Vous goûterez délicieux jambonneaux …
Madame Raveau was currently running the inn which had once belonged to the Chaumette-Robins and would be bought after the second war by Mesmin Chauvet, he who demolished the outside staircase.
Où vous pourriez bien vous désaltérer,
Bureau de tabac, cigares et cigarettes,
Du bon vin gris, c’est chez la Mélanie …
Mélanie, estranged wife of Jean Chausée, was now running the Café-Tabac. The Hôtel de France had passed to the Aussirs.
Presented with this picture of the village as a hive of traditional labour and home-grown produce, it is rather a relief to find that the second half of the refrain introduces a sudden riotous whiff of the Twenties:
Allons, les choeurs, suivez notre cavalcade
Et apprêtez-vous à charlestonner,
Dans dix minutes on va rentrer au bal,
On va guincher, on va black-bottomer.
So even villagers in central France were not unaffected by fashions from the far side of the world, though I wonder how literally they charlestoned and black-bottomed? And to what? A tinny jazz record by then, perhaps, on a wind-up gramophone? Somehow I cannot quite imagine Bernardet throwing himself into that, dancer though he was. An athletic waltz to an accordion, perhaps, back erect, cap well pulled forward.
When the song was reprinted, the Mairie got someone who remembered 1929 well to add a few notes. These ended with the remark that, although work was long and laborious, ‘people took plenty of time off for living; there were a good number of jokers and skivers [farceurs]’.
That too comes as a relief after the stated conviction of many of today’s elderly that ‘the young don’t know what work is’. It also has the ring of truth. Charles Robin, complete with mouth organ, hunting horn and abandoned skill as a chef, fulfils well the description of a joker who took time off to live.
* * *
Long before Charles and Blanche had declined into their final role as village oddities, their daughter Zénaïde had left the Berry to embark on a life elsewhere.
The original idea behind her boarding-school studies in Bourges was that she should become a teacher, the classic route into middle-class society for the bright boy or girl. However, once grown up, she went to work in Paris, dans l’administration, the vast, fusty womb of French governmental bureaucracy.
It seems, on the face of it, a choice hardly comparable with Raymonde Vincent’s break for liberty in Paris at the same period, but appearances may be deceptive. I do not know that Zénaïde ever embellished her income and her life by modelling for artists, but I would not be surprised; she was a handsome girl and is alleged by those who remember her to have ‘moved in bohemian circles’. Paris between the wars, with the cosmopolitan liveliness of its boulevards and the traditional working-class culture still intact in its cobbled side-streets, was one of the better places on earth in which to live. It was a city in which baths were a middle-class luxury but in which a furnished room could be rented for next to nothing, and anyone in regular employment could afford to eat the set meal in one of the innumerable family restaurants. Zénaïde spent many years in a little flat in the ancient Place Dauphine on the Left Bank. With an individual flair that seems to presage the 1960s rather than reflecting her own era, she decorated it with genuine antiques and small pieces of mirror-glass set in patterns. She never married, but I am told she had various gentlemen friends – ‘la belle vie, quoi?’ The women who stayed in the village, hands reddened and swollen by a lifetime’s work, are half censorious, half indulgent.
‘Ah, she was a very nice person, Zénaïde, kind, warm, good fun – but a little dotty, not really a good-wife-and-mother type. She was more of an intellectual. And eccentricity ran in the family, as you know.’ Jeanne Pagnard speaking. She herself actually visited Zénaïde in Paris, which was a mythical place still to most of the citizens of Chassignolles between the wars; but then trips to Paris ran in her family, following the tradition set by her emancipated grandmother.
Another who stayed with her, rather later, after the Second World War, was a boy of ten. He was her distant cousin from the Yvernaults of the inn, who had intermarried with the Chaumettes a full hundred years before, though in the family the precise nature of the connection had been lost. He wrote to me:
‘She was a dreamer, affectionate, dynamic – a person out of the ordinary. I was very fond of her; her open-mindedness [son esprit libre] was like a breath of fresh air to me … She let me go about Paris on my own just as I wanted to, which brought home to me for the first time my own need for independence.’ Today that village boy is a university lecturer.
