Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  It is a vertiginous stretch of time. Célestine entered a world where not even cart tracks but just narrow footpaths linked villages like Chassignolles to the outside world, and measures of distance were expressed in terms of how far you could walk in a given time or how much of a field a man could plough in a day. She was born into a France in which the inhabitants of each region and sub-region considered themselves essentially people of that pays, with their own dialects and customs, and French citizens only in a theoretical, remote way that did not affect their daily lives. In the 1840s the great mass of the people had no formal education at all and, more fundamentally, had no notion as yet that progress and change were elsewhere becoming regarded as part of the natural order of existence.

  Wolves still roamed the woods and forests, seized lambs on the misty edges of fields and were even seen in hard winters to enter farmyards. But wolves were not the only dangers at large. In the imagination of the people, especially in the Berry, which was a country famed for the supernatural, the hills and valleys were crowded with spirits. The dead and the fairies (often mingled) hung around at crossroads. In the moonlight, Midnight Washerwomen washed the souls of unbaptized babies, while on windy nights in the racing clouds whole trains of unearthly huntsmen crossed the sky. Round La Châtre, a being resembling a man but larger, known as Le Grand Bissetre, was sighted hovering over pools in certain years. He was a bad omen – but then so was the familiar screech owl, whose mournful cry, when heard at a distance, sounds like heavy breathing and whose feet on the roof overhead are like human steps. Marsh gas, a light in the wood, a beast snuffling in a dark field, the buzzing of insects – any of these could be a portent of some alarming event.

  As for an unfamiliar face encountered on a path, a pedlar with books of printed words in his pack – one never knew what such meetings might signify. Even the known might turn out to be sinister: who could tell but that the woodcutters and the charcoal-burners, who passed their time in the forests, might not be meneurs de loups, secretly in league with wolves? The peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, writing in 1904 of the world his grandparents had known, evokes the horror of the little swineherd on a heathland when he is accosted by one of these strangers, even though the man is only an itinerant tree-feller looking for a spring to fill his flask. ‘When I saw the big, dark person who was not from any of the three neighbouring farms, I was so terror-struck I could not move.’ Elsewhere Guillaumin writes: ‘The peasants were always afraid. They didn’t know just what they were afraid of, but they were always afraid of something.’

  ‘That ‘something’, conceived of as the visitation of a spirit or a neighbour’s evil spell, was in reality famine, sickness, absolute want, recurrent realities still for those who worked the soil. Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, most of those who dwelt in the countryside were on the perpetual edge of poverty, entirely vulnerable to a bad harvest, an extra-cold winter, a chance stroke of personal misfortune. The awareness of this is enshrined in songs:

  Dansons la capucine, i’a ’pas de pain chez nous,

  ‘Y en a chez la voisine, mais ce n’est pas pour nous –

  Ahr-rr …

  (We dance the beggars’ dance, there’s nay bread in our house,

  There’s plenty at our neighbours’ but it’s not for us)

  Many people still, in the time of Célestine’s birth, fed and clothed themselves entirely on what they produced or made or could barter locally. Nothing was bought for money but iron and salt, solemn purchases made once a year in November, on St Martin’s Day. (It is perhaps significant that iron and salt, coming by way of the alien towns, were the two things that malevolent country fairies were thought to fear.) Till the late 1840s salt was expensive on account of the notorious Salt Tax which also made its purchase obligatory, but it was nevertheless essential to every household for pickling and preserving food for the winter. Iron was also expensive, and might be thought of as equally essential for farm implements, but even in regions like the Berry, where there were forges, it was something of a rare, special commodity to the ordinary smallholder. Still, in the mid-nineteenth century, the wooden plough on the medieval model, made for and by the hands that would drive it, was in common use, with the addition only of an iron tip. The odd cooking pot, knife blade and needle was bought at long intervals. But sugar, coffee, lamp oil, wax candles, bought furniture or cloth – in the country, even to the relatively prosperous family, these things were exotic luxuries and would be for another twenty years. The long winter nights, sometimes passed in the stables along with the animals for warmth, were lit, at best, by spluttering smelly, home-made tallow candles, more often by scraps of wick floating in pans of nut oil or by the even more primitive pétrelles – slivers of wood dipped in resin to emit a tiny sparkle. Matches were unknown. Fires were laboriously struck with tinder and flint, or reignited with a borrowed clog-full of smouldering cinders:

