Celestine (10 page)

Madame Aussir's husband once made us an oak stool, and I used to visit her in her spacious, warm kitchen where the elderly farm-workers of Chassignolles would sit imbibing in a row. In its grander days the café, under the name Hôtel de France, had developed a formal front room for customers, but the old men preferred the warm kitchen. ‘They just pick their chairs up and bring them in here,' said Madame Aussir in tolerant despair. Afterwards they would line up in the dark outside to relieve themselves against a stone cornice so encrusted with greenish lichen that it must have served this same purpose for generations. There was a public lavatory just on the far side of the war memorial, built by the Commune in an access of Socialist hygiene about 1968, but the old men preferred the traditional spot.

Some used to frequent the establishment round the back of the church also, along with schoolboys with money for lemonade and table-football in their pockets, but it was clear that this Chauvet café was running itself down, subsisting quietly until its proprietors could take their formal retirement. About 1980 it closed its doors. I rarely went in there, for in those days I had no idea that this was the one-time Chaumette inn.

It is built so close to the church that there is barely room to drive a car in between: I have been told that there was once – ‘Oh, long ago. I've only heard tell' – a stone archway at that point connecting the two buildings. The inn is the obviously ancient, irregularly shaped house that appears on the map of 1843, but it has been enlarged and altered several times since. Not till I got inside it again, which was years after it stopped functioning as an inn though its bar still stood ghostly in the front room complete with ageing liqueur bottles, did I learn from Monsieur Chauvet that the house had been there ‘in the time of the monks'.

From him I also heard that it had had a vaulted outside staircase of fine stone, roofed with tiles, leading to a large attic room where wedding receptions and the like were held. This distinctive feature, known locally with an impressive disregard for chronology as a ‘Saracen staircase', allies the building with the fifteenth-century private mansions in La Châtre and with the ‘castle' of Villemort. The attic, converted to bedrooms, is still there. The staircase, however, was pulled down by Chauvet in 1946 when he wanted to renovate the place.

‘I was rebuilding the main café-room entirely then, you see,' he explained with a hint of apology which suggested that he might, today, have spared the staircase. ‘The ceiling was so low – great, black old beams. Made the place so dark.' He is a small, stocky man but he raised a hand to indicate a height barely above his own head. There, under that vanished low ceiling, several generations of Chaumettes ministered to the needs of the village. I also, for a reason that will become apparent, believe that for many years before the Mairie was built the Council held their meetings in the attic up the stair.

The whole house is roofed today with the neat slates of the late nineteenth century, but at Célestine's birth it had wooden shingles or thatch. A great many of Chassignolles' houses and barns would originally have been thatched, but so many fires started in their roofs and went on to consume entire properties that a series of prefectural regulations were passed which gradually excluded the use of thatch. So, in an uncharacteristic quirk of modernity, the thatched cottage passed away from central France where it had once been as common as in rural England.

The Chaumettes also owned property in the run of smaller houses and one-time workshops on the far side of the church, the buildings that follow most clearly the curve of the original monastery-fortifications. Here, by one of these mouselike dwellings whose floors lie well below the level of the present roadway, is another outside staircase – a modest wooden one this time. In this house, Célestine's mother died.

She was an Anne Laurent. She came from Nohant, George Sand's village, and her occupation in the Marriage Register of 1838 is given as
‘bergère',
shepherdess, thereby completing the fleeting mental image of her and Silvain-Germain as characters in one of George Sand's rustic idylls. I know that she eventually died in that house rather than in the inn across the way because I was told so by the present occupant. Mademoiselle Pagnard has been for many years the chief repository of Chassignolles lore. In childhood she was an admiring younger-sister figure to Zénaïde Robin, Célestine's granddaughter, and she liked to talk about Zénaïde, whom she felt had had a more adventurous life than she herself had.

‘Zénaïde's great-grandmother died in this very room we're sitting in,' she remarked to me conversationally one day. ‘Of cancer of the breast, poor woman. She tried to treat it by putting a slice of best raw steak on it that she got from the butcher. People believed, in those days, that that was what you did to draw a cancer out; it would feed on the steak so not on you. They didn't go in for doctors much, then.'

