Celestine (16 page)

Rumours about the prospect of railways began in the late 1830s when the first line opened between Paris and nearby St Germainen-Laye, but that was more of a toy than a serious venture and the commercial implications of railway transport were not at once seen. It was known, however, that in England railways were already proliferating, and it was with English engineering advice and investment that the first proper lines were planned: Paris to Rouen (opened 1843) and Paris to Orléans (1845). Orléans lies midway between Paris and the Berry, so once it was pencilled on the maps the local administration did not waste any time in suggesting that it might usefully be extended southwards through their area.

Not everyone was happy at the prospect. Carters, owners of livery stables and post houses, coach drivers and innkeepers all complained that the iron way would destroy their trade: they seemed to have imagined the railway to be all-penetrating. A condescending editorial in the
Journal de l'Indre
remarked that in spite of the much advertised spread of enlightenment among the people – a sprinkling of schools? more pedlars? more pink silk dresses? – they did not know what they were talking about. Railways, the editorial explained, did not destroy trade but increased it. The writer then rather spoilt his case by saying that it was quite likely, in any case, that the new invention would never actually reach the Department of the Indre.

Railway fever had, however, arrived in Châteauroux in advance of the trains. Large schemes were envisaged. Concessions were sold and share offers were floated. By the middle of the decade the Orléans line was working its way, via Vierzon and Issoudun, to Châteauroux with more than a thousand navvies. These were given free evening classes in reading, writing and arithmetic: more enlightenment, and perhaps an attempt to keep them out of the trouble that gangs of single men usually found. The newspaper published an encouraging article about how the railway was really not more dangerous than other forms of transport but less – even in England, that byword for modernity, though there, of course, the trains ran too fast …

Châteauroux station was opened in November 1847 on what was then an open field site just outside the town; the town soon stretched out to meet it. Each old town, many of them still partly walled at that date, went through the same metamorphosis as the railway reached it with its transforming breath. The station spawned a new suburb, while the ‘old town', with its narrow streets tumbling towards a river that had once been all-important, declined into a purely working-class quarter. La Châtre went through the same evolution a generation later, though it was never transformed in the way the county town was.

Châteauroux opinion was divided between those who insisted that the line must not be allowed to stop there and those who, on the contrary, said that it should remain the railhead. In the same way Argenton, an ancient town on the River Creuse and the next place of any consequence to the south, insisted that they too wanted the railway to reach them, but that it should stop there. Traditional fears and jealousies had evolved but not disappeared. The inhabitants of both the Indre and the Creuse saw the advantages of sending their wine and mutton to towns in the north, but were much less enthusiastic about the possible arrival of cattle from the Limousin to the south. Needless to say, by the time the unstoppable railway reached Argenton (where the station opened in 1854) there were already plans to extend it to Toulouse.

But the Châteauroux to Argenton stretch, roughly following the route of a Roman road, ran through a wild, poor lakeland section of the Berry, far from La Châtre and Chassignolles. Regret at this state of affairs found expression in the Chassignolles Council the following year. With unusual fluency, the Council declared that since the Indre had only achieved one railway line which completely bypassed a large part of it, the Department was missing out on ‘a national movement that is important for agriculture, commerce and industry'. What was needed was an east-west line, coming down from Tours, linking Châteauroux with La Châtre and on to Montluçon and then Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central. Such a link, the Council said, would effectively bring the Lower Berry into a network of communication with the Atlantic ocean on one side and Switzerland and Germany on the other.

I assume that this untypically progressive and cosmopolitan call, which reflected the visions of Louis-Napoleon himself, was passed on to the Préfet in Châteauroux. As a matter of fact, since Chassignolles' mayor, Geoffrenet de Champdavid, was a friend of the Préfet, it was probably instigated by the Préfecture. As to the supposed heady advantages of eventual communication with Switzerland and Germany, at that point Chassignolles could hardly be expected to foresee (Châteauroux did not) that ten years later the iron-smelting industry of the Berry would be abruptly killed off by products arriving by rail from the more up-to-date foundries of the Loire, followed by imports from Germany and Scandinavia.

