Celestine (27 page)

At the time of Victor's marriage the family firm in La Châtre was tactfully wound up, having served its commercial purpose in launching Guillaume Pissavy's sons into professions such as medicine, banking and the law. Victor too, once married, embarked on law studies, which in his case were intended rather to embellish his future life as a gentleman of leisure: the young couple made their plans to remodel the big farm in Chassignolles as their country residence. When Marie-Rachel died, Madame Yvernault moved there to take charge of little Louis. He was thus brought up an Yvernault as much as a Pissavy, and eventually added his grandmother's name to his own.

The received version is that Marie-Rachel's death so affected Victor that he never remarried. The fact was that this handsome widower of barely thirty could hardly take a new wife without compromising his inheritance from Marie-Rachel, including the property in Chassignolles, to all of which he was entitled solely as trustee for his son. He was an intelligent and forceful man, and the role of local squire in a time of evolving rural prosperity was far too attractive to abandon: had he not in any case sacrificed a continuing lucrative career in trade to take on this role? He made sure, however, that he retained certain business interests in La Châtre which required his presence there, sometimes overnight. Later, when young Louis was sent to school with the Jesuits in Poitiers, and Grandmother Yvernault accompanied him there to ensure that his delicate health was properly monitored, Victor was able to revert to a more bachelor life and spent most of each winter in La Châtre.

*   *   *

In a wood of oak, ash and larch that forms part of the Chassignolles Domaine's extensive property, a small iron Virgin with a Child in her arms stands on a stone plinth in the recess formed by three tall trees. She is a typical statuette of the second half of the nineteenth century; her pretty, impassive face is commonplace, but her lonely situation invests her with a certain austere power. I have visited her in all seasons: in summer when the woods are green and gold and alive with woodpeckers; on a day in deep winter when the hoar-frost on a spider's web made a breathtaking lace veil against her iron cheek; and again in very early spring when the whole bare wood above the carpet of dead leaves was suffused with a blue, expectant light. For a long time I assumed that her presence was due to some half-pagan cult in this wood that a late-nineteenth-century Curé had Christianized with a new, respectable figure. Madame L, however, believed that the Virgin and Child had been placed there in the 1860s as a memorial to Marie-Rachel.

But, if so, why does the plinth bear no inscription?

Georges Bernardet – who will re-enter this chronicle as it nears his own birth date and the family from which he sprang begins to appear in the Minute books – told a different story and one whose specificity carries a ring of truth. The statue had, he believed, been put there in memory of a boy who was in some way connected with the Domaine. This child had been climbing a tree in the wood after a magpie's nest, had fallen and broken his neck. ‘Not a child of the family, no. I think the Monsieur Pissavy of the time was his guardian, or somesuch.'

‘Which Monsieur Pissavy? Monsieur Victor or Monsieur Louis?'

‘Ah, I couldn't say that. My grandfather, he could have told you.'

Another entire, intricate story, irrecoverable now as last year's dog roses.

*   *   *

But meanwhile what of the forges of Crozon?

After Louis Yvernault's abrupt death in Paris, they were directed for several years by his twin brother with the help of a resident manager. But at that time the local iron trade, which had flourished so in the new industrial area, suddenly began to fail, victim of the very same forces of evolution and change. Just as the new roads that had been a boon to pedlars ended up making them unnecessary, so the proliferating railway lines, which demanded iron for their own construction and carried it to all parts of France, began to bring in iron from elsewhere in competition. Cheap imports from neighbouring countries undercut the product of central France, even though overproduction had already driven down the domestic price. In addition, veins of ore were being worked out and the forests themselves were being cut for charcoal at an uneconomic rate. In any case charcoal-firing was out of date and had elsewhere been abandoned. On the Loire, Henri Martin's coke-and coal-fired forges were turning out a new, superior material – tempered steel. All over the Berry by the 1860s small, undercapitalized forges, which had been working for hundreds of years but could not afford to convert their machinery to use coke, were going bankrupt. As a contemporary wrote: ‘The workshops are shut, the paths are abandoned, the buildings crumble, the teams of workmen are disbanded and the woods grow thick once more … Silence is re-establishing itself in the forests and the villages of the Berry.'

