Celestine (3 page)

In old age, when he had retired from the heaviest farm labours, Bernardet softened his work ethic to the extent of adding a few flowers among the regimented vegetables in our garden. He had always, till then, regarded flowers as ‘the wife's department'. A hedge of pink escallonia that we planted ourselves particularly took his fancy, and in the early summer of 1988 we received a letter from him that for once conveyed no practical message but simply told us: ‘your primroses [
vos prime verts
] are a marvel to see.'

It was to be the last year he saw them.

*   *   *

Bernardet, though unique in his way, was in many respects a far more typical inhabitant of the village than were Célestine and her descendants. He and his family and his shadowy ancestors belong to the great but largely silent tradition of French peasantry, those who ‘come; and till the soil, and lie beneath', but whose anonymous presence is still widely perceived in France as the country's moral foundation. He figures here not just for his own sake but as a rural norm against which the different, more ambitious and yet more fortune-tossed lives of Célestine and her kind need to be seen.

Chapter 3

You have most likely passed through the village, or its prototype. Anybody who has travelled across the large, beautiful, essentially reclusive countryside of France has been to it, in one of its thousand variants. In the language of bureaucracy, it is the
chef-lieu
of a Commune: the basic, untranslatable unit of French local government that is presided over by its own elected mayor. The Commune is home to some six hundred people, but that includes the population of a dozen outlying farm-hamlets as well.

In the village itself there is a fine church dating from the thirteenth century but much altered since, a Mairie built after 1870 which used to house the boys' school as well but does no longer, and a modern primary school for both sexes constructed out of the girls' school that was the latest thing in the 1900s. There is a diminutive post office, open four hours a day, where a new centralized computer performs manoeuvres to do with pensions and electricity that a few years ago were achieved just as efficiently with handwritten entries in small books. There is a busy garage, another down the road that attends to two-stroke motors and agricultural machinery, a Tabac run by the garage owner's wife as a service to the village, and the café-restaurant. Two other modest cafés have closed in the last twenty years, when their elderly owners wished to collect their trade-related pensions and could find no one who felt it was worth taking on such small businesses; one of these was the place where Célestine Chaumette served customers a hundred years earlier.

Shut now, for the same reason, are the barber's and the forge. The last working horse clopped to his rest about fifteen years ago on the death of his master – similarly shod in name at least, since horseshoes and clogs are both called
sabots.
The thriving baker's shop still works seven days a week, sustaining the French tradition that daily bread should mean just that. When not at his ovens, the baker himself delivers the warm loaves for miles around. Since he and his wife are not getting any younger either, the village surrounds them with a nervous appreciation. ‘During that terrible weather, five years ago now, when it got down to twelve below freezing, do you know Monsieur Mayer
never missed a round?
Some of the farm tracks were quite snowed up, and he went
on foot
to the doors to make sure people got their bread. Such devotion…' In France the baker plays the role taken in England by the milkman. It is the baker who finds yesterday's bread still in the bird-proof box by the farm gate, penetrates the unlocked kitchen and discovers the owner incapacitated beside the stove, or ranges the barns and orchards calling a name till a feeble voice responds from beside a fallen ladder or a toppled straw stack.

There is no grocer's in the village today. Once, counting those ‘in a small way' there were five. A grocer's van from the town calls weekly, trumpeting its horn as it comes to rest in the square behind the church, opening up flaps and extensions in a minor transformation scene that leaves you wondering if the houses around might not embark on the same trick – but all that happens is that customers emerge from doors like weathermen. The last proper grocer's shop, which closed some ten years ago, is much missed. It was almost always open, Madame Démeure having been brought up in the business from childhood and having the interests of her customers truly at heart (said everyone). She was sometimes heard to wail, ‘It's no use my saying I'm shut for the afternoon – people keep coming in just the same', but she must have liked it that way, since she did not lock the door. She sold a great many things: not just perishable and tinned food and cleaning stuffs, but saucepans, underclothes, babywear, old men's flannel shirts, slippers, wellingtons, light-bulbs, seeds, mousetraps, small toys, cards, string, sealing-wax, school exercise books and straw hats. No poisoned wheat for the rodent population, however. That, in deference to the ancient practice of the miller stocking all the grains, is sold at the bakery. And no paper hankies (‘not much call for them here') but good-quality cloth ones along with equally traditional towelling napkins for both infant and female use. In addition, almost anything could be ordered on request from a large catalogue, and Madame Démeure would also take orders for clogs to be made by her husband.