The idea that railways were an excellent thing, or at any rate something they could not afford to miss, had now implanted itself in the Berrichon mind. For the next forty years, the long-delayed but enticing prospect of the Tours–La Châtre–Montluçon line and, later still, the building of branch lines through other neighbouring towns and villages, provided a constant theme of expectation in the Council meetings. There was even an exciting moment in 1900 when Chassignolles thought it might acquire a station of its own.

*   *   *

In Célestine's childhood, however, the prospect of local trains and indeed the very sight of a train lay in the future. Life was still bounded by the village and wherever else could be reached on foot. Who were the Chaumettes' neighbours?

The most prominent one was the maverick gentleman Louis Vallet, who has already surfaced several times in this chronicle. According to the tables that accompany the map of that period, by then he owned more land in the Commune than anyone else. I imagine him dressed, like the badly behaved Gros Propriétaire in George Sand's
La Mare au Diable,
in ‘half-bourgeois clothes' with a black cutaway above ordinary country riding-breeches. If he consorted as a social equal with anyone in the Commune, it would have been with the Geofrillon-Simon family who appeared from nowhere on the census in the 1840s as the occupants of isolated, ancient Villemort. They consisted of an elderly married couple, a son and two daughters in middle life and a retinue of servants. None of the younger generation had apparently married, but one of the daughters had a six-year-old son called Hubert. Dilapidated aristocrats they may have been, but they must have had Republican sympathies for, in late 1848, after the
coup,
one of them took over as mayor for two and a half years. Vallet also rejoined the Council at this time. Ten years later they were all gone and Villemort was in the charge of a tenant farmer.

Vallet lived, like the Chaumettes, in the centre of the village. Through the land-registry tables I traced him to the old house with the tower and gated courtyard, the only gentleman's residence available. It stands immediately opposite the house that was built as a school in 1848, which explains his objection to that project. I had long been interested in this miniature and forlorn grand house, which was occupied in the middle decades of the twentieth century by a cycle-repair shop and before that by a grocery business. One old lady told me that, as children, they had believed the tower to have been a dungeon where prisoners had starved to death, ‘because we'd peeped in and seen skulls there'. Probably it had been used as an ossuary for the bones that surfaced every time one of the buildings near the church was extended or restored. (Some human teeth from the same source ended up as a lucky charm and
memento mori
in the Pagnard sewing basket.) Other delights of the house include original wooden tiles round the dormer windows at the back of the courtyard and, at right angles to this building, a later one reached by an airy double flight of steps: a charming eighteenth-century pavilion with a whiff of Fragonard and
fêtes champêtres.

So the house contained several separate quarters, and there Louis Vallet led his idiosyncratic existence. He never seems to have married. The first census, that of 1836, lists him as a ‘landowner', with several other members of his household down as ‘servants', including a Jeanne Aussourd, who varied the age she gave over the years but was actually born in 1798, down as his servant. She was a niece of the Aussourd who had kept the registers in the Revolutionary days of Vallet's father, and this man's sons, her cousins, still lived nearby. They were a family above the social level from which servants usually came and it might seem strange that Jeanne was performing this function – but significantly the census lists in Vallet's house two more Aussourds, Colette aged eleven and Françoise aged five, both Jeanne's daughters.

Ten years later Louis Vallet and Jeanne were still together. There is no sign of Françoise at this point (away at convent school?) but Colette was now inhabiting another part of the house with a young husband, and both of them were listed as being on Vallet's staff. As if to throw a genteel disguise over Colette's origins, her
husband's
family name is given as Aussourd, though he may of course have been her cousin.