The Yvernault family, or at any rate the Crozon branch of it, saw what was coming and got out just in time. In the same year, 1861, that Victor Pissavy abandoned the cloth business to marry Marie-Rachel, her family were liquidating their own interests and placing the money in land. The forges of Crozon were sold (I was rather surprised to discover) to the Parisian engineer with the Creole wife, who already owned the quarries. Perhaps it was an asset-stripping exercise; at any rate even he could not make them profitable, and in 1868 the furnaces were at last allowed to go out. The night skies were dark now above Crozon. Weeds and water birds colonized the great pools.

The forge still bears that name today and the various buildings stand, not so much ruined as fossilized by time, by more than a century of summers and winters and the endless altered people that have come and gone. The house with the monkey-puzzle is tidy but shuttered; nettles grow in the kitchens of the workmen's model cottages under the broken slate roofs. Straw, sacks, barrels, discarded harrows, a rusty Deux Chevaux and an antique tractor occupy the echoing works. In the yards where the conduits ran and heavy trucks were pushed around on Louis Yvernault's modern rails, chickens and geese wander. The fine seventeenth-century house is smothered in flowering creeper, its hand-wrought roof shingles perilously sagging. It is occupied, more or less, by an elderly couple engaged – more or less – in subsistence farming. The fifteenth-century house next door gapes roofless to the sky, a shelter for rabbit hutches; while the medieval lookout tower on the mound, from which the forge foreman used at one time to observe his workforce in the yard below, has become a territory for goats.

Thanks to the mining engineer, Marie-Rachel's inheritance was secure, but another branch of the family was not so lucky. The foundry in Châtillon, on the far side of the Department, was not sold in good time: in 1866 it was advertised fruitlessly for weeks in the
Écho de l'Indre.
The business went down with many debts, a burden that was to haunt the younger generation for the rest of their lives. A retreat into formal bankruptcy would have been a relief but this they refused, either to avoid the shame or from a highly developed sense of honour toward their creditors. One daughter escaped into marriage, one son emigrated to Minnesota, where he apparently prospered. The official chronicler remarks regretfully: ‘He was on the point of coming back to France in 1890 when he died, leaving no children, and his family in France who should [
sic
] have inherited were unable to recover a penny.'

The other son became a railway clerk with the Paris–Orléans–Châteauroux line, till his mother died and he retired early to live in La Châtre with his sister – she who was ‘lame'. Needless to say, neither of these incidental casualties of nineteenth-century progress ever married. They lived in a cramped little house in a row built on the site of the one-time town moat, valiantly practising what have been described to me as ‘sordid economies'. The phrase implies worn, shiny jackets, mended grey cotton stockings, casseroles of horse-meat, heart and lights, bread always a day old so that they were not tempted to eat too heartily of it … One lamp, never lit till dark had fully come, winter nights made interminable by early bedtimes that saved on wood for the stove … All the entrenched tradition of old-style French penny-pinching frugality that still today, like a necessary shadow, accompanies that other French tradition of abundance, quality and
douceur de vivre.

It was not simply that they were poor relations, though they were. Their aim was to pay back in the end all the money owed since the 1860s failure. They saved and saved, doggedly converting their accumulated
sous
into gold. For the whole of the nineteenth century and even after, the value of gold was unaltered in monetary terms: 290.32 milligrams equalled one French franc, as if the franc was a fixed measure like the metre or the litre. It did not occur to most people that it could be otherwise, certainly not to this pair. The years went by, life changed around them, the Great War came and the right to exchange money for gold was suspended as a ‘temporary', emergency measure. Four years later when the war ended the emergency did not. The cost of living inflated; the brother and sister's resolution remained fixed. At last, one day in 1923, they achieved their goal: every debt was honourably repaid.

