Celestine (38 page)

Could Georgette, I wondered, have been unaware of the S family pattern when she told her tale? But of course Georgette was hardly born when Henri S died, and if his death was accounted an accident … Fatalities in Lavoirs were not uncommon in that part of France, where few people knew how to swim, though most often they involved small children. But the only body in a Lavoir that seems to have made a profound impression in the Bonnin family annals was not drowned. It was old Denise who mentioned it, quite in passing: ‘such-and-such an event was after the murder in the Lavoir…'

‘Murder! What murder?'

It turned out to have taken place in the Lavoir at the Domaine: ‘… It was Sunday, see, and the son from La Vergne [a farm hamlet] had died, so everyone had been to his funeral. They were all coming away from the cemetery, in their best clothes, when someone came running and said there was another body, one that had been found. So we all hurried over to the Domaine land and there, on the edge of the Lavoir, with his legs in the water, was a man. One arm was raised and clenched, as if he'd had a stick in it and tried to defend himself. He was in his Sunday suit too, and I thought, when I first looked at him, that he was wearing a great red cravat tied in a bow. But it wasn't a cravat, it was the red blood that had spread out on his shirt front because his throat had been cut. He'd been stabbed as well.' Denise Bonnin shuddered daintily. ‘After that, for a long time I didn't like going to that Lavoir.'

‘How old were you? I mean, when did it happen?'

She found it difficult to say. It was like her father refusing to drive his cart over his mother's grave: the fact, enshrined in family lore, had become dateless. She thought, on much reflection, that she had still been a child – ‘but big. I'd taken my first Communion.'

So, shortly before or during the First World War?

Further lip-munching reflection produced the thought that it was winter time; snow had fallen and that had obscured the murderer's footmarks. ‘But the man hadn't been killed at the Lavoir. The Gendarmes said he'd been dragged from over by the woods.'

‘Who was he? Did anyone know?'

Denise Bonnin looked surprised at the question.

‘Oh yes, he was known. He wasn't from round here, though. He was from the Creuse. He used to work here sometimes. I think he was a builder.'

‘And who killed him?'

‘Ah, the Gendarmes never found out…'Course, they didn't have all the education then that they do today.'

So, one of that classic out-group, the itinerant labourer from the Creuse. And something in Denise Bonnin's manner suggested to me that, even if the Gendarmes never found out, certain people in the Commune could make an informed guess. She herself resisted further questions and drifted off to another topic, but Georgette said afterwards that she'd always had the impression that it must have been a
crime passionnel.
‘Perhaps the builder was surprised by the husband. After all, the wife wouldn't have told. Would she?'

It occurs to me, also, that far from being concealed this murder was flaunted, as if to make a point. Otherwise, why not leave the body in the wood, rather than going to the trouble to drag it into a public place?

In a society where the theft of a coat from a hedgerow or a pair of shoes from a kitchen could result in a month in prison, a murder should make big news. I looked extensively through the columns of the
Écho de l'Indre,
beginning to wonder if the slaughter of the war had emptied private killings of their power to shock, but it turned up in the end in April 1919: I had been looking for it several years too early, and also too early in the season. The body had immediately been identified as that of a Louis Bachelier, aged fifty-two, from the edge of the River Creuse near Argenton. He was described as a
journalier,
but as having left home the very morning of his death to come to La Châtre ‘on business', which suggests that he was in fact something more than a day-labourer. The item ended: ‘The forces of the law are looking into the matter: let us hope they will be able to throw light on this mysterious death which has, rightly, upset our peaceable district.'

However, as subsequent weekly editions of the paper confirm, the forces of the law got nowhere. The paper also confirms that April was exceptionally cold, with frosts that damaged the blossom on the fruit trees and sudden falls of snow.

Madame Démeure, a brisk twelve years younger than Madame Bonnin, remembered having heard of the murder as a small girl and being frightened several years later when she took the family cow to pasture near the Lavoir on her own.