  Va chez la voisine,

  Je crois qu’elle y est

  Car dans sa cuisine

  On bat le briquet

  (Go to the neighbour,

  I think she’s there all right,

  For I hear in her kitchen

  Someone striking a light)

  England, on a different timetable with different historical milestones, had evolved considerably in the seventeenth century and still more in the eighteenth. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), pointed out that the English agricultural worker commonly had in his lowly cottage all sorts of products from distant countries that had been through many hands. Not so in France, where distances were so much greater and local cultures much more distinct. There the industrial revolution began to transform life for most people much later and in a much more piecemeal way; the difference is still apparent today. Even when it had wrought its transformation in parts of France in the early nineteenth century, the banker Jacques Lafitte complained that these areas were trying to sell their products to consumers who were stuck in the fourteenth century and seemed content there. Moreover, these non-consumers, the rural masses of France, were then the great majority of the population.

  But George Sand had glimpsed the future and spoken presciently, even though the railways took longer to arrive in the Lower Berry than she predicted. When Célestine made her inconspicuous entry into the world, stealthy changes were just beginning to be felt which, over her lifetime, would sweep the fourteenth century away – and the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and even the nineteenth. She and her contemporaries would experience the quiet, irresistible revolution brought about by what a senior French civil servant called ‘the two great motors of civilization’, the spread of roads and railway lines and the coming of education for all. But beyond this, she herself lived on to see the telegraph, the bicycle, the camera, the telephone, the internal-combustion engine, even the cinema and the aeroplane. She saw the occasional car vibrating in the village square and the mechanical reaper clattering in the fields. She heard wireless sets burbling in the cafés. She lived to see her grandchildren’s generation dancing in short skirts to the alien music of a wind-up gramophone. Before this, she had seen that generation forcibly involved in a war of hitherto unthinkable proportions from which many never returned.

  Much of France changed more in the years between 1840 and 1930, or even 1914, than it did during the five centuries before. In our own late-twentieth-century world it has become commonplace to emphasize the speed of social and technological development and to speak as if this were in itself a unique and stressful experience. We are greatly mistaken. The transformation of the world around her that someone like Célestine had to absorb between childhood and age makes our adjustments seem relatively insignificant. A more apt comparison might be between nineteenth-century France and many parts of twentieth-century Asia. The historian Eugen Weber makes the point that, in the years before the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune of 1870–71, much of central and southern France was at the stage of development that we now a
ssociate with the Third World – with Paris in the role of distant, colonizing power. Perhaps, therefore, the experience of Célestine’s generation in Chassignolles can be perceived now by looking at rural India, where local famines have faded away only in the last twenty years, superstitions and customs remain powerful, but roads, electricity, tractors, modern medicine and, above all, radio and television, are at last modifying an immemorial way of life for ever.

  * * *

  The story of Célestine’s life, therefore – which is hardly a story in any intricate sense, just an outline in pencil with details noted in faded ink – is the story of an epic period in recent French history. Uncovering facts about her to add substance to the letters, I realized that what I was also discovering was a social drama of evolution: not so much the story of a woman but of a place and thus of ten thousand other places like it.

  Even confining myself to one village, I have only been able to present in the light of a retrospective day a few individuals among hundreds of possible ones. Their particular, obscure destinies reflect great events or movements that were taking place far beyond their own circuits or conscious experiences: the making of a whole French culture and way of thought that still – just – endures.

