Celestine (13 page)

Taking his stated age, forty-five, as a clue, and assuming that the events referred to in the paper dated, like most of the Minute book, from the 1840s, I was looking for a birth some time around the turn of the century. Sure enough, in the register for autumn 1803 (
7 Brumaire l'An XII
), Antoine Pirot made his appearance. His father was Silvain Pirot,
‘Propriétaire et maréchal'
of Le Flets, one of the Commune's outlying hamlets. So Silvain, like François and Denis Charbonnier, owned enough to qualify as a landowner and was also a blacksmith – a person of some substance, as you would expect of a future mayor. At Antoine's birth Silvain was stated to be ‘at the wars', a sign that the Napoleonic
levée
of young men to fight battles such as Austerlitz and Jena was making a sweep even in this remote countryside. The birth was announced, and the baby presented in person, by his maternal uncle and by the midwife Marie Chaumard, whose name often appears at this time.

‘Over 45 years' on from 1803 takes us to 1849 or 1850. So the gentle and inoffensive Antoine had evidently committed his unprecedented act just when France herself was passing through one of those periodic re-enactments of revolutionary emotion and countermeasure which are the chief milestones of her nineteenth-century history. It was also just at the time when the active Silvain-Germain Chaumette, then in his early thirties, had become a councillor.

To discover something about Antoine Pirot's problematic marriage I had to search through more of the registers than I had expected. Most couples married young. Public assumptions pushed them along (‘Dancing together again, I see: that'll make a marriage') or there might be a child on the way to precipitate matters. By the age of twenty or so a boy had usually developed his skills, was doing a man's work and could not expect any particular increase in his fortunes. There was no point in waiting longer in a society where everyone held much the same ideas on the conduct of life, and individual fulfilment was not ordinarily considered. Silvain-Germain was twenty-one, give or take a few months, when he married Anne Laurent, who was to become Célestine's mother.
His
father, François, was only twenty-one at his birth. The men of the Charbonnier family, from which Antoine's wife came, show a similarly rapid turnover of generations.

But Antoine took his time, not marrying till he was thirty-three, an exceptionally late age for a countryman at that period. In George Sand's
La Mare au Diable,
Germain, who is approaching thirty and is already a widower with several children, is kindly warned by the father of his dead wife that he really should find himself a new one, ‘or you will have left it too late'. Love, it was felt, was something for the period of brief physical flowering only, and it was assumed that no young girl would find a man of Germain's age attractive, even though George Sand described him as handsome and not yet ‘worn by labour'. Instead, it is suggested that he marry a woman who, though still comely, is already a widow herself and a ‘good prospect'.

A similar suggestion was perhaps made to Antoine Pirot. The wife we find him marrying in 1836 was not only a widow – she was seven years older than he was. The François Charbonnier who was keeping the registers at the time of her second marriage was her uncle and the Charbonnier family occupied a farm next door to the Pirots. It looks as if the main purpose of the marriage was to unite two properties into a more profitable one. If so, it was destined to fail spectacularly, resulting not only in domestic unhappiness but a crisis in the fortunes of both families. When I managed to date more accurately the event that led to the charge of attempted murder, I realized that the
séparation de biens
pronounced in favour of Marguerite was not the consequence of her crisis with her husband but the final action that provoked his violent attempt to drag her home. It is clear from the appeal to the Minister of Justice that she had already left him by then. What had raised such hostility against him in her? One is tempted to wonder what inadequacy of nature, tacitly recognized by the community, may be cloaked in the description of Antoine as a ‘gentle and inoffensive' person.

I wrote to the Ministry of Justice myself some hundred and forty years after the event, hoping for further information. After the usual delay, they referred me to the location of their nineteenth-century archives and supplied a reference number. I wrote then to the appropriate department of the Bibliothèque Nationale and eventually got a helpful letter admitting to the case of Pirot, Antoine, in the records but regretting ‘the file relating to a possible pardon in this case no longer exists. The fact is, many files were destroyed near the beginning of the present century…' The writer told me, however, that the conviction appeared to date from July 1851, and suggested that I might find an annotation on the records of the Assize Court – which were kept in Châteauroux.