All monies received from any source seemed to be dropped straight through the inconspicuous slot in the shop counter into the drawer that served as an all-purpose till. We never dared reflect on how the VAT inspector would tackle the Démeure establishment. Perhaps the inspector did not dare either, or perhaps Madame Démeure did occasionally do frenetic, summary paperwork behind the scenes. Certainly Monsieur Démeure did not. In the rural tradition from which they sprang, husband and wife each have their own sphere, and his lay out of doors. He always seemed busy there, though one could not quite say what he did. He was a trundler of barrows, a feeder of chickens, a grafter of fruit trees of which he was particularly fond. Some people said:

‘It was the war – being a prisoner those five years. He wasn't the same, after. Affects a person, you see.'

‘Monsieur Pissavy was a prisoner for all that time too.'

‘With Monsieur Pissavy, it's not the same.'

‘I reckon it was Maxime finding, when he did get out, that a ten-franc note he'd been keeping stitched in his clothes all that time wouldn't buy so much as a meal.'

‘That famous note.'

Others simply said: ‘Well, he's a clog-maker by trade, what do you expect? There isn't the same call for clogs today.'

The first time I heard this remark I took it lightly, as it was spoken, almost as a joke. Only later did I come to some understanding of the significance of obsolete skills or outdated experiences lying inert across lives, weighing down what they should have sustained. A larger and more personal capital than ten-franc notes has been devalued in French villages by social changes. And the very idea that a trade, once learnt, is fixed for life, becoming the state of being to which one has been appointed (
état
in old-fashioned French usage) forms in itself part of this antique capital. Until well into the present century clog-making was the trade for which Chassignolles was renowned; the village once had a score of men producing the handy, protective wooden footwear that everyone in the country wore for work and the children wore to school. Business contracted between the wars but showed no sign of actually disappearing, and took on a new lease of life between 1940 and 1945 when shoes became hard to buy. That, however, was its Indian summer. In the 1950s the wooden shoe industry began its terminal decline. Today bunches of them still hang, like fruits harvested and since forgotten, in dusty barns and disused workshops, and in the village street a silence has fallen. No clattering
sabots,
after hundreds of years of them. And no hooves either.

*   *   *

Chassignolles was a local centre for wooden shoes because, in the past, it was surrounded by forests of oak, ash and Spanish chestnut, a vast world unpopulated except by woodcutters, charcoal-burners, and isolated peasants gathering dead wood for fires or minding the hairy pigs that snuffled for acorns in great troops. The very name Chassignolles derives from the old French for oak,
chesne.
Only gradually over the centuries, as the demand for agricultural land increased, was the forest cut back into separate woods and coppices. From locally cut trees there came, as well as clogs, the roof timbers of every house, every stick of furniture, every farm implement, every barrow and cart. A trade in timber also developed. From the seventeenth century on, whole trunks were transported laboriously to the Indre and sent down-river into the Loire and so to the shipyards in Nantes. Thence, as the components of ships, they eventually made their way to India, the Far East and across the Atlantic to the New World.

But as well as being the all-purpose material on which life ran, wood was the only fuel, industrial as well as domestic. Till the mid-nineteenth century, when railways began bringing in coal, it was wood that powered the local iron forges and the workshops making glass and pottery. The importance of the forest as a source of livelihood crops up again and again in the history of the Lower Berry. Still today, viewed from a vantage-point on the edge of the higher, barer Champagne Berrichon to the north, the Indre valley seems hidden in folds of dense vegetation – actually the hedges of the small fields. It is the country which George Sand christened for the purposes of her novels the ‘Vallée Noire'.