  Chapter 5

  When I first began to find out about Célestine’s life I was accustomed to the more centralized record-keeping methods of Great Britain. It did not initially occur to me that the dates I had hunted down among broken shards in the cemetery might be more conveniently available in the village Mairie. I was aware that all births, marriages and deaths in France are registered in this very local way; but I assumed that the town hall registers of fifty years ago, let alone a hundred and fifty, would long since have been sucked into the maw of French bureaucracy. I thought that I would have to go to the county town of Châteauroux to consult them, probably travestied on to faint and unconvincing microfilm like a dialogue with ectoplasm, on which it is impossible to keep track of more than one page at a time.

  I did know, however, that the Mairie possessed a fine map of the Commune dating from 1843, drawn by hand. It is coloured in delicate washes of ochre, pink and green, with the names of fields and outlying hamlets in a flowing script. It is inscribed: ‘Terminé sur le terrain sous l’Administration de Mr. Bonnet, Préfet, Mr. Pirot, Maire, Mr. de Boureulle, Directeur des Contributions directes, Mr. Colsen, Géomètre en Chef du Cadastre.’ So careful and complete was the work of these gentlemen that the present-day map, which shows the dimensions of every parcel of land for legal purposes, is still based upon it and drawn to the same scale. Happily, the Lower Berry has not suffered the remembrement (regrouping of land) in the name of efficiency that has swept away field patterns, and with them memories and history, in much of France nearer to the Loire. In fact there are, if anything, more subdivisions of land now in Chassignolles than there were several generations ago, as a result of the legal Code that obliges families to divide up an inheritance into equal shares.

  The present mayor is also Monsieur Pirot. He is related to the earlier one: all the numerous Pirots in the district are said to be descended from two Serbian brothers who came to France as soldiers of fortune during the Wars of Religion. He had shown us the old map years before, in response to a query regarding our own house and land. Now, realizing that it documented Chassignolles in the very year of Célestine’s birth, I went to study it again with more minute interest.

  Although the speckled woods were then more extensive than they are now, you could still use this map to find your way to almost any corner of the Commune. And yet it is another place that it depicts. The village of 1843 had the same basic shape, clustered round the meeting point of several roads, that it has today, but there was then no Mairie and no buildings on the site of the present café, the baker’s or the post office. Fenced vegetable gardens occupied the place of the cemetery: the crosses of graves filled the space round the church where the road now runs. The small, old houses along the line of the medieval fortifications and the house with the tower were there. But a close examination of most of the other buildings on the map suggested that even though they occupied the same spaces as the present-day houses they were not necessarily these houses. Today the village as a whole looks just old, in a generalized, settled way. But between Célestine’s childhood and the First World War, much rebuilding must have taken place.

  Our own house, for example, is built of local rough stone, rendered, and its pinky-brown floor tiles of fired clay are laid straight over the earth and participate in the changing damp or dryness of the seasons. The walls are very thick, the oak and elm timbers that support the tiled roof were hewn by hand and raised in the same pattern that you find in buildings hundreds of years older. But the fireplace is small and the one main window is a conventionally sized casement with factory-made fastenings. These last details speak of a building not constructed till the latter half of the nineteenth century. On the old map the rectangle marking a house on the site coincides with the position of ours, once you allow for the widening of the footpath into a road. However, the fireplace, as shown by the bulge of a bread oven, is at the other end. I think that at some time in the 1870s or ’80s the building that was here was demolished and the materials were used to raise a new house on the same foundations.

  Modest as our house is, I can imagine that when it was rebuilt it represented a distinct advance in comfort and modernity compared with the dwelling it replaced – huge old hearth, small, glassless window or perhaps just the hatched upper half of the door, like a stable door, to let in the light, beaten earth floor, animals stabled behind a flimsy partition so that their warmth might penetrate the human living space. There are still houses like this in the Commune. But most have today been relegated to farm use, and many more have evidently gone.

  The process continues. The Monsieur Pirot of today pointed out to me that even since I had known the village myself at least three houses on its outskirts had been allowed to fall down and disappear, while others scarcely larger, in carefully ‘traditional’ design with rustic shutters to please the planning authorities, had risen nearby.

