Celestine (32 page)

The carved and polished oak presses in which all the linen was kept, and which I saw in another house in the village in the 1970s, were, I think, part of the furnishings of the inn and the work of a local carpenter – perhaps of Jean Yvernault, around the middle of the century. But, along with Blanche, the family acquired a couple of spoon-backed padded chairs. There was also a padded
prie-dieu,
the prayer-stool that had by then become an approved article of furniture in a genteel bedroom, and a small padded footstool. Both these were worked in
gros point
woollen tapestry, another refinement which had by then belatedly reached the village. The footstool depicted a small, neat cat, its eyes worked in silk for greater brightness. I have been told that the embroidery of both the
prie-dieu
and the stool were done by Célestine as a gift to her daughter-in-law, and that the stool was intended for her to rest her feet upon both before and after her baby was born.

Zénaïde Robin duly appeared in 1895. The next thing that happened was that Blanche went mad.

That, at any rate, is how the disaster is described in village lore. Today, one might refer to post-puerperal psychosis, which responds readily to medication. Or one might speculate about its having been simply a nervous collapse, with manic features. No one still alive today remembers the baby's christening, even Madame Caillaud was not born till two years later. But a number of people remember having heard about it in childhood: ‘There was dancing; people did then, after a christening. And although it wasn't long since her laying-in, Blanche would join in. And she danced, and she danced and she danced all night – she wouldn't stop…'

‘People kept saying to her, “But you must sit down,
ma chère.
Take a little rest. You'll wear yourself out. Think of the baby…” But it was as if she really couldn't stop. She just danced and danced…'

I am reminded of the bewitched girl in Hans Andersen's
The Red Shoes,
whose feet were condemned to dance for ever, attached to her or not. But this story is simply a latter-day version of ones that had been current for centuries in Europe, of dancing epidemics that broke out, either in the wake of plague or as a result of individuals being cursed. Some sufferers were said to be in a state of sexual arousal; some, in the tradition of classic schizophrenia, heard voices urging them on; while others apparently believed continual dancing to be a protection against sickness. As late as the seventeenth century, in Basle, a servant girl is reported to have made herself ill by dancing for a whole month. ‘She ate and drank but little, but danced continuously till she had wasted all her strength and had to be taken to hospital, where she was cured.'

The fact that Blanche's first disquieting episode took this form may be fortuitous, but it is also true that individuals ‘go mad' according to the traditions and preoccupations of their particular society. Dancing, as I have said, occupied an important role at that time in the life of the village young, and the Chaumette-Robin inn possessed the village dance floor. The fact that a married woman, newly delivered of a child, should choose to assert herself by frenetic dancing hardly augured well for the future happiness and stability of the marriage.

Blanche recovered – but relapsed. Over the next few years this became a pattern. Presumably the Robin family tried to keep her away from dances, but I am told she would sometimes become ‘quite wild', would talk incessantly and have ‘strange ideas' – unspecified, perhaps for reasons of delicacy.

She does not appear to have received any treatment for her condition, not even the soothing bath-cures that were all that medicine could offer then besides opiates. Indeed, where would she have gone? Twenty years before, in an unprecedented move, the Préfet of the Department had asked the Commune of Chassignolles to contribute to the support of one of their fellow-inhabitants who had had to be confined in the madhouse in Limoges, but he was there because he was said to be
aliéné
– ‘beside himself' – and beyond the control of his family. The ordinary hospital in La Châtre, the ancient religious establishment that put babies out to nurse, was small and rudimentary, a combination of orphanage, infirmary for simple physical injuries, and refuge for the destitute old. By the 1890s large, purpose-built asylums were rising in the French countryside as they had a little earlier in Britain, but there was none in the Lower Berry and in any case such places were merely for care and shelter. For anything resembling treatment Blanche would probably have had to go to Paris. There, at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Charcot, the high-profile pathologist and mentor of Freud, had pioneered the idea of hysterical ailments; ‘neurasthenia' was now a fashionable concept. However, the whole subject of insanity had become caught up in
fin de siècle
debates about ‘decadence', the evil influence of cities and the erosion of moral certainties among uprooted people: such causes could hardly have seemed relevant to Blanche Robin in Chassignolles.