By 1856 Louis, who would by then have been nearly seventy, had gone, presumably into the earth between his house and the church, but Jeanne was still ensconced in his property and was now styling herself
propriétaire faisant cultiver
– an owner with others working her land, successfully it would seem since she now had five servants. Also living with her was her younger daughter, now calling herself Marie and married to a man much older than herself, surnamed Choppy. Colette and her husband and children lived in another house nearby.

It would seem that Jeanne's inherited property, however interesting its origins, now ensured that she moved in the most genteel circles of village society. For also in part of the tower-house, perhaps in the eighteenth-century pavilion, was a separate establishment consisting of an elderly priest and his even more elderly housekeeper. The census-taker's description of him as
desservant,
mass-server, suggests that he was not the official Curé. Geoffrenet de Champdavid, on his appointment as mayor four years earlier, was keen that the dilapidated presbytery should be put in good order, but evidently this had not yet happened.

The priest and his old lady were still keeping Jeanne Aussourd company ten years later, but by 1872 they were both gone and a very young Curé had come to occupy the now-renovated presbytery (where he soon made himself unpopular). Jeanne remained, withdrawn into a smaller portion of the house, with one middle-aged servant. She was still there fourteen years later in 1886, rising eighty-eight, an independent survivor of a lost age.

I had thought that the picture of her life I had put together would remain supposition, but when I mentioned the tower-house one day to Mademoiselle Pagnard she replied at once.

‘In my grandmother's day it was lived in by a woman who'd had children by a gentleman … A lawyer from the Creuse who came here at the time of the Revolution.'

I told her how pleased I was to hear this, but suggested: ‘Actually I think it must have been his father who came here at the Revolution. Otherwise, he'd have been over a hundred.'

‘If you say so … Anyway, the family came from there.'
Étrangers,
said her tone. ‘I don't recall his name, though.'

‘Vallet?'

‘That's it! Fancy you knowing. Vallete.' She solved the variant spellings by sounding the t. ‘The woman was supposed to be his housekeeper but he left everything to her. She was very well off then. People gossiped, but that's because they were jealous … She had a daughter called Frauzine.'

‘Frauzine? But that's not a name.' In France, then and till very recently, a name had to come from a State-approved list.

‘No, it's not a name! I think she called herself something else later, to be more like everyone else.' So ‘Françoise' was the census-taker's compromise. Elsewhere in the Aussourd family at that time appeared an Angélique, a name that (like Célestine) spoke of social aspiration, and Colette Aussourd's son was called Prosper after the writer and statesman of the period, Prosper Mérimée.

‘I remember being told that Frauzine got most of the money in the end. And as she'd married a gentleman [
un monsieur
] name of Choppy, who was in business and who died and left her all his money too, she did very well. She wasn't, you know, like a village woman at all.'

The name Choppy had been saying something to me. By and by I remembered a saga from a Council Minute book:

‘When they were building the Mairie they needed to buy the site from a Madame Choppy and she made difficulties about it.'

‘Oh yes?' said Jeanne Pagnard, as if she had known all the protagonists and was not going to be surprised by anything. ‘Well that would have been her mother again, you see. She ran everybody. You couldn't tell her anything.' She added after a moment: ‘Everyone knew that Frauzine and the other daughter were from him, the old man, but you couldn't say so. It would have been a scandal.'

We sat there in the autumn sunshine of 1992, contemplating the gossip of some hundred and twenty years earlier.

‘The schoolmaster lived there too, in the tower-house, at one time,' added Jeanne Pagnard presently.

‘Monsieur Charbonnier? Yes, I noticed that.' In the 1870s, Auguste Charbonnier, with wife and baby daughter, had moved into the accommodation vacated by the old mass-server. More genteel company for Jeanne Aussourd, from a time before national education was formally pronounced ‘secular' and a priest and a teacher did not necessarily represent opposed worlds. Both elderly priest and young teacher are in fact mentioned affectionately in the same sentence in a manuscript memoir, written
circa
1880 about the 1860s, that came into my hands only as this book was going to press (but see Afterword).