Chassignolles began life as a fortified medieval priory, an outpost of the great abbey of Déols by what is now Châteauroux. In the classic way, the monks were driven out and their property sold by the State at the Revolution. The existing small houses round Chassignolles' church form a protective curve that follows the line of the one-time wall, and the largest of them incorporates a defensive turret on one side of its miniature courtyard. The place was fortified because central France had long been accustomed to troubles. In the fourteenth century the English presence induced the state of endemic civil strife now known as the Hundred Years War, and for a while, a rival royal capital to Paris was set up in Bourges, on the other side of the Berry, in what is now the Department of the Cher. The Black Prince passed that way, taking the key towns of Châteauroux and Issoudun before retreating again to Poitiers. On Chassignolles' doorstep, the town of La Châtre was attacked by English troops occupying the nearby village of Briantes, and defended by the Barbançois family who, on the strength of this success, got money from the French king to build a fortress. Fifty years later the war was over and the fortress had been made obsolete by the invention of gunpowder, but its great towers and story-book keep still stand among the quiet fields.

The sixteenth century brought more troubles to the Berry. The Wars of Religion devastated Bourges, where an intellectual Protestantism had begun to flourish, and left much lasting bitterness in other progressive towns such as Vierzon and Issoudun. Fortunately the Lower Berry was insufficiently progressive, even then, to find itself at the heart of the strife, though when an exhausted truce was finally called in 1594 it was under the government of a certain Claude de La Châtre.

After that the focus of French political action moved definitively north to the Parisian basin, leaving the Berry to cultivate habits of peace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries outsiders stigmatized the region as ‘backward', even ‘poor', but these things are relative: the Berry may have lost its position as the wealthy heart of France, but it was still much more fertile and quietly prosperous than the vast, mountainous regions directly to the south. Its population remained stable, with almost as many ‘hearths' (households) recorded near the end of the Wars of Religion as there were two hundred years later shortly before the Revolution.

The national events of 1789–94, with their permanent, emblematic effect on French consciousness, seem to have had remarkably few immediate repercussions in the area except for the departure of the monks. No heads rolled. A few aristocratic landowners were chased away too, or thought it prudent to retreat, but a number of them insinuated themselves back fifteen or twenty years later by repurchasing confiscated property through proxy names. Some, adopting semi-rustic clothing, even took up farming themselves, inconspicuous and scattered versions of the gentleman-farmer on the English model. Other holdings were acquired by the tenant farmers on the spot, whose social aspirations were rising to meet the standards prevailing among the newly impoverished gentry. So, one way and another, most of the fields remained in the charge of those who had always looked after them and certainly had no desire to see them ‘redistributed to the people'. In any case, that part of France always had a large number of small farmers,
petits propriétaires,
scratching a living. The theory that the Revolution gave the land for the first time to those who laboured on it hardly applies in the Berry. But it is a potent idea, here as elsewhere in France, and has encouraged a peculiarly French and literally grassroots form of Communism.

More than in any other European country, perhaps, national political orientation in France continues to follow the lines traced by history and now mossy with age: peasants against nobles, teachers against priests, regions against central government. The basic historical myth in the Berry is of a people rejecting outside interference (‘outside' being anywhere beyond the confines of the old province) – yet, paradoxically, priding themselves on a background of cosmopolitanism due to the waves of different people that have passed by.

‘So the English have come back to claim their own?' a neighbour suggested mockingly to us in the first year, when we were still objects of mild interest and surmise. (This unspectacular countryside is far from the touristic circuits of the Loire, Lot and Dordogne and Provence: a foreign house owner was, and is, a rarity.) To my look of enquiry, he explained: ‘The English were here before, you know. Your kings were kings of Aquitaine too, in the olden days. There's a draper in La Châtre called Langlois – well, he's retired now, the old man has, but do you know you can still see he's an Englishman? The dead spit of your Winston Churchill.'