Celestine (44 page)

One winter's day of snow and biting cold Fanny and I were rolled up in layers of quilt and blanket. [Fanny was his little sister. She later married the banker son of the Pissavys, a brother of Victor, who was almost a generation older than herself, and lived with a certain ostentation in a large house on the edge of La Châtre.] Looking like two parcels, with only our small heads with wondering eyes poking out on top, we were installed in a donkey cart that belonged to Le Père Soudit from whom the family bought wine … At that date you could not get all the way to Chapin in a four-wheeled cart. [Indeed, the long-delayed widening and improvement of that road out of Chassignolles in the direction of Crozon were not to be completed for another twenty years.] In winter, especially, you could travel only on foot or with a very sturdily built two-wheeled conveyance. I have retained a vivid memory of that journey, which was decided upon suddenly and undertaken there and then: not so much a move, you might think, as a flight. At the time, I did not wonder much what was going on; I was too busy chattering and joking with Fanny and our mother and with our father, who walked beside the cart talking to Soudit. It was an exciting journey, for on the way down to the Ris Blanc [the small river below Chassignolles, where, seventy years later, the young Madame Démeure and her friends took clothes to wash] one or other of the two men had to hang onto the back of the cart, for the slope was so steep that otherwise cart, occupants and donkey could all have ended up in the river. Even I was a little scared at this point, and was hardly reassured when, as we forded the stream at the bottom, I saw the water come more than half-way up the cart wheels and almost to the boards on which we were sitting. Finally we made it without mishap, but it was almost nightfall when our procession entered the farmyard at Chapin where everyone was standing around waiting for us: Langlois' wife and Sylvain in front, behind them young Louis, Le Père Langlois, François and the rest.

A roaring fire had been made in the big farmhouse fireplace, a hearth built to burn whole tree trunks with a high, wide chimney leading straight up to the stars that could accommodate the entire family gathered round for a
veillée.
It seemed to me like something out of a fairy tale … In my surprise and delight I went rather too close to the flames, spreading out my small, cold, stiff hands to them in the way that seemed to me right. All of a sudden I was seized with that awful pain called an
onglée
which results from too quick a change from icy cold to heat, and my day ended in tears. Luckily my father had a remedy for everything; he took me on his knees (perhaps the best bit of the remedy) and wrapped my hands in a warm handkerchief till the pain wore off.

For the rest of that cold season Paul, Fanny and their mother stayed at Chapin and hardly went out. They were entertained by Charles, Louis' child, who ‘had the Berrichon shepherd boy's special talent for making little carts, miniature water mills to put over rivulets, toy fences, gates and so on'. The father went back to work in La Châtre:

On the three days a week on which he appeared in Court, he came back to Chapin afterwards to dine, sleep and spend the following day there working at home. He has often told me that this period was one of the happiest times of his life – ‘I would arrive, having come all that way on foot; I was young, I had spent the day representing someone in Court and so earning a bit of money to feed my family and there you would all be gathered to welcome me on the threshold.'

I have learnt since that our removal to Chapin was quite literally a flight. That year a terrible epidemic of croup broke out in La Châtre. [‘Croup' is properly the description of a symptom, an inability to draw breath because of swelling in the throat: here, it would appear to indicate an outbreak of diphtheria.] Over the course of several months, this disease carried off more than eighty young children: their graves fill one whole side of the cemetery. When I was older, my father took me several times to visit that patch of ground where I myself would almost certainly have been laid to rest along with Fanny if Chapin had not been there to save us. I seemed to feel coming from him there in the cemetery a kind of pleasure mixed with horror as he contemplated the tragedy that had been averted … A single fact may convey a graphic idea of the ravages caused by that disease. Long after, in the year when many of those boy children who were my contemporaries would have reached the age of twenty, there were only a handful there for conscription into the army so the usual recruitment could not take place.…

My first cousin, another Paul, died then in Châteaumeillant [a town some ten miles from La Châtre]. He was six or seven years old. I can remember us playing together on the wide pavement in front of our house. The last time I saw him he was wearing a little straw hat with a blue ribbon and we ran races together.