At any rate, she stayed at home. Balzac's remark, made earlier in the century, was no doubt still appropriate: ‘Who has not encountered the admirable devotion that people in rural areas show towards the sick, the sense of shame lying in wait for a housewife if she should abandon her child or her husband to the care of an institution? And then again, who is not aware of the reluctance of rural families to pay for the keep of one of their number in a hospital or asylum…' (
L'Illustre Gaudissart
)

When Blanche was in a particularly wild phase she had to be locked in her bedroom. Later, when it became apparent that the situation was not going to improve, part of the stabling at the back of the inn was made into a small garden room for her, separate both from the family quarters and from the inn. Zénaïde, an intelligent and sweet-natured child, was brought up largely by her grandmother. By the time she was in her teens she was sent to board, first in Châteauroux, and then in a convent school in Bourges to become a
demoiselle,
away from her mother's influence.

The choice of Bourges seems to have been merely the obvious one: the town, the old religious centre of France, was full of convents. If Ursin Chaumette was still there, the family in Chassignolles did not know it, but I think it far more likely that he and his weak constitution had been inconspicuously extinguished some time in the 1880s or '90s and that his widow had maintained no contact.

The long-term effects of Blanche's condition on the Chaumette-Robin establishment can be only too well imagined. Pierre and Célestine were in their sixties by now: logic and tradition would have suggested that the day-to-day running of the inn should be progressively handed over to Charles and Blanche. But – to use Jeanne Pagnard's turn of phrase – ‘For the innkeeper's wife to be mad is most inconvenient' (
‘Ça n'arrange rien'
). Although Blanche was indisputably intelligent, and not malevolent, her nervous, intense manner, even in her more peaceful times, put people off. Customers drifted away to the other inns. The Chausée establishment, on the other side of the church, near the Pagnards' various workshops and the corner where the male clientele liked to relieve themselves, had been rebuilt as a four-square, slate-roofed house with proper bedrooms: it now called itself ‘L'Hôtel de France'. Jean Chausée had become the prime organizer of village festivities and was generally considered very go-ahead. He even drove – for a while, till an unfortunate accident – the first petrol vehicle the village had seen.

Business declined at the Chaumette-Robin inn. Its stables were little used now: that is how the space could be spared for Blanche's bower. It wasn't, however, all Blanche's fault, says Jeanne Pagnard. Charles was a good cook: he had been sent away in his teens to do a course as a chef and he had, like his father before him, a pleasant manner ‘at any rate with outsiders'. But, as the only son and sole inheritor, he had been spoilt. And he was lazy as a dormouse. Mademoiselle Pagnard used the word that, in correct French, is spelt
fainéant
– ‘do nothing', but which in the country accent is transformed into
feignant,
which has overtones of pretending to be busy while achieving little.

Madame Caillaud, of the same generation as Zénaïde, also remembers the family well. Her own family, the Graizons, had been on genteel visiting terms with the Chaumette-Robins for half a century.

‘I don't think that Célestine – well, I knew her as Madame Robin of course – ever
said
anything about her daughter-in-law and the way things had turned out. She put a good face on it. Quite right too. But all the same…' Charles, according to Madame Caillaud, was undoubtedly amiable but unrealistic, a dreamer – ‘a little cracked [
fêlé
] himself, actually, as if madness was catching!'