Another child’s testimony to her, still more long-range, has reached Chassignolles. One day in the early 1990s a well-dressed lady ‘of a certain age’ called at the Mairie and revealed that she had been a refugee child in the village during the war. She was passing through the Berry with her husband and wanted to see again the house where she had stayed, which she could only locate by describing its owner: ‘Zéna I called her … A wonderful person, so kind and such fun … I really have a golden memory of those months.’
I think this must have been in 1940 after the fall of France, when Zénaïde, in common with a great many other Parisians, retreated to their country roots for a while. Her parents had died some years earlier: she had kept their house, by now a packed repository of vanished lives.
According to Jeanne Pagnard, who vaguely remembered the little girl, she was the child of Zénaïde’s current gentleman friend – ‘Not a born Frenchman, no, I don’t think so. No, I don’t know what happened to him…’
Zénaïde met her post-Impressionist painter, whose name was Norman Lloyd, during the Liberation of Paris four years later. By one of those turns of fate that seem to transform the random nature of life, he led her back again to her rural origins, for his own stock in trade was not Parisian streets but landscape. Though he was always referred to in Chassignolles as ‘English’, his childhood roots lay in the space and light of Australia, which he had left for good as a young man to fight and be wounded in the previous war. After 1944, he came with Zénaïde to Chassignolles for the holidays, and after several years he took to spending summers in the place even when she was not there. He it was who built on the makeshift ‘English-style’ bathroom, added the blue-painted veranda and trellis and embellished the front garden further with a cactus and pampas grass. A new side gate was installed, with a ship’s brass bell that jangled and could be heard in the back, and in the end wall above the beehives bits of mirror were set in a pattern.
Charles Robin had not made very old bones. According to the family grave, he died in 1934, not yet seventy. His death does not, however, appear in the Chassignolles register for that year, nor in La Châtre, where relations on his father’s side were still living, nor yet in Châteauroux, though he is known to have been there in the care of the nuns around that time. He is remembered singing a potato-pickers’ song at a Christmas party. So exactly where he was at the end is a small mystery. It was an era when, in the country, most people still died at home – but where indeed was home, with his only child far away in another life? The mould was broken. The Chaumettes, once so numerous in the village, were all gone. If Blanche survived him, she would hardly have been capable, by all accounts, of caring for him in his last illness, but I think she may well have been dead herself by then.
I do not know because her name does not appear in the Chassignolles Death Register either, for any year in the 1920s or ’30s. Nor does she figure on the gravestone. For some time I believed that, as she got madder and her husband declined in vigour, some of her relatives must have appeared from elsewhere and mercifully reclaimed her. Perhaps they did – but she cannot have gone far, for in death she was returned to Chassignolles to lie with the family to whom she had caused so much inadvertent harm. Both Monsieur Chauvet and Monsieur Aussir were adamant that she was ‘down there too’.
‘Are you sure? Her
name’s not there.’
‘’Course I’m sure. They’re both there. I helped carry her to the cemetery on my shoulders. That was how it was still done, then.’
‘I should say so. It was me who made Blanche’s coffin. A big coffin for a big fat woman.’ Monsieur Aussir. He added casually: ‘The cemetery’s full of my handiwork, you know.’
The shiny black plaque, which now lies broken in the dust, was engraved all at one time, replacing various earlier inscriptions whose indecipherable traces still faintly mark the stone.
It can only have been put up after Zénaïde’s own death in 1954 because Zénaïde is on it. The initiator was almost certainly Norman Lloyd, he who inherited the small house and all the hoarded family chattels that it contained. So the stone commemorates not so much the actual bodies who lie there – Silvain-Germain, Zénaïde’s great-grandfather, is mentioned though the cemetery did not exist when he died – but rather those whose memory was revered and had been handed down.
It would seem that, over the years, Zénaïde had spoken to her companion of her grandmother Célestine. She must have spoken too of Célestine’s by then mythical father, first innkeeper, first Secretary of the Mairie, but she did not much mention, it seems, her own mother. Whether poor Blanche’s name was ever, briefly, on the grave I do not know. But after Zénaïde’s death from cancer of the breast (a repeat of Anne Laurent’s seventy years before) the outsider who was the one person left to preserve her memory simply omitted Blanche from the record. This fact is in itself an eloquent comment.
* * *
But what of Célestine’s last years?
Because the packet of letters from her distant youth had surfaced in the small house, I assumed for a long time that she had returned to live there in her widowhood with her feckless, ageing children. She is certainly remembered appearing in Chassignolles in the years after the Great War, wearing the white cap tied with ribbons beneath the chin that by then most women had abandoned – mistakenly, one might think, for it was a becoming article of dress. But Jeanne Pagnard was adamant that she did not live in the village. ‘Oh no, not with Blanche!’
Sure enough, the Chassignolles census for the period does not list her. I found her in 1921 in La Châtre, still in the Rue des Chevilles, where Pierre had died in November 1914. The alley had declined further during the years of the war. The roofer and the clog-maker who had been there earlier had moved on, several houses were derelict or used for storage. Célestine was one of only three inhabitants, all old women, each living on her own. One, of seventy-three, is described as a ‘servant’ and another of seventy-eight as a journalière – a casual worker. There was no safety-net then for such marginal members of society. It is something of a relief to find that Célestine, also seventy-eight, is described as ‘without occupation’, but on what did she live? On some relief fund for the widows of indigent licensed victuallers? Or on the charity of her husband’s relatives?
There is, however, a happier note on which to end Célestine’s story. According to both Mademoiselle Pagnard and the Bonnins, she had ‘a friend’ in La Châtre who lived very near by. The word Jeanne Pagnard used for this person was bon ami, the traditional term for companion-lover: she at once corrected herself, but the general message was clear – ‘Of course they were both old people by then, and he was the retired Curé from Crevant! But he was her special friend and they spent their days together.’
So perhaps it was choice rather than absolute necessity that made Célestine remain in that ramshackle street behind La Châtre’s church. Her life had been spent largely in thrall to the demands of others. The passing years had denied her the happy family of descendants she might reasonably have expected and had taken from her almost every advantage she had known in better days; but, like the granddaughter who followed after her, she finally made her own unconventional arrangements. It is satisfying to know that she who had been reared for something better than a life of peasant labour, and who was so sought after in girlhood, was not after all bereft in old age of the company and affection of a suitable man.
By 1931, when Célestine was approaching ninety, her companion had died – it is thought, during the particularly severe winter of 1929. She had become too old to sustain independence any longer and had moved to Châteauroux, to the charity home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Charles was quite without any resources and had Blanche on his hands. There were no other near relatives who could look after her and nowhere else she could go. Her granddaughter had her life and her job in Paris, and even the provincial French respect for family duty did not demand that Zénaïde abandon everything to care physically for her grandmother. It is, however, remembered that Zénaïde, ‘who’d always been fond of her old Granny’, paid for Célestine to have some extras that the Sisters did not provide, including a cup of sugared milk every evening.
Célestine died at last in February 1933. The motor hearse that brought her from Châteauroux back to Chassignolles travelled at a matter-of-fact speed over roads that she had once known as muddy tracks for donkeys and packmen. The few personal possessions she still had with her were similarly returned, and were stuffed into the already-full oak presses without anyone examining them.
Célestine was laid away in the cemetery that was new when her mother was buried there. Her son followed her only a year later. They joined many Chaumette cousins, Jeanne Pagnard’s grandmother, the pedlar great-grandfather who opened the first shop in the village, many Apaires, Bernardets, Pirots, Yvernaults and others, named and unnamed, whose lives and labours and aspirations had gone to form the village Célestine had known, and where she herself had played such a central role over many decades.
Chapter 17
Sixty years have now passed since Célestine’s death, another lifetime of physical change and social evolution. Born to the first stirrings of a new era, she died also on a cusp. Looking back now at the rural France of the 1930s, it seems to us and to the nostalgic survivors of that period that the intricate, well-peopled structures of traditional country life were then still intact, the archetypal world that we have lost. And yet the number of cars on the roads was increasing year by year, the first tractors were appearing on the bigger farms, the wireless and the daily paper had installed themselves even in remote farm kitchens. Planes appearing in the skies above the fields no longer occasioned excitement and wonder; within a few years, another war and a psychologically traumatic Occupation would move France on once again. Combine harvesters, Family Allowances, medical insurance for all, secondary education, television, declining Church attendance, efficient contraception, bathrooms in every home – all these phenomena of the later twentieth century were already waiting in the wings when Célestine took her last ride.
And yet the Chassignolles we first knew in the 1970s still retained – retains even today – much from a far older world. Pictures without date, drawn from the last twenty years, assemble themselves in my head. Because they express survival and continuity, it takes me a while to realize that some of these images in themselves have insensibly acquired the patina of vanished things, absent persons.
* * *
I walk up the road from our house to the village, bound for the baker’s. A thin old woman falls into step beside me, our neighbour. Her husband – he who had once crossed the sea to the Dardanelles and wondered politely which sea we had crossed – died a year or two back. His widow is lonely in her big, dim farmhouse with only her vegetable garden to scold. Too old now to keep goats, she wages an obsessional war against the mice in the shed who eat her potatoes: there is usually a petrified corpse strung up in the cobwebby window like a villain on a gibbet. Its beady eyes are open, it holds a fragment of cheese in its pitiable mouth. Marie D calls it, with satisfaction, a ‘scarecrow’.
‘You’re going for the bread? I’ll keep you company.’ I resign myself to ten minutes of her random reflections on life and mice.
At the next corner we are joined by another pensioner, a man with a trim white mou
stache and a stick, whom at this time I know only by sight. He is in fact Monsieur Jouhanneau, retired postman. Cheery greetings are exchanged, for it is a beautiful spring day with a hint of summer warmth to come and may flowers once again whitening the bare hedgerows.
We embark on a ritualistic conversation about the season being advanced but treacherous, and about the risk of night frosts to the early fruit blossom. Marie D opines that people are at risk too – far too early to think of leaving off woollen underwear: ‘“Pentecôte, découvre côte” – that’s what we always said, wasn’t it, Henri?’ (‘Don’t uncover yourself till Whitsun.’)
The old man assents politely, but I see that inside this vulnerable old figure there is hidden away the strong man, impatient of women’s fussing, that he once was.
Having secured another listener, Marie D suggests they let me go on ahead:
‘Your legs are younger than ours. We can’t walk at your pace. We’re old just now [vieux à présent].’
The old man says: ‘It’s lucky you and I have already been young once, Marie, for it won’t come back again.’
He speaks with a faint incredulity in his tone, as if he, like others accustomed all their lives to the regular renewal of the seasons, finds it hard to believe that his own youth and vigour will not, like the may and the swallows, return.
Henri Jouhanneau, the composer of the Chassignolles Song, tramped the Commune on foot for years with his wallet of letters. Later, when the lanes were better surfaced, he took to a bicycle. Now another postman, another strong young man making the most of a routine job, roars round the same lanes on a PTT motor bike. When in a good mood, he matches the drama of this with a histrionic manner of delivering the mail – ‘Voilà, Madame! Encore une lettre de votre amant.’ He hands a circular for pig food or an electricity bill to a housewife, who may be flattered but is certainly disconcerted to be told it is a letter from her lover. Monsieur Gallant (an approximation to his genuinely dashing name) takes no account of who else may be within earshot. Mademoiselle Pagnard says: ‘Really, he shouldn’t say such things. After all, they might be true…’
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