One day, after we had come back again to La Châtre, my aunt came to our house. She was in mourning. She picked me up and sat me on her lap, looking at me for a long time in an odd way. Then she asked me ‘Do you remember your cousin Paul,
mon chéri?
You won't be playing any more with him: he's left Châteaumeillant…' And, in tears, she hugged me so hard she almost smothered me.

(It will be noted that this catalogue of childhood mortality relates to the densely populated country towns. No such cluster of deaths appears in the Chassignolles registers for the fatal year. This confirms the general picture, already conveyed by the birth and death records, that a child born in the village had, contrary to the twentieth-century mythology on the subject, a very good chance of surviving to grow up. Indeed I have been told, and have no reason to disbelieve it, that the lowest mortality rates of all occurred among children reared on isolated farms, whose contacts with anyone beyond their own own extended families were minimal. It was these youngsters, however, who tended to succumb to illness in early adulthood, when they were called up into the army or went into service in a town and encountered alien microbes for the first time.)

In subsequent years the annual migrations to Chapin were less dramatic but considerably jollier:

When we went through Chassignolles the journey became a fête, almost a triumphal procession. As we reached the edge of the village our father would greet his old friend the Curé, Normand [this was indeed the name of the incumbent described in the censuses for 1856 and '66 as the ‘mass-server' – perhaps a piece of bureaucratic secularism]. The old man would come to hear our news over the hedge of his garden, which bordered on the lane, with his housekeeper, to be sure, following on his heels. He was the first, and then it would be someone else and then the schoolmaster Monsieur Charbonnier and then Dédolin the clog-maker.

(Charbonnier, then a young man in the early days of his career, is a familiar figure. Dédolin the clog-maker was the great-grandfather of Madame Démeure, she who kept the grocery shop till the 1980s. His son and one of his grandsons were to follow the same calling: the dynasty is still remembered in the village. So the tapestry picture of a clog-maker's workshop, painstakingly stitched as an anniversary present by a daughter-in-law, which hangs today in Madame Démeure's main room, commemorates not only her late husband Maxime's trade but her own family tradition also. Today, a one-time clog workshop in Chassignolles is occupied by a foster son of hers, a young man whose lost family origins lie in eastern Europe but who has taken on the mantle of village carpenter.)

The later pages of Paul Pouradier-Dutheil's memoir, which was written largely in 1879, when he was a homesick young military officer on a foreign posting, seem to be addressed to the girl who was later to become his wife. Describing the egalitarian nature of life in La Châtre, where the young workmen with whom he had played as a boy at the same school were still greeting him on his visits home as an old and intimate friend, he wrote:

You will probably be amazed,
amie,
at this way of life, which is that of a small town which has, up to now, lived much cut off from the world on account of its lack of communications: there is no railway line for a full ten leagues all round. Indeed, I think that when there's hardly a stage-coach or a coachman left in the world the La Châtre tackle will still be running … A town that has its stage-coach can retain its old, simple manners and that genuine brotherliness of which I spoke just now. Sadly, these pleasant things are disappearing with the passing years. I admit that at moments, and in certain circumstances, I have something of a horror of Progress. Of course I am impressed and made happy by scientific developments. I love taking my ease in a fine
compartiment
in an express train that slices through distance [three lines vigorously scratched out here – perhaps as being of too intimate a nature for public consumption?] … But, on the other hand, without being able to explain why, I dread the disappearance of my old stager from Châteauroux to La Châtre, my
Grand Voiture.
I can't imagine arriving home any other way than perched on its top next to———or———[two named coachmen]. How will I manage when I can no longer ask them, as we trundle along, to fill me in on recent deaths, marriages, births and scandals – when I won't have a charioteer to regale me with all the gossip, interspersed with encouragements to the horses, cracks of the whip and special manoeuvres each time we go down a hill? I shall have a lump in my throat the day that I arrive at La Châtre by railway train without having seen, as one does from the coach, the whole of the beautiful Black Valley spread out below with its villages, its church towers, the river and the blue distance. I pity with all my heart the generations of Berrichons who will never experience the vision of the sunrise as they reach the heights of Corlay.

