Celestine

by Gillian Tindall

  It is remembered that Célestine, now in middle life, set the tone of the establishment. If a customer showed signs of putting away a great deal of liquor, rather than encouraging him she would say softly to him so that his friends could not hear: ‘Now, mon fils, haven’t you had enough?… Why not think of going home?…’

  ‘… Even though,’ Madame Caillaud added meaningfully, ‘this affected the inn’s takings.’

  Commerce was expanding. The census for the mid-1890s lists in the village in addition to the three inns, two grocers (one still the venerable ex-pedlar’s), three blacksmiths, a baker, several clog-makers, a cobbler, two tailors, two dressmakers (one Mademoiselle Pagnard’s grandmother employing two apprentices), one remaining weaver (the inevitable hard-up Chaumette cousin), two carpenter-cabinet makers, a wheelwright (Mademoiselle Pagnard’s father) and sundry other specialized occupations such as plasterer, post-master and ‘owner of the alambic’. This was a travelling still, which converted the skins and pips of each grape harvest into a fiery liquid known as la goutte. An elaborate blackened contraption of pipes and boiler, it is still to be seen today in November parked steaming ghostily on a grass verge in a quiet part of the village; though the band of people left with the right to make use of it is shrinking every year and no more are being given licences. A hundred years ago it was busy for six months of the year, for every self-respecting local family by then had their patch of vines for their own delectation. The phylloxera plague of the late 1870s was a blow, but it was not the financial disaster in the Berry that it was in areas where finer wine was grown to sell. In any case, in Chassignolles the energetic Victor Pissavy presently organized the Communal buying of a hardier, American strain of plant.

  Meanwhile his mother-in-law, Madame Yvernault, supported by Mademoiselle Guyot and the nuns of her school, were organizing a liberal distribution of wayside crosses. There was a Virgin now too by the cemetery, to keep an eye on a disused loop of old path that had become a favourite stroll for couples on summer evenings. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and hence the cult of the Virgin, had received a boost since Her timely apparition at Lourdes and the development of that small Pyrenean town by the promoters of railway tourism. A shift had taken place since the days when a central character in Le Meunier d’Angibault had complained of the peasants’ superstitious attachment to wayside shrines. Now, it was the well-to-do who went in for cults and symbols, and for the refurbishment of old chapels that were then opened with pomp by Monsignor from Bourges. Religion in France might be under secularist attack but, as in England, it was socially correct. The more prominent Chassignolles households, such as the Graizons (Madame Caillaud’s family), the Pagnards and the Robins, gravitated towards the Church as part of a lifestyle that included schooling at Mademoiselle Guyot’s establishment and good relations with the Domaine. Yet, overall, unquestioning religious faith no longer held the place in life it once had.

  Fear was in retreat. Many people were still poor – the applications to the Communal benevolent funds show this – but the very fact that the funds existed, encouraged since the 1880s by legislation, was an advance on the past. Prosperity is a relative concept, and the historian who takes a longer view of this period has to note that in the last part of the century France, compared with her European neighbours, was economically depressed – that the prices obtainable both for farm products and for manufactured goods suffered from outside competition. Nevertheless, the perception of the ordinary Frenchman, rich or poor, was that from about the middle of the century the standard of living had begun gently to rise. It continued to do so, with pauses but without major setbacks, far into the following century and indeed almost into the present day.