‘There was one summer evening I saw a man there, on the grass. I thought the famous body had come back, and I ran all the way to the Domaine to get help with my plaits flapping over my ears. I was sure the body was coming behind me! 'Course, it turned out to be just a harvester, who'd lain down for a snooze.'

Madame Démeure dismissed the idea of a crime over a woman.

‘The dead man was a horse dealer, so I've always heard. I think it was a row about money.'

A newspaper article later in 1919, referring to this murder and to another unsolved one near Nohant, reflected darkly on the misdoings of gypsies and on the general need to ‘control the gypsy problem'. It would seem that views on this unsolved mystery relate to the preoccupations of the speaker as much as to the event. But, as someone who'd spent his life in the area said to me flatly: ‘Someone in the Commune, or more than one, knew all about it.'

My own very tentative hypothesis I cannot commit to paper; at least till another full generation has passed to allow the protagonists to drift, like poor Antoine Pirot, away from the proprietary feelings of the living and into the benign indifference of history.

*   *   *

From the eve of the First World War, Charles and Blanche Robin were living in the small house near the Domaine that had been saved from the wreck of the family fortunes. It came as something of a relief to me to hear that Charles remained polite and cheerful on the whole in spite of everything, and indeed was known as ‘a bit of a card', a skilled player on the mouth organ and other instruments. Monsieur Chauvet, who later bought the inn that Charles should have inherited, remembers him standing up on the outside staircase with a hunting horn, piping the harvest wagons home.

‘What did he actually do in life?'

‘Do? Well, he took things as they came, didn't he? He always did. That was just it.'

Perhaps, for a man indissolubly linked to a mad wife, such an apparently feckless attitude was the most intelligent one he could have adopted.

In spite of his reduced status as a
cultivateur
Charles still had genteel aspirations. He laid out the small front garden with box hedges and white rose bushes. ‘He had a lot of taste,' said Jeanne Pagnard regretfully. In old age, being considered a deserving case, he was made sacristan like his great-great-grandfather, though it is recalled that he was once drunk enough to fall up the altar steps during Mass. It is remembered also that he used to bring his wife with him when he went to ring the church bells, partly because he was afraid of what she might do left on her own and partly because she enjoyed pulling the ropes herself. Charles has been described to me as a wiry old man, quite tall but thin, with a quizzical eye. Blanche, by that time, was much more substantial than he was, though that apparently did not prevent him once or twice, exasperated beyond bearing, from ‘taking a stick to her'. As she accumulated bulk and years, the aura of semi-tragedy that surrounded her dwindled; she came to be perceived as merely comic. Her strength and enthusiasm were, as ever, greater than her judgement, and when excited by the sound of the bells she tugged the ropes so hard that she was carried up off the ground. ‘We boys used to gather to watch,' an elderly man told me. ‘She would go up on the rope in a flurry of skirt and petticoat, you could see right up her bloomers, which we thought a great joke.' Another man remembered, as a small boy, being held ‘among her skirts between her knees' receiving from her a literal crash course in bell-ringing.

Excitement, bells, movement, dancing, heedless sexuality – there seems to be a consistent theme in poor Blanche's eccentricity. Manic depression (so it would probably be diagnosed today) may have run in the family – a genetic pattern like the one suggested by Bernadette N's ending. Jeanne Pagnard recalled hearing that Blanche's father had eventually hanged himself.

She added the irrelevant but thought-provoking detail (‘I don't know if it was true but that's what I was told') that after his death his cousins were eager to obtain pieces of the rope he had used.
La corde d'un pendu
had long been regarded as having magic properties, and rural beliefs were not easily given up. It does seem, however, that the theory that Blanche came from prosperous and genteel people should be treated with some reserve.

