Celestine (14 page)

Monsieur Pirot looks quite stoical, even cheerful, at the prospect of a left-wing rout. Like every farmer today he is certainly more deeply worried about the long-term implications of the Common Market and the ‘crisis of overproduction' than he is about political labels. He is a heavy, compact man and his rolling walk is the kind which, like a laugh or a facial expression, is inherited down the generations. If we had film footage of our own great-great-grandparents, as one day some of our great-grandchildren will of us, we would rediscover not only our own chins and eyes but our gestures, our voices, our way of moving.

Monsieur Pirot is descended from one of Antoine Pirot's uncles. But when I asked him tentatively if he had ever heard of a Court case he was at a loss. He had never seen the draft letter asking for pardon. When I told him about it, he remarked gently that it was a good long time ago, wasn't it, and that in those days people were different. Weren't they?

II

The Cheerful Day

Chapter 8

The Pirot drama occurred when Célestine was between six and seven years old. Let us return to the year of her birth, 1844.

Thirty-two babies were born in Chassignolles that year, the same birth rate as in the previous decade. Only one of these infants died, though three older children succumbed.

That same year, General Bertrand, Maréchal du Palais, died in his great house in Châteauroux on the edge of the ramparts overlooking the river. He had been one of the handful of obstinately faithful generals who accompanied Napoleon into exile in St Helena. Several years after his own death his remains (always euphemistically referred to in French as ‘ashes' in spite of the Church's dislike of cremation) went to Paris to lie beside those of his Emperor in the Invalides: they travelled on the brand-new railway line.

In 1844 Clemenceau, who was to lead France out of another great war a hundred years after the Napoleonic campaigns, and whose life span was to be very close to Célestine's, was three years old. Émile Zola, whose novels were to document so many aspects of the rapidly evolving nineteenth-century society, was four. In that year too Louis-Napoleon, the future Second Emperor, whose name was eventually to become synonymous with a cynical and materialistic regime, published a work which, for the time being, endeared him to George Sand's socialist friends –
The Extinction of Pauperism,
containing suggestions for interventionist welfare policies. He was also by training an engineer, a man looking towards the future.

In the
Journal de l'Indre,
the Châteauroux newspaper that liked to keep up with metropolitan affairs and published a
roman feuilleton
about an aristocratic family living in the Faubourg St Germain, there was a news item about Red Indians from America being paraded in Paris like exotic animals. There were also rumours that an invention called ‘the electric telegraph' was being tried out between Paris and Versailles. (It did not work.)

On the edge of the Commune of Chassignolles in full summer the month after Célestine's birth, a wolf appeared from a small wood out of the mist that preceded a hot day and carried off first one lamb and then another without the shepherd girl being able to stop it.

Few of the local footpaths had yet been widened enough to take a cart. But in the last few years the Chaumette family, in their old house with the outside stair, had opened their inn. It was chiefly the enterprise of the twenty-eight-year-old Silvain-Germain and his wife, but François Chaumette, then in his late forties and living nearby with his own wife, daughter and carpenter son-in-law, also began styling himself
cabaretier.
The family owned a little land too; it was François who had apparently seen to that. Except for the unfortunates who had failed to acquire any, like cousin Silvain-Bazille the weaver and his brothers, anyone of any standing in the Commune had his one field, his cow or a couple of goats, a pig, perhaps a mule or a donkey for haulage. (Only the larger landowners had their own plough-oxen, so a good deal of borrowing and work trading went on.) In many areas still, at that period and for long after, the tenant farmer struggling to meet both his own needs and the landlord's and having nothing to show at the end for all the labour invested, was a common figure, but Chassignolles never had very many of these. However, those with no land still tried to rent a patch to grow one crop, or reared goats or geese by pasturing them on common land and chivvying them for walks along the grassy paths: the basic occupation in the Commune, then and for the next hundred years, was subsistence farming. The gradually evolving trades of smith, farrier, wheelwright, sadler, carpenter, innkeeper, trader, builder and so on, started as part-time occupations, bringing in extra money to a life which, till then, had been almost universally precarious, in thrall to the vagaries of chance and the seasons.

The Chaumettes and their neighbours and customers lived mainly on bread, cheese, vegetables and potato-cakes, with a dish of
fromentée
(frumenty – cracked wheat boiled in milk) as a special treat. After Célestine's birth Anne Laurent would have been given a bowl of hot, sugared milk to drink; had the baby been a boy it would have been mulled wine. In the inn, eggs and butter may sometimes have been consumed, if they were kept on offer for passing customers, but the poorest peasants still took most of these products into La Châtre to sell in the market. The market was where all beef and mutton went as well. The diet of the wooded Lower Berry was recognized as being more varied than that of the sheep-runs of the plains, but the only meat regularly eaten by the ordinary people, and that only on Sundays, was home-cured pork, or the occasional chicken for a celebration. ‘Butcher's meat' was even a faintly suspect commodity. The folk-song about three small children who meet a butcher in the fields at night, and are invited into his isolated hut, reflects a rooted fear centring on an urban and upper-class luxury and the dubious trade of those supplying it. (The children have their throats cut and are laid out, like pigs, for salting, but St Nicholas appears and magically restores them to life.) In fact Chassignolles, even in its commercial heyday of five grocers and two bakers, never ran to a butcher's shop. Horse-meat, which became part of the staple diet of the urban working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, complete with special shops advertised by wooden horses' heads, was never much eaten in the countryside. The horse had become the peasant farmer's work companion; people said it would be like eating a fellow human being.

In the mid-nineteenth century bread was still by far the most important item of diet. It was rye bread – white flour was another luxury that was only grown to be sold to the wealthier townspeople. Home-grown grain was ground in one of the Commune's three water-mills; one was near Le Flets and was kept by a Charbonnier, and another was owned by the Mercier family, who still live there today. Bread was baked at home, but only at long intervals. The batches of heavy, ring-shaped loaves were hung up to keep, safe from rats and mice and picking fingers. They continued to provide the daily ration even when stale and dry. The ceremonial, almost sacramental cult of fresh bread, the
pain quotidien
that today sends customers on daily or even twice-daily excursions to the baker's for long loaves crackling with warmth in their rack, had not yet been born. Commercial baking had only reached the towns.

Those who had insufficient land to grow their own grain had to buy it, and after a bad season the prices rose and went on rising because hoarding began. This operation of market forces was not perhaps as hard on the poor as the artificially raised prices imposed by the English Corn Laws, but it could still have a devastating effect on the peasant budget and on that of town dwellers who bought bakers' bread. Even when grain was plentiful the cost of this for a family of six accounted for about half the earnings of a labouring man.

Célestine was born in May and that summer was an unusually parched one. Some village wells ran dry and women washed linen at the rivers in a trickle of brown water that could not clean it and left a tainted scent of its own. Then the following winter was particularly hard. The temperature went down to nine and then twelve below zero (centigrade); rain turned to ice where it fell. The Mayor of La Châtre (then, as for many decades, George Sand's Vicar-of-Bray friend, Delavau) had forbidden the trapping of larks, but the Préfet of the Indre overruled him, inviting the Gendarmerie to take no action ‘since it constitutes the only resource available to the labouring classes without work'. The larks, incidentally, were not eaten by the trappers, but sold for a pittance in the markets – to buy bread.

The following summer was wet. The Indre broke its banks at La Châtre, carrying away two houses and flooding the Rue Royale. The waters, according to the
Écho du Berry,
‘rose to a height that the oldest inhabitants in the area [