of the many village pensions while the work was carried out. They had always imagined themselves in a busy town; the sense of isolation and silence was alarming. Trocmé noted that his new parishioners were as grey as their granite farmhouses, and that they talked incessantly about death.

  Determined to make the best of the unpromising house, Magda sewed white tulle curtains for the wood-panelled dining room, which doubled as a waiting room for André’s parishioners, planted geraniums in boxes and bought a piano, a clock and a new dresser, which she covered in brightly coloured plates. André’s study was gloomy and dark, but he papered it with reproductions of Michelangelo’s Creation. Though rats scampered behind the wainscotting, Magda noted with pleasure that when the sun came out, the forbidding grey granite sparkled. Below the house were four layers of terraced garden, leading to the Lignon below, down which water rushed torrentially with the autumn rain. It was a measure of the remoteness and simplicity of the village that a town crier still beat his drum on the street corner and called out the news.

  The Trocmés were a good-looking family. Magda took pains to see that the children were well dressed, embroidering their clothes herself. Seven-year-old Nelly wore her curly fair hair in tidy pigtails and learnt to ride her bicycle round and round the fountain in the square; the boys had belted pinafores, buttoned at the neck and shoulders, which made them look like Russian children. What Nelly would remember later was the drabness, the silence of le Chambon, after the noise and bustle of the north. When the snows came, and drifts banked up around the presbytery, the children left the house by climbing through the windows in their clogs and heavy wool Loden coats, which smelt strongly of dog once they got wet. The clogs had nails in the soles, to prevent them slipping. Jean-Pierre, blue-eyed and clever, was a gifted pianist and loved poetry; Jacques was delicate and easily frightened, but also lively and rumbustious; Daniel, with his mass of tangled straw-like hair and round face, was fearless. The Trocmés acquired a spaniel and called it Fido.

  Appalled at first by the dinginess and cultural desolation of their new surroundings, the family slowly adapted. Both André and Magda threw themselves into parish life, paid visits to all the villagers, started classes and Bible groups. Nelly went to the village school and learnt to make lace and to crochet. Magda collected pine cones and devised a stove for the hall, fed by packed sawdust from a nearby mill, with metal pipes that snaked around the room and carried some heat to the arctic bedrooms. They were not unhappy; in fact, Magda would later say that this was the start of the happiest period of their lives.

  Trocmé bought a small Citroën C4 and took the children on picnics; he built two ponds under a plane tree in the garden, calling the smaller the Mediterranean and the larger the ocean, on which they sailed paper boats. He played the accordion and had a gift for story-telling, illustrating his letters and messages to his children with charming little drawings. He carved small wooden toys. Though often serious and preoccupied, writing that ‘those who seek their own happiness before all else risk to find themselves disappointed, discouraged and the unhappiest people on earth’, he could be light-hearted and teasing. Magda made people laugh with her funny faces and caricatures. They had an extra table made for the dining room to accommodate the many visitors to the presbytery. And when the deep snows came, the children tobogganed, starting high above the village, crossing the railway line, winding through the streets – trying to avoid hurtling through the butcher’s window – then round a corner, past the temple and over the bridge to the other side of the Lignon. The farmers who walked their cows through the village complained that the toboggans made the ice slippery.

  Among his parishioners, who had started out ‘lukewarm’ in their attendance at the temple, there was growing admiration for André’s forceful sermons, with his flights of mysticism and prophecy, his powerful voice carrying loudly from his raised pulpit across the large, austere wood-panelled temple, though some were in awe of his occasional outbursts of temper. As a preacher, he prepared his words with care and spoke in paragraphs. For his part, he was coming to regard his congregation with warmth, having discovered that behind their severe expressions and white lace caps lay considerable intelligence. The Chambonnais were even growing accustomed to Magda’s exuberant and unconventional ways, though they had trouble adjusting to the fact that she refused to wear a hat in church and insisted, on warm days, on swimming in the Lignon, dressed only in an enormous enveloping towelling robe. No pastor’s wife had ever done such a thing. She was quick to quarrel, they noted, but as quick to make friends again.