The railway was at last making its way to La Châtre as Dutheil wrote; the station opened three years later. To George Sand, born fifty years earlier than Dutheil, the stage-coach itself and the road it ran on represented modernity and progress compared with the unmapped heathlands of her own childhood. Now in turn the railway line, winding along the valley of the Indre from one village to another, has become part of that lost country of the past. Dutheil himself was, in the fullness of time, to help introduce the first telephone to Chassignolles and one of the first cars.

Bibliography

While it would be impossible for me to list every book that has, over the years, formed part of my reading on the subject of central France and her recent history, the following is a list of works which I know to have contributed directly to the writing of
Célestine.

Published works

Alain-Fournier, Henri,
Le Grand Meaulnes,
Paris, 1913

Ardoun-Dumazet,
Voyage en France
(No. 26 in series), Paris, 1901

Audebert, B. and Tournaire, J.,
1900, La Châtre et la Vallée Noire,
Editions Souny, Limoges, 1985

Balzac, Honoré de,
L'Illustre Gaudissart
(1833),
Le Curé du Village
(1839),
La Rabouilleuse
(1841),
Les Paysans
(1844)

Baroli, Marc,
La Vie Quotidienne en Berry au Temps de George Sand,
Hachette, 1982

Berducat, Jeanine,
La craie pour l'ecrire
(1989),
Léonie, femme de la terre
(1992),
François, le maçon
(1993),
Octave, le déraciné
(1994). All published by Editions La Bouinotte, Châteauroux

Bernard, Daniel,
La Fin des Loups dans le Bas Berry: histoire et traditions populaires,
privately printed in Châteauroux, 1977

———
Itinérants ambulants dans l'Indre au XIX siècle,
Extract No. 11 from ‘Le Bulletin du Group d'Histoire et d'Archéologie de Buzancais', 1979

———
Hier en Berry: les Habits du Peuple des Campagnes,
privately printed in Valençay with the assistance of La Guérouée de Gatines, 1985

———
Coureurs et Gens D'Étranger en Berry,
privately printed, 1984

———
Le Berry de George Sand,
Editions Gyss, Châteauroux, 1989

———
Paysans du Berry dans la France ancienne: le vie des campagnes berrichonnes,
Editions Horvath, Roanne, 1982

Braudel, Fernand,
L'Identité de la France,
Flammarion, Vol I, 1986; Vol II, 1988; Vol III (not completed) 1990

Bury, J. P. T.,
France 1814–1940,
Methuen, 1949

Burnand, Robert,
La Vie Quotidienne en France 1870–1900,
Hachette, 1943

Chastenet, Jacques,
La France de Fallières,
Fayard, 1949

Cobb, Richard,
A Sense of Place,
Duckworth, 1975

———
Promenades,
Oxford University Press, 1980

Devailly Guy (ed.),
L'Histoire du Berry,
Editions Privat, 1980

Duguet, Claude-Charles,
L'Histoire d'une Petite Ville qui n'a pas d'Histoire: La Châtre avant la Révolution, XVII Siècle,
privately printed in La Châtre in 1896, reprinted by Res Universis, Paris, 1991

Dyer, Colin,
Population and Society in Twentieth-Century France,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1978

Faith, Nicholas,
The World Railways Made,
Bodley Head, 1990

Febvre, Lucien,
La Terre et L'Evolution Humaine
(4 vols), Paris, 1924

Flaubert, Gustave,
Madame Bovary,
1857

Gaultier, Jean,
Histoire de la Châtre et du Berry,
Éditions le Vagabond, 1982

Guillaumin, Émile,
Paysans par Eux-Mêmes
and
La Vie d'un Simple,
Paris, 1904

Halévy, Daniel,
Visites aux Paysans du Centre (1907–1934),
first volume 1907, complete edition Grasset, 1935