  By the Third Republic, the world in which you could easily die of cold and hunger, in which starving vagrants roamed the countryside and any stranger or even neighbour might cast the evil eye on you, had passed into history. The brutalized peasantry, direct descendants of the feudal serfs, was largely replaced in popular tradition by the peasantry as the spiritual guardians of France, and now called nos braves gens de la campagne. The Wicked Lord had been replaced by the Pissavy-Yvernaults; the schoolmaster was mightier than the Curé, and the newspaper told you more than the Almanach had. Paraffin and acetylene lamps were chasing away the hobgoblins that had thrived in the dark beyond the rushlight’s tiny spark. Drained swamps, covered wells, disinfectants and respectable earth closets down the garden were proving more effective against sickness than prayer had ever been. Fertilizers, imported seeds, mechanical reapers and steam-powered threshing machines were delivering the earth’s bounty more reliably than religious processions for sun and rain. Even though such processions still continued sporadically in the Berry into the 1920s, there was no longer, by the 1890s, the same need to place desperate trust in the old saints of field and spring. And if magic spells were no longer expected to work in a literal and demonstrable way, then nor was prayer. It is a natural sequence to which no religious leader has ever found an entirely satisfactory solution. More than wolves were driven out by the trains.

  There were other modern inventions that must have seemed more remarkable yet to Célestine’s generation, who, in their own youth, had pioneered the written communication sent by post. Telegrams, at first brought on horseback from the office in La Châtre, had been known for some time. But in 1898 the telephone suddenly makes its futuristic appearance in the Minutes of municipal meetings. This was the work of Louis Pissavy-Yvernault, then in his thirties, and his friend and relation by marriage Paul Dutheil, a regular army officer, later to become a General. Dutheil’s father was a lawyer and landowner and the family occupied the only other ‘big house’ in the neighbourhood. These young men were making Chassignolles an offer that, though generous, must surely come under the heading of enlightened self-interest. The telephone line had arrived in Châteauroux five years before and was shortly due to be installed in La Châtre. To extend it to Chassignolles would cost 100 francs a kilometre – 700 francs in all, which was reimbursable by the State. But the cost of an actual instrument and its installation would be 300 francs, and this sum was what Pissavy and Dutheil were offering. It was not a vast amount to them, for differentials were large, but it is instructive to see what it represented to the ordinary villager. At this period, the annual income of a smallholder or a farm-worker in central France often amounted to less than 600 francs a year – much of this sum notional in the case of the smallholder who consumed his own produce or bartered with his neighbour. Even such a respectable and sought-after job as rural postman paid only 800–1000 francs a year, depending on length of service. Wages were higher in the towns, but so was the cost of living.

  In fact the telephone did not operate in La Châtre for several years more, and I do not know if the offer of a subsidy was promptly taken up in Chassignolles. But certainly ten years later a phone was in place in the Mairie and in the post office premises – also then owned, as it happened, by the Pissavy-Yvernaults. Night telephone calls from one Mairie to another, with urgent instructions to millers to open sluices, helped in 1911 to avert the worst consequences of a flood which rivalled that of 1845, the year after Célestine was born.

  * * *

  In 1904, Célestine turned sixty. Her generation might well have been excused for thinking that the half century just ended, their century, had seen such changes that little more need be anticipated. Modernity, the official goal of progress, had surely more or less arrived and the future could not now hold many more new inventions?

  With the disadvantage of hindsight, one feels daunted on their behalf that the vast further technical developments of the twentieth century, with their attendant capacity for destruction and social dislocation, were only just beginning. But to the ordinary citizen in the early 1900s all technological development had so far seemed more or less benevolent; such dissident views as were expressed tended to be on the lines of ‘what you gain on the roundabouts you lose on the swings’.

  O
ne theme continually surfaces and, after 1900, intensifies: the complaint about the drift to the towns and the threat of rural depopulation. It is true that, from about this time, the practice of the men going off only seasonally to labour in the cities was replaced by a more permanent exodus. Wives tended now to accompany their husbands and find work themselves as maids, shop assistants or concierges. The Guide to Central France quoted in the previous chapter spoke of the boys and girls of the Berry all going off to work in the factories of Vierzon and Montluçon – an anxiety that seems rather overwrought considering that scores of Berrichon villages like Chassignolles were then reaching their peak of population. Another, more subtle version of this unfocused angst expressed itself in complaints that those who did stay on the land were the least able and ambitious of their generation, though this may have been the view from the city and based upon urban values. The alternative view was that even in the country the modern young were too sharp for their own good, and over-interested in fêtes, cafés, billiards and the latest styles in clothes. As the aged central character of La Vie d’un Simple expresses it to a companion, watching young girls coming out of Mass: ‘If they could come back, the women of the old days, those who’ve been dead fifty years, wouldn’t they be astonished to see these dresses?’