She spoke with such authority that at first I assumed she had seen with her own eyes the desperate lady in an unbuttoned linen camisole, applying the unaccustomed luxury of butcher's meat to a white bosom defaced by an ulcer.

‘I don't know,' Mademoiselle Pagnard continued, musing, ‘how long the meat was supposed to stay there. It would have Turned, of course … Perhaps it had to be renewed regularly? Expensive, if so.'

‘And it couldn't have worked.'

‘Of course not. Made things worse, if anything. Maggots and so on.' (
‘Les vers se sont installés.'
)

‘How simply awful.'

‘Yes. Well.' Herself a brisk survivor of one modern operation for cancer, Mademoiselle Pagnard explained with an echo of horror in her voice from another time: ‘They thought so too. They called it the Evil Sickness.' (
‘Le mauvais mal.'
)

Only later did I realize that the death of Zénaïde's great-grandmother, even if it took place at an advanced age, must date back well before Mademoiselle Pagnard's birth. In fact it occurred in 1884. But to Jeanne Pagnard the personalities and actions of those who inhabited her world before she did, walking on the same stones, sleeping under the same rafters, have always been as real as the events of her own long life. Another of those she cannot have known in person, but presented to me just as if she had, was her own great-grandfather on the maternal side, François Chartier, who was Chassignolles' earliest shopkeeper. If, as she agreed with me once we got down to dates, her own parents were born in the 1870s and her grandparents (roughly the same generation as Célestine) around the middle of the century, then the entrepreneurial Chartier was, like Silvain-Germain, born during or just after the Napoleonic wars and, like the innkeeper, made the most of what the time might offer.

In the 1850s he set up as a travelling grocer, the forerunner of the modern vans. That is to say, he used to walk into La Châtre to buy his stock and then trudge with it in a pack round the countryside. As this was the period when such extras as sugar, spices, candles and even chocolate and coffee were beginning to be appreciated on the more prosperous farms, his enterprise was opportune. Later – I afterwards confirmed from the census records that this was in the early 1860s, just as Célestine had grown to womanhood – he opened his village shop.

‘See that little place at the end of the run that's empty now and got a great big poster on it for a supermarket? Yes, beside where the elm used to stand before it was cut down…' It was here, in this miniature, dimly lit dwelling more like a stable than a house, that he carried on a business that thrived and continued to do so even when competition came. Although he was illiterate, he kept accounts in picture code, thus reinventing writing from first principles. ‘He was canny,' said Mademoiselle Pagnard. ‘Sugar came in triangular loaves in those days, like small pyramids – you had to break bits off. Well, often people couldn't afford a whole loaf, they just wanted a little. So my great-grandfather used to break it up, and he charged a little less for the bits from the bottom of the loaf because they weren't quite so sweet. People knew and they came to him for that. 'Course, he charged other customers a bit more than the standard price for the pointed bits that were the sweetest.'

The progression from itinerant packman to shopkeeper typifies what was then happening for the first time all over rural France. The trade of pedlar went back hundreds of years. In the centuries of little or no communication between one
pays
and another the pedlar was the only source of news, a breath from elsewhere. A sighting of the solitary figure, bent under his pack, moving at the field's edge against a line of trees, brought the children of the farm running and the women from kitchen and cow-shed. It has been suggested that much of the peddling that went on was not especially lucrative, but it gave the chance to see the world to men too restive by nature to be content with the deadening rhythm of the fields. It might also provide a boy from a poor home with a pretext to seek his fortune, leaving the family with one less mouth to feed. But peddling, like all adventures, could be hazardous. Some men became victims of criminal assault on lonely roads, or were attacked by wolves or drowned in flooding rivers or were found dead of exposure in the winter snows. Others drifted into crime themselves or descended to begging. Begging was long a feature of the French countryside, and sometimes it took on a menacing aspect.

