Celestine
Authors: Gillian Tindall
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Contents
This book is all true. I have not been able to discover everything that I would have liked, but nothing has been invented or imagined. A number of people both in England and France, and from varying walks of life, have contributed greatly to its writing, either through their own writings and specialized knowledge, through family papers they have lent to me or through conversations I have been privileged to have with them. In particular, several Chassignolles citizens, all of whom are, with their consent, mentioned under their real names, have shown me a generosity and interest without which my re-creation of a past world would have been impossible. I hope they will accept this work as a tribute, however foreign, to themselves, their ancestors, and to the tenacious traditions of rural French society.
To all the living, and to the known and much-remembered dead, my humble thanks. To all those dead I never knew in person, whose shadowy lives I have tried to call up from the gulf of time â my grateful salutations.
Gillian Tindall
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Once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.
G. M. Trevelyan,
An Autobiography and Other Essays
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The written history of these regions is odd. It opens extremely late: there is very little, it seems, till the nineteenth century. The country people who lived there, far from towns and main roads, remained for a long time without a voice of their own or anyone else to speak for them. They were nevertheless there; they did things, cared about things, and thus had their effect, without anyone realizing it, on the heart and soul of the nation.
Daniel Halévy,
Visites aux Paysans du Centre (1907â1934)
One autumn day in the 1970s an old man left his small house in a village near the geographical heart of France and caught the weekly bus into the nearby market town.
He was not a Frenchman, though he had spent every summer in the village for many years, since long before foreigners were generally seen in the French countryside. He was by birth an Australian and by vocation a painter: he had harvested the landscapes, the skies, the light and the stone of the Berry in his pictures, and these were, in token of friendship, disseminated in many houses in the village and neighbouring farms. He had come to France as a soldier in 1916; the Second World War found him in Paris again at the Liberation in a liaison job. There, no longer a young man, he encountered a secretary of charm and intelligence who was not young either. In due course she took him back to the house she had inherited from her parents and introduced him to the covertly amused but respectful neighbours she had known since childhood.
These neighbours were not entirely surprised. They had always known that Zénaïde â rather a fancy name for a local girl, what do you expect? â was a bit of a dreamer, with tastes and expectations outside their ken, and anyway look at the family she came from ⦠Her mother going odd in that way. And her father: an amiable man but no head at all for business. And her grandmother â such a refined yet open-hearted person. People a bit out of the ordinary run and long remembered.
Although the painter was known to have another life, and another wife, in England, that was a long way off and the fact was politely unmentioned. The summers together continued for ten years till Zénaïde herself died before she reached old age. She left the small house and its contents to her painter for his lifetime. A handyman, he had embellished the classic French exterior with a veranda and a blue-painted trellis, so that it now resembled an English
cottage orné
of the Edwardian era. He also converted the grain loft into bedrooms reached by an inside boxed ladder, and built on a kitchen and bathroom in a lean-to with a soakaway to a covered pit beyond the apple trees â at a time when hardly another house in the village had plumbing. The two main rooms, however, were left as they were and had always been. He continued to return and open the place up every summer, spending months at a time in the décor of past lives he had never actually known. In the 1960s and '70s the polished press in the bigger room was full of the linen sheets, square, lace-edged pillowcases and towel-sized table-napkins with initials in the damask that had been a bride's dowry in the 1890s. The padded
prie-dieu
stood where it always had, and so did the wood-burning stove. So did the footstool with the
gros point
cat upon it, worn now but still as lifelike as when it was worked long ago by Zénaïde's grandmother, when she was still a pretty girl, before her own life became harder and sadder.
Leaving the house, the painter carefully secured the shutters as usual and turned the heavy iron key, locking up all those things again in timeless suspension along with his own paintings, his cream flannel suits and his old straw hat with the brush marks on it. The bed in his attic room was left made up, there were packets and tins in the kitchen cupboards; a carton with a little milk left in it stood overlooked by the stove. He meant to return within two or three weeks. He never did. The vivid autumn of central France declined into the bleached landscape of winter. In the house, only the mice and rats moved. The stool cat sat on with her happy face. The unmoving air, ventilated only by the chimney, took on the taint of soot. The forgotten milk became a brownish, transparent liquid, infinitely antique. Dead leaves silted up in the back porch by the makeshift bathroom. The weeks grew into months. People in the village began to worry, to recall how vague the old man had seemed that summer, and to ask one another what should be done. Eventually, fumblingly, enquiries were made, someone was contacted, someone else was found to translate a lawyer's letter, the wheels of necessary destruction began cumbersomely to turn, finally rendering Zénaïde's forebears and their home extinct long after their own deaths.
The following summer the house was at last cleared. It would be sold by its inheritors, Zénaïde's distant cousins. They took most of the contents, except for a few things that were given away. They left behind, on a corner of the mantelshelf in the darkened, empty room behind the shutters, a small cardboard case meant to contain those cards that are distributed in pious families to commemorate baptisms, first communions and Masses said for the dead. Perhaps they assumed that cards were what was still in it and therefore, with some half-formed sense of respect or superstition, refrained from putting it on the great garden bonfire which had already consumed so many long-paid bills, so many mildewed cushions, wormy chairs, quilts sticky with moths' eggs, and mouse-wrecked packets of sugar.
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Had Zénaïde's cousins looked, as I did when I came to the house, they would have found that the case was packed tight with seven letters, two of them in their small envelopes, the others showing traces of having been simply folded and sealed. In the late afternoon light coming through the door that I had left open behind me, I peered at them and found a date â 1862 â and then another. The copybook handwritings varied: I saw that the letters could not all be from one person, but the ink was faded and even a cursory glance through the soft wads of paper delicate as old skin showed that some of the French was very odd.
I had come to collect the cat footstool, which had been promised me. Now I creaked open the shutter over the stone sink in the smaller room, dusted the long-dried surface with my handkerchief and carefully spread the letters out.
The Célestine to whom they were all addressed I knew to have been Zénaïde's grandmother. I knew almost nothing else about her at that time, but she had been a young girl in this village; she must have kept the letters all her life and her granddaughter had continued to do so after her death. They were all from suitors, except for one from a young soldier brother, and all, except that last letter, dated from the early 1860s. One was from a local schoolmaster, another from a salesman travelling for a wine merchant. Others came from a bakery, from a village where rural iron foundries then were, and from another known for its annual cattle fair: these writers expressed themselves with more difficulty in the unfamiliarity of the written word. From the way they were addressed â variations on âMademoiselle Célestine Chaumette, in her father's house, the Auberge at Chassignolles' â I saw that she had been the daughter of the local innkeeper; as such, she must have had the opportunity to meet and attract a wider range of admirers than most country girls at that date.