*   *   *

As in every village in France at the beginning of the 1920s, the war memorial was commissioned and erected in Chassignolles. It stands on a patch of ground, overlooked by the oldest inn, the Chaumette inn, where the road forks as you enter the village. But younger boys – the eager, docile faces in the Bonnin wedding group – were growing up in sufficient numbers to carry on the life others had left for ever. The population never again reached the level at which it had been on the eve of that war, but for a long time the decline was gradual and unobtrusive. The village remained the populous place that it appears in Adolphine's precise drawings, filled not only with people but with handcarts, pony traps, apple presses, small flocks of goats and sheep being herded even in the main street, and the ubiquitous, busy presence of chickens. This crowded life at walking pace, which had not changed radically for hundreds of years, still survived between the wars thanks to the almost complete absence of motor traffic. As young women at the Domaine just after the Great War, Madame L and her sister would prick up their ears at the sound of a car heard far off across the summer countryside – ‘Because we knew it could only be coming either to us or to the Duteuils down at Chapin.'

For Madame Démeure, the first car she ever saw was the Duteils': ‘You could hear it coming very slowly and noisily up the steep hill from the river, and everybody would rush out of their houses to see it. Later on, there was another car, a great high red thing that we thought was wonderful. It belonged to a gentleman who used to visit La Gazette's mother. That one could only be started by half a dozen boys pushing it out of the Aussirs' stable and down the hill towards Crevant.'

What, I wondered, about the car Jean Chausée had before the Great War? But Madame Démeure was too young to remember that.

‘Anyway, after the war Jean Chausée moved on. To La Châtre. You see, he'd found another wife while he was away in the army…'

He always had been considered in advance of his time.

In spite of the motor buses, no one as yet foresaw that the private car, that plaything for the adventurous and well-to-do, would eventually become the indispensable tool of rural life, at once its saviour and its destroyer. By one of those familiar ironies of history, this era just before the internal-combustion engine transformed the roads was a time when the convenience and speed of horse-drawn transport was far greater than ever before. The traditional isolation of one hamlet from another, one village from another, that had struck George Sand so forcibly, had gone. The perception of ‘neighbourhood', of known and accessible territory, had expanded considerably, almost to the cluster of adjacent Communes that provides today's network. People still walked a good deal – children were expected to walk up to four kilometres to school and back – but longer journeys now became simple and frequent too. Shopkeepers' covered carts delivered goods over wide areas; a general carrier left Chassignolles for Le Magny and La Châtre every morning and returned in the evening. It carried the post, but the carter would also take private packages, messages and persons, and even undertake shopping errands.

You could also entrust him with children who were too young to walk far. The Dédolin grocer's little girl, she who was to become Madame Démeure, was regularly posted back and forth from Chassignolles to her maternal grandparents in Le Magny. She had been wet-nursed in Le Magny, as an infant during the Great War, and spent most of her first five years there. Her father was at the front, and her mother was trying single-handed to keep the business going and look after the elder children.

‘I was like a little queen in Le Magny. When I came back to live at home after the war, it took me years to get used to it and feel that it
was
my home. My sister was jealous of me because she hadn't been used to having me there, and my mother had no time to spare for me. I lived for Wednesday evenings, when I could go and spend the night and the next day in Le Magny, because Thursday was a school holiday.'

By and by, the bright child found her place in the family by helping to prepare the packets for the daily deliveries round the outlying farms; her father undertook these by pony and trap, the logical extension of the grocery-peddling business begun sixty years before by Chartier.

‘Everything had to be prepared and weighed up separately, sugar, salt and so on, in the exact amounts that had been ordered. Some people would only want to pay for tiny amounts at a time – they didn't use money much in the country then. Washing soda, too – that had to be hacked off a big lump and crushed by hand and if you weren't careful the sharp bits used to pierce the bags. And we often had to grind the coffee as some farms didn't run to a coffee mill … But in the school holidays I loved going out with my father. He went all over the place, as far as Crevant and Crozon. People were always glad to see him, and they used to give
me
things as a thank-you to him. I used to get nuts, and the fruits that had been dried in the oven that people used to keep strung up in their attics all the winter. Apple rings and peach rings – lovely! That was before tinned food really came in, of course. Even bottled fruit was thought a bit new by the older generation.'