Another trip to the quiet house in the Rue Vieille Prison: was that prison, which was part of the ancient fortifications of Châteauroux, the place where Antoine was held before his trial and pending his assignment to a long-stay institution? The infamous seaport forced-labour prisons, the
bagnes
with chained prisoners that were run by the Navy as the successors to the hulks of the Ancien Régime, were abolished that same year, 1851; Antoine had a lucky escape. But the Houses of Correction on the British model, which were then rising in the Assize Court cities and populated by the dregs of those cities, were hardly suitable places either for a peace-loving forty-five-year-old peasant. The last paragraph of Chassignolles' appeal on his behalf reads: ‘In prison his good conduct has led the administration to decide that he merits special treatment: he has in fact been separated from the other prisoners and placed in a room by himself where he can devote himself to the work in which he is a specialist.'

Just what call there might be in prison for the speciality of locksmith gives pause for thought. The letter ends, with a final flow of Silvain-Germain's eloquence and knowledge of the circumstances. ‘Doubtless Justice has its rights, but when Justice has been satisfied it cannot be of any use to exclude from society [
rejeter hors des voies sociales
] a man who has only weakened in a moment of confusion or drunkenness and to make an outcast of him.'

The census shows that the Pirot ménage had moved, after marriage, to a house in the centre of the village where Antoine had his metal workshop. By 1850, evidently, Marguerite had deserted him and returned to Le Flets, which was a mile or more distant. Was it alone at home or was it perhaps in the nearby Chaumette inn that Antoine indulged in the drinking session that was to have such terrible consequences for him? I see him in my mind's eye setting out with furious intention, probably by night, maybe with some lethal tool of his trade in his hand, down the muddy path past the Croix Pendue in the direction of his in-laws' farm.

Since a Charbonnier was still a member of the Chassignolles Council at this time, it must be assumed that even the family of the aggrieved Marguerite felt that the affair had been blown up by Justice out of all proportion. A generation earlier, when there were fewer organized brigades of Gendarmerie in the countryside to call upon, the whole business would probably have remained between villagers.

Silvain-Germain had said that the circumstances were laid out in the Court papers. When I followed the recommendation to explore the Assize records in Châteauroux I had hopes that I might turn up the whole story. In the catalogue I found reference to the criminal dossiers for cases relating to the late 1840s and some from 1852, not only for Châteauroux but also for the Lower Court in La Châtre. For 1850–51, however, there was nothing listed. When the short-lived Second Republic foundered in November 1851 and the Prince-President assumed his role as Emperor, repercussions were felt at the local level and those who had recently been running the Courts were summarily swept from office. As is traditional in such circumstances, some hasty burning of papers probably took place to avoid subsequent account-settling.

In my disappointment, I tried calling up the scrappy files for 1852, made hopeful by a reference to a Perrot. But he turned out to be one of half a dozen men from a village just outside La Châtre topically accused of ‘exciting the hatred of citizens one against another' at the time of the November plebiscite. His sentence was three months in prison and a hundred francs fine, which was the equivalent of about four months of a labourer's earnings, but Perrot may have been of skilled artisan class. Other Republican spirits about the same time got a straight six months for
rébellion,
and I assume that the scattered charges of spreading false news, ‘outraging the Mayor' and ‘defaming a magistrate' are signs of the same repressive zeal on the part of the newly installed Imperial establishment.

Otherwise, the Châteauroux and La Châtre Courts at that period could produce nothing but a trickle of assaults (
coups et blessures
) usually punished with a few days in prison, disturbing the peace at night (
tapage nocturne
– idem), minor thefts, a deception (
escroquerie
) and a good deal of persistent vagabondage, sometimes aggravated by begging with menaces. On the whole, robbery was punished more seriously than physical violence, but two men found guilty of violent robbery on the highway each got five years' hard labour, and a would-be rapist (
attentat à la pudeur
) was sent for fifteen months to Châteauroux's new House of Correction. An
outrage à la morale publique
(indecent exposure?) earned a month inside.