  ‘People would rather have a home with a proper damp course and modern conveniences. It’s only natural. And it’s cheaper to build again from scratch, out of the pattern-book. The old materials aren’t wasted, though. They’re sold for what they’ll fetch. Or people just take them, if they’re left lying around, to patch up their own houses.’

  I thought momentarily about the indestructibility of matter – the likelihood that some of the stones the thirteenth-century monks built into their fortifications are dispersed to this day round houses elsewhere in the village. I remembered an abandoned house near our own which had looked solid enough until one year its roof had become a skeleton, stripped of tiles, open to wind and rain. Now, ten years later, all trace of it had gone and the site had been incorporated into next door’s vegetable patch.

  ‘Once the roof’s gone on these old properties the walls just go back to the soil,’ said Pirot equably. ‘They’re just earth and stones.’ The centre of Chassignolles, these days, is ‘classified as a monument’, which is to say Listed, but I discovered soon after this that the municipal council was in a dispute with the Beaux-Arts, the listing authority, about the garage proprietor’s right to demolish one of the last pre-Revolutionary cottages in the street.

  Pirot, the owner of many cows, was less interested in old houses than in the shapes of the parcels of lands in 1843. Casting a practised eye over them, he was able to point out which segments are now in what use. The average land holding in the Commune today is forty to fifty hectares (about a hundred acres) either owned or rented, with many proprietors holding less. Many of the old field names are still current. With some of them – La Grande Salle, Le Champ Rouge – the origin of the name is obvious: the latter pasture still has a vein of iron-red soil across it. Other names speak of uses now forgotten except in this survival: La Forge, La Gitte (the animals’ lair), Le Bute (archery butt
s), Le Champ Galland (the tournament field). Others again suggest lost history: was buried gold once unearthed in Le Champ de l’Or? What was the Roc au Sourd (Deaf Man’s Stone) in the field of that name? And does the name ‘Pendu’ (hanged) attached to both a field and a crossroads indicate the one-time presence of a gibbet?

  Pirot could not tell me. But he remarked that there was a Chêne Pendu (literally, ‘hanged oak’, but perhaps once the Oak of the Hanged) in a wood on the edge of the Commune.

  ‘In the Bois de Villemort?’ I asked. We had sought it out one unnaturally still, balmy day in the dead of winter, when a luminous blue light had shone through the bare branches and crows had clattered among the dead leaves. The tree is so huge that an adult photographed standing beside its trunk appears in the picture as small as a doll. It had not been hard to believe that unpleasant retributions had once gone on in that isolated spot, though it is true that malefactors were not normally strung up in the depths of woods but by roads where passers-by could be impressed by this demonstration of justice received. I discovered later that the only record of bodies on the great oak is of those of eighteen wolves, strung up there after a wolf hunt organized in 1849 when strenuous efforts were being made to drive man’s traditional enemy out of the Berry. The wolves remained unimpressed, for near the end of the century the Bois de Villemort was one of the last places where they were sighted or heard in the area.

  Villemort – ‘dead town’ – must indicate an abandoned settlement, but Pirot knew of no story connected with the name. The only human habitation near that place on the old map and still the only one today is a late-medieval gentleman’s residence: one of those ‘castles’ with a turret or two, an ancient chapel and an external staircase. Here is another hint of past greatness in this quiet place: huntsmen, hawks, hounds – all the vanished pageant.

  On the old map the property at Villemort looks rather more extensive than it is today, with outbuildings that are now only shadows under an adjacent field when the light falls the right way. Similar ghosts of buildings appear round the Bernardets’ farm-hamlet (Les Béjauds – ‘the falcon nursery’) about half a kilometre from the village, and at other outlying farms. It has been suggested by the French historian Braudel that the sites of these well-established hamlets may go back to prehistory; that they are possibly older, in many cases, than the villages which developed later round crossroads and fords. Still, in the first half of the nineteenth century relatively more people lived in the settlements among the fields where they worked and fewer au bourg. There were not so many reasons, in the 1840s, to settle in a village that as yet had no shops, few artisans, no administrative centre but the church, and no school. What turned out to be the golden age of village life lay in the future – in Célestine’s adulthood.