  To which the other old man answers that ‘it’ (time and progress) might ‘all go back again’: a countryman’s cyclic image of time.

  In general, at the turn of the century as in 1850, 1870 and indeed in 1920, 1950 and 1990, it was felt that old ways were passing, that folk customs were in decline and that the rising generation no longer respected the traditions of their parents and grandparents. Certainly it was true by then that the young no longer had to sit around in the long evenings participating in these traditions. The old social cohesiveness, born of necessity, had inevitably weakened a little. The young peasant whose father had had to do his courting in the fields and trudged through mud and fords to the weekly market, now had not only the branch-line railway but often a pony and trap and a decent road to use it on. Or, increasingly after 1900, he had a bicycle, that great new aid to freedom. It was during this rural heyday that regular Saturday-night dances (bals) were established, rotating week by week from one village or small town to another. These remained the principal entertainment and meeting ground for the rural young till after the Second World War, and still play an important part in country life. Later reminiscences of them therefore cast a valid light on earlier times.

  Georges Bernardet, born in 1913, recalled the dances of his own youth as some of the happiest memories of a life otherwise spent in incessent toil on others’ farms. When, in 1938, he had inherited a little land of his own and saved up enough to rent some more, he felt able to marry and that was a matter of pride to him. But there was a flaw in his pleasure.

  ‘Saturday came,’ he told me once. ‘The Saturday after our wedding. And I thought, Ah, good, the dance is at St Denis this week. We’ll take the cart down there with a few friends. And then I thought, Ah, merde, I can’t. I’m married now. My dancing days are over. Not the done thing to dance once you were fixed up. But I hadn’t thought about that beforehand, and I’d always enjoyed dancing so much. I felt really put out.’

  Vous n’irez plus au bal

  Madam’ la mariée …

  He and Madame Bernardet, who’d also enjoyed her youth, solaced themselves with late-night card parties – that vestige of the old veillées, where the conversation still tended to turn to the possibility of there being the odd wolf about in the region or of the wisdom of singing in the dark on the way home to keep evil spirits at bay. ‘And then when they turned out into the night,’ Bernardet remarked, ‘they’d be so frightened they’d take to their heels at the sound of each other on the far side of a meadow!… But even if it had been a spirit or a ghost, what then? What harm could be done to us by people who were once just creatures here like ourselves?’ It took more than dead ancestors to perturb him. Dislike of any group was more apt to be expressed by him as a mild, measured contempt, the same for Germans, Communists, gypsies, the rats in the barn and young people who didn’t know what work was. Late in life, however, some of his ideas expanded or mellowed, under the influence of the television documentaries about distant places that he enjoyed. It is true that television has been a largely negative influence in rural life, isolating people of all ages, especially the old and the young, behind their own front doors, but to Bernardet and some others of his generation it has been a belated chance to see and learn things on which their brief schooling never touched.

  Today the old card parties, like the Saturday-night open-air hops on the village squares where the shuffle of feet was as loud as the live music, are themselves seen through a veil of nostalgia. The rural dances that take place today happen in specially hired hangars complete with revolving lights. From hired equipment hugely amplified music fills the night air with vibrations, for one night turning a sleepy village into a vision of the wicked city. And yet … disco dancing has replaced the once-shocking foxtrot and tango just as these once overtook the polka with its scandalous Second Empire reputation. A generation before, in the youth of George Sand, it was the waltz, and the very idea of dancing in couples, that shocked those to whom dancing had always meant folk dances in circles and squares. How great is the real change? When, in the mid-1980s, our son attended a rural bal in the Indre valley, he reported that, in spite of the volume of noise, it was extremely decorous by urban standards. Most of the assembled youth of the area knew each other, many were as ever related, and a large amount of very proper cousinly kissing on both cheeks took place. There was little heavy drinking, since these boys and girls had been accustomed to alcohol at home from childhood and getting drunk has no social cachet in France at any level. Even the presence of a group of young soldiers on leave did not lead to any disturbance. Bernardet would have recognized the atmosphere from his own youth. Célestine would have done so, from the dancing under the stars that rounded off the festivals of her youth once the townspeople and the stall-holders had gone home. What the historian Daniel Halévy wrote in 1907, in the first edition of his ongoing work Visites aux Paysans du Centre, still seems to be true today:

  Progress has taken place, yes – but so what? Past times were hard; does it really make so much difference if they are no longer? To compare the present with the past is to calculate – so much more of this, so much less of that – and happiness cannot in fact be quantified in this way. Comparisons have to call up memories in review. But happiness is a state of mind without memory …

  Many people undoubtedly were happy in Chassignolles by the 1900s, benefiting from just those changes that others deplored. But the era has now, in its turn, assumed the pristine glow of a golden age, the time of irretrievable safety on the far side of a momentous historical divide: in this case, the First World War. ‘Village life was never the same after that war,’ I have been told by the very old. The same perception as their ancestors, perennially discovered in a new form.

  Marcel Jouhandeau, who was born nearby in the Creuse in 1888, did not subscribe to the idea that any essential changes had taken place by the 1900s. He wrote in his memoirs:

  There are eras that are destined to be blessed … The first forty years of the Third Republic seem to me to have been such an era. From 1890 to 1914, how fair was my native place … This happiness was no doubt due to the fact that everyone had received much the same upbringing … From this derived something miraculous: a moral unity, a confidence, a relaxed trust and mutual helpfulness. We all spoke the same language and hardly needed to speak because we understood one another anyway. Everyone shared more or less the same ideas about what mattered … What a delight and a source of strength to have to do only with people you have known since childhood and whose family have done nothing that you don’t know about for the last hundred years!

  How happy such a narrow world really makes everyone is debatable. Lifelong enmities and griefs can flourish in it ju
st as much as peace and security. But nevertheless I do feel that many of the growing population of Chassignolles at that period enjoyed their lives more, for simple, practical reasons, than previous generations did, and more innocently and optimistically than the post-war generation could.

  This lost era will be the first one in Chassignolles not to vanish entirely into myth on the disappearance of its last witnesses. By 1900 photographers no longer had to confine themselves to carefully posed, breath-held portraits such as the one taken of Marie-Rachel in the 1860s, but could take exterior shots of daily life. These were made into picture-postcards, much used in those days for ordinary communications, since telephones were for the rich or for emergencies only. Half a dozen different postcard views of Chassignolles survive, including one of the new girls’ school looking prim and rather forbidding, one of the Yvernault café with the extended family and retainers drawn up in front of it in their Sunday clothes, and one of the Chausée establishment similarly arranged. There are also two of the roadway at this point crowded with decorated carts, men in bowlers and some with musical instruments, women with cottage-loaf hair and figures to match, a boy posing proudly with his bicycle, others in Pierrot costumes, some blurred little girls who hadn’t stood still when they were told to – and several raised umbrellas. People grin self-consciously, others stare dutifully into the lens. The sky lours.

  ‘C’est la Cavalcade!’ Denise Bonnin’s sight, at ninety-two, is no longer what it was, but she instantly recognized the scene as a grand festival organised by Messieurs Chausée and Yvernault in mid-Lent 1912 as an encouragement to business in the village. It was one of her happiest memories. ‘We girls from the school [the religious school, not the new State one] put on a special show, like we used to each Christmas. I was dressed up as a boy with a moustache!’ In more prosaic terms, the two-day fête was only half successful, since torrential rains descended as they do so unpredictably in this region near the mountains, and a planned procession, complete with comic turns, all the way to La Châtre, had to be abandoned.