What strikes one today is the relatively tiny number of cases and the relative severity of the judgements. This was a fundamentally peaceful and law-abiding society; the crime rate for the Indre was then, as now, well below the average for France as a whole. The region had evidently come some way since the eighteenth century: then, gangs of
chauffeurs
(‘heaters', not drivers) had roamed the countryside, torturing peasant landowners by heating up their feet to get them to reveal where they hid their savings.

In 1852 there were no murders reported, not even an attempted murder. No Antoine Pirot. Yet domestic murders were apparently not unusual, for a few years earlier the Châteauroux paper
Le Journal de l'Indre
had suggested that the sale of arsenic should be banned, and it seems that each time a case of poisoning occurred the spouse fell under suspicion. Perhaps this was why the local authorities had been so ready to assume that Pirot's wild foray to scare the Charbonnier family was a premeditated attempt at murder.

You might have expected the
Journal de l'Indre
to carry the Pirot story, but in July 1851 this intensely urban, royalist, Catholic, bourgeois organ evidently had other matters on its mind. As for the more local
Écho de l'Indre,
that summer it seems to have been chiefly preoccupied with odd wolf sightings and bankruptcies; also with the buying and selling of vineyards, including one adjoining the Charbonnier land at Le Flets which may have been part of the property Marguerite Pirot had taken back from the wreck of her marriage.

Otherwise, its few pages are filled with Sirop Laroze for stomach complaints and ‘choleric influences'; and with invitations placed by a shipping company in La Rochelle for men to join a voyage to
les mines d'or de la Californie.
The Gold Rush of '49 was having its repercussions even here. In response, an editorial at the same time complained that the sons of peasants were leaving the land for the towns, a refrain we shall hear again and again. The conclusion was that they should stay in their villages and continue the occupations of their fathers at the station in life where Providence had been pleased to place them. Poor Antoine Pirot cannot be accused of having wanted anything but this.

I felt that now I would never know if Pirot had been pardoned or not. But when I returned to the census records in Châteauroux I came across an answer of a sort. In 1856, five years after the court case, Marguerite Charbonnier was back at Le Flets, living on her own. She had a brother and a cousin living nearby but she was sixty now (though she gave her age as fifty-eight), her parents were presumably dead, and she does not appear to have had children by either of her husbands. Maybe, also, she was not a particularly popular woman. In the margin by her entry is written
‘son mari est absent – détenu'
– detained in prison. So Silvain-Germain's eloquence did not, after all, soften the hearts of the black-robed gentlemen in Paris.

By 1861, although the rest of the Charbonnier clan were still around Le Flets, Marguerite had gone.

*   *   *

On a pristine morning in early spring, when points of white fruit blossom are precariously appearing against the sky above the newly dug earth of the vegetable gardens, I watch the Monsieur Pirot of today walk through the centre of the village towards his Mairie wearing his mayoral sash. It is Sunday, but the doors stand open. There is a General Election, another sub-chapter in the great wrangle between the Republican ideal and the forces of tradition and conservatism which has been the history of France for the last two hundred years. It is said – correctly, as it turns out – that the Left are due to suffer a landslide defeat. Monsieur Pirot is a lifelong Communist supporter, following in the steps of an admired uncle who died in the Resistance. (There was a good deal of Resistance activity during the Occupation in the Indre, since it was just south of the Line of Demarcation.) How Monsieur Pirot reconciled his politics with his position as a prominent Chassignolles landowner puzzled me a little, till it was explained to me by another that in central France Communism is equated with the triumph of the small man over the large absentee landlord. Hadn't the Communist Party earlier this century stated clearly that when it came to power it would abide by the land revisions made under the Revolution and not embark on another round of expropriation? To cling tenaciously to one's own few hectares, resisting Government interference, is therefore, by a rural logic, to be a good Communist.