She added a terrible detail. When she was a child, accompanying her mother to church on Sundays, they would usually encounter Célestine. More than once, outside the church, Madame Caillaud saw her mother slip money from her own gloved hand to Célestine's shrinking one with a sympathetic murmur: ‘Take it,
ma chère,
please take it.' It was not the country custom to make such a gesture. The danger of absolute want was still perceived as being too close at hand for general peace of mind. Literally anyone might be at risk, and so most people, in atavistic fear and self-protection, preferred to look away. Perhaps, in fact, Célestine herself would have preferred it so.

To her, the sought-after girl from the prosperous family she had once been must have seemed very far away by then. As far as the two brothers who should have been there to buttress her: gone their ways these thirty or more years. She had, as the implacable French saying puts its,
mangé son pain blanc en premier
– eaten the white bread of life first, so that only the bitter rye remained for her in her later years. She could not possibly have foreseen this.

In the end bankruptcy, the spectre of ultimate disgrace that haunted the French commercial classes of that period, did not quite overwhelm the Robin family, though failure did. In May 1909 the decision was taken to sell up, and not just the inn but all the family property. For several weeks the advertisement appeared in the
Écho de l'Indre:

‘To sell or rent as one Lot: L'Hôtel Robin and all its adjoining buildings situate at Chassignolles, as from St Martin's Day: meadow, vineyard, other parcels of land, garden, stable yard, store house, barn and the hotel business. Apply to Monsieur Robin, at Chassignolles.'

But there were apparently no takers at the asking price. At any rate, the family were still there running the inn two and a half years later, though they may by then have disposed of most of their other assets.

Finally, in 1912, the inn was sold for a knockdown price to a family from Le Magny with the name of Péru. Péru was a blacksmith specializing in farm machinery and his wife had been keeping one of the several grocery stores in the village. It would appear from the table of land holdings that this purchase passed through the intermediary of the Pagnard family, who also bought a building or two by the church to add to what they already owned there. The Péru inn – or rather, café, since the Pérus did not have the ambitions for it that Célestine and Pierre had once pursued – was one of five such establishments now in Chassignolles.

Not quite all the property was sold. Charles and Blanche moved into a small house that had been built in happier times on a site originally acquired by Françoise Chaumette near the gates of the Domaine. It was the house that Zénaïde was to occupy with her Australian painter several decades later. Like most houses in the Commune, it had its own patch of land on which minimal subsistence farming could be carried on. By the census of 1921, Charles Robin was listed at that address as
cultivateur.
They kept no servant, not even a little farm boy.

Célestine and Pierre did not move in with their son and daughter-in-law. In old age, for the first time in their lives, they went to live quite on their own. They returned to La Châtre, where Pierre had grown up and still had relatives, and where they had once run the inn on the main street.

Now they settled in the old town, in a narrow lane sloping steeply down behind the church in the direction of the river. Rue des Chevilles (‘the street-where-pegs-are-made') is one of the oldest in La Châtre. It was there in the twelfth century, and though none of its houses is probably that old several certainly date from the later Middle Ages. Today it has a dilapidated and semi-abandoned air, and it would not have been much better on the eve of the Great War. A retired Chassignolles schoolmaster (another Pirot), who was a child in La Châtre at that time, evoked for me the poverty of what was then known as the
basse ville
– the dirt, the barefoot children, the men who worked in others' vineyards for a pittance, the women who grew lettuces and leeks in their tiny gardens by the river and trundled them around the more prosperous quarters begging housewives and maids to buy. At that time, and indeed till the 1970s, there was no main-drainage in the old town: the dirty water ran from waste pipes under windows into an open drain. Today, this has been remedied and the streets smell clean for the first time in hundreds of years. In the more picturesque corners some cautious gentrification is taking place, but so far the Rue des Chevilles is untouched by new paint, geraniums,
style rustique
shutters or freshly exposed stone lintels.

The reason I know of the move to the Rue des Chevilles is that I found Pierre Robin's death recorded in the town hall in La Châtre. He did not long survive the departure from Chassignolles. His occupation was given as
vigneron
– vineyard worker. He was seventy-seven years old.