  For all Magda’s sewing and scrimping, the Trocmés were always short of money. They took in lodgers, who squashed into the little dining room and became part of the noisy, endlessly busy family. One day, a very good-looking young man appeared at the door of the presbytery, saying that he was a doctor, recently returned from missionary medical work in Cameroon, and that he was looking for a practice on the plateau. The elderly and loquacious local doctor, Dr Riou, sometimes overwhelmed by the numbers of people who came in the summer months, generously agreed to share the work, and Dr Le Forestier returned with his belongings to lodge with the Trocmés.

  From the first, ever willing to visit his patients in their most distant farmhouses whatever the weather, he was much liked. He was high-spirited and somewhat wild, making up songs and rhymes, always laughing, charming the children with his practical jokes and stories. After studying at the prestigious Ecole des Roches in Normandy, where he became a keen scout just at the time that Baden-Powell visited France, he had gone through medical school, then his army medical service, before working with Albert Schweitzer in Cameroon. Having fallen out with Schweitzer after the leprosy doctor punished one of his patients for stealing a chicken by locking him up in a small bamboo hut, Le Forestier had set up on his own. He dreamed of curing leprosy, syphilis and malaria, and wrote that ‘suffering, like love, cannot be understood by the brain. It is felt.’ Invalided back to France with bilharzia, he had opened a practice in Grenoble. But he was a restless figure, in search of somewhere congenial to his Protestant faith, and his wanderings had brought him to the plateau, where he sensed the air would restore him to health.

  In the evenings, Le Forestier made the Trocmé children laugh with his antics, pretending to be a monkey and clambering on to the dining room table, chattering loudly. He brought rabbits from his laboratory, having used them for pregnancy tests, and they went into the communal pot. Having offered to brighten up the gloomy rooms of the presbytery, he painted the main room yellow and cream, with a rust-coloured trim. His exuberance charmed the villagers too; he became president of a comité des fêtes, organised fancy dress parties and amateur theatricals. The Trocmés thought of him as another son.

  Not very long after Le Forestier’s arrival, the flow of summer visitors brought with it a strikingly pretty young woman. Danielle was 17, the granddaughter of a Darbyist who owned a grocery store in Cannes, and she had accompanied the two daughters of a corset-maker up to the plateau for their holidays. She and Le Forestier became engaged. Magda was a witness at the wedding in Cannes, after which the party was serenaded on the beach by a group of Dutch singers while they picnicked by a fire of driftwood. It was an occasion touched by sorrow. Shortly before the wedding, two of Le Forestier’s three sisters, all of them doctors, had been killed in a car crash; his mother, who had been driving, survived. Danielle did not wear a wedding dress.

  Dr Le Forestier with Danielle, at
the time of their wedding

  Le Forestier returned from his honeymoon in Cameroon bringing with him a young assistant, Tagny, who planned to attend a forthcoming reunion of Christians in Amsterdam, and a monkey called Fifi. Leaping around the Trocmés’ house, swinging from curtain to curtain, Fifi became extremely jealous of the children. When the cold weather came, Magda made him a coat out of an old sock. But soon after Le Forestier and Danielle moved to a flat above the chemist’s near the main square, Fifi died. Le Forestier always maintained that the chemist’s wife, maddened by the monkey’s cavortings and constant thefts, poisoned him. Later they moved into a rented house, the Côte de Molle, where he opened his surgery. Intensely gregarious, Le Forestier was soon on friendly terms with most of the village. But he was always on the move, thinking up outings on the spur of the moment. ‘Pack,’ he would say to Danielle, coming into the house. ‘Pack, we’re going.’ Le Forestier burnt, observed a friend, ‘with inner fire’.

  At Christmas, there was a huge gathering at the presbytery. All the children played an instrument. Everyone sang. In the temple, an immense tree was carried inside and covered with decorations, candles were lit, and every child was given a bag with an orange, some dates, nuts, raisins and a small present. Pacing backwards and forwards, André told a story written specially for the occasion. Roger Darcissac, president of the parish council and leader of a male choir, showed slides with a magic lantern.