A few weeks later France finally abandoned the gold standard, with a substantial devaluation. This meant that the gold with which they had paid their creditors would, if they had only delayed, have been worth far more. It also meant that the annuity they had bought to live on, by selling their one remaining piece of land, was reduced to paper francs, each worth only about a quarter of the precious gold francs that had been used to purchase it.

Two years later they both died, within a few days of each other.

By chance, Célestine Chaumette (who was born the same year as the crippled Mlle Yvernault) was also living then in La Châtre, in two rooms in an old house not far off. She was alone.

There are lives that descend into silent tragedies that, piecemeal and partially hidden, never warrant statuettes or memorial histories, which have no place of honour in family lore, but whose inaccessible pain tugs wordlessly at the heart.

Chapter 13

In 1871, following the establishment of the new Republic, Victor Pissavy became the mayor of Chassignolles and remained so for thirty years. He was no Republican; as the family chronicler circumspectly put it, ‘his preferences were conservative and imperialist', but evidently both he and the village felt that for him to be mayor was befitting. No doubt his dead wife would have thought so too, for from then on he modelled himself on her father, of blessed memory, who had ruled his own Commune some twenty years earlier with a degree of benevolent despotism:
bourgeoisie oblige.

Like Louis Yvernault in Crozon, one of Victor's first acts as mayor was to offer the Commune a religiously-run school – this time a girls' school, the one that was to be organized in her own new house by Mademoiselle Guyot. It was a common pattern in the countryside at this stage: the boys' schooling was coming to be seen as the financial and social responsibility of the Commune, while the girls could attend only an establishment run by private charity. It may seem enlightened of Monsieur Pissavy and Mademoiselle Guyot to want the girls to be educated too, but such initiatives began to run into trouble in the next decade when, under Jules Ferry, the principle was established of secular State education for all –
‘gratuite, obligatoire et laïque',
in the ringing phrase of the time: dedicated anti-traditionalism creating its own tradition, its own glory.

Indeed, by the 1890s, the conflict in France between Church and State was reaching its final spasm before the Church finally retreated to its own separate high ground, taking refuge in the moral and social clout it wielded. In Chassignolles, this national contest found local expression in fervent proposals for the building of a new, non-religious girls' school on the same lines as the boys'. It therefore seems no coincidence that at this time Victor Pissavy was replaced as mayor. A letter of the period to the Préfet from the new mayor, a villager called Appé, spoke of
‘la population républicaine et clairvoyante de Chassignolles'
(‘the Republican and farsighted members of the community') being at loggerheads with ‘the reactionary population' who, he alleged, were campaigning in a way that showed bad faith and disloyalty towards their erstwhile fellow-councillors. It is not hard to see where the nexus of this reactionary feeling was supposed to lie.

The chronicler of the Pissavy family remains silent on this row.

The neighbouring Commune of St Denis de Jouhet, where Victor Pissavy possessed a farm, suggested that he might like to come and be their mayor instead, but he had the grace to decline their offer. He was then in any case in his mid-sixties, though he was to live on at the Domaine, a powerful figure, into his eighties. He is still remembered as having ‘done a lot' for Chassignolles, though the oldest inhabitants did remark to me that he was very careful with his own money – the family characteristic, no doubt, which had made the Pissavys astute tradesmen. After the school affair the mantle of benevolence was assumed by his son Louis. He was gentler in manner than his father and less physically robust; I have been told by one person that he was ‘a bit of a soft touch' and by another that he ‘really loved country people, understood them and knew how to talk to them spontaneously without hurrying them'. He had, of course, been reared by his grandmother, whom he is said to have ‘adored' and whose own memories went back to simpler, less class-conscious days.

Let us return, for the moment, to the 1860s. Once the Guyot girls' school project had been agreed, the cause of enlightenment plus piety found its next object in the cemetery question. The time-honoured practice of inserting the dead into the open land around the church, which was not even a defined churchyard in the English style, was causing unease. Old bones surfaced every time a new grave was dug. ‘It has become impossible,' Victor Pissavy pointed out, ‘to continue burials there without complete prejudice both to respect for the dead and to public hygiene.'