The poorer peasants, locked in the struggle for sheer survival with their annual purchases of iron and preserving salt, may not have had much use for the pedlar's wares, but there were always more prosperous families to be tempted. By the nineteenth century, in spite of Jacques Lafitte's discouraged remark about half of France still being stuck in the fourteenth century, the demand for made goods was inconspicuously growing. A description of the contents of one pedlar's pack at the time of Célestine's birth lists thread, cotton, quantities of needles, pins and buttons, thimbles, scissors, hooks-and-eyes (a newfangled extravagance), ready-made braces (ditto), knives and combs. There were also more frivolous items such as snuffboxes and ‘Limoges ware' (small, decorative china boxes given as keepsakes), and cakes of soap. Other records mention pencils, penknives, quills and notebooks, for those whose skills now extended to the keeping of accounts, in pictures or otherwise.

Reading matter and religious pictures were also staples of the early-nineteenth-century pedlar's trade, along with religious medals and chaplets. The books were usually little ‘Almanachs' bound in blue paper: they contained a mixture of religious and folk aphorisms, home remedies, hints on etiquette of the Don't-belch-at-table variety, potted histories, descriptions of famous trials and fairy tales. It was from such books that people like Pirot the Mayor and François Chaumette became acquainted with the alphabet. (France being a Roman Catholic country, there was never the encouragement to Bible reading that characterized Protestant rural life in England.) Earlier, the Almanachs were called
grimoires
(grammars) and contained both prayers and spells: they seem to have been acquired as talismans even by households where there was no one who could decipher them.

The construction of some new main routes in the later eighteenth century and under Napoleon was done for nationalistic reasons, not with the aim of benefiting the regions through which they passed. They did, however, make it possible for pedlars to go further afield more safely and to get their goods from more widespread sources. Troops of pedlars were organized by masters in the towns. By the 1840s it had even become possible for them to deposit their takings safely in savings banks in the main towns on their route, rather than running the perpetual risk of being robbed for the cash they carried.

But that was the Indian summer of peddling. The same advances that made life easier for the solitary trader with his pack ended by making him obsolete. Country footpaths were widened into tracks for carts which could carry more goods more easily. Shops multiplied in the towns. In La Châtre, the Pissavy family, who had set up to sell cloth from the Auvergne after the Napoleonic wars, and who at first sent pedlars with bolts of it all over the Berry and the Touraine, found by the mid-century that they could deal more profitably by acting as wholesalers selling to traders in fixed premises. By the later part of the century the men on the country roads with packs or baskets were still selling their wares, but those from afar were now more marginal, gypsy-style figures – chair-caners, china-menders, illicit sellers of non-Government-manufactured matches done up to look like cheeses. The more regular and respectable sellers on the road were now, like Mademoiselle Pagnard's great-grandfather, local tradesmen making deliveries: the village shop had been born.

*   *   *

Jeanne Pagnard was described to me by a contemporary as ‘the daughter of peasants – but rich peasants'. The family had been in the wheelwright and saddlery business. When I first got to know her I called her ‘Madame', assuming that the elderly man I saw coming and going from her house, wearing clogs and accompanied by the last working horse in the village, was her husband. In fact he was her brother. Another brother had died before we came to the village, and this younger one was to drop dead of a heart attack in her kitchen a few years later. The three Pagnards had all been born between 1906 and 1910 and none had ever married. Perhaps they had seen enough of the financial and physical burdens of large families in their youth to be wary of marriage, or perhaps the three of them simply felt complete in themselves: they lived together all their lives. After her second brother's death, Mademoiselle Pagnard (as I now knew her to be) became more confiding. She has always had the capacity to make friends, and now she missed her lifetime's companion.

‘People say, “After all, losing a brother isn't quite like losing your husband,” but for me, at my age, it has been exactly like. Being alone … From time to time an idea passes through your mind and you want to share it. But you can't go knocking on someone else's door just with an idea, so if there isn't anyone on hand it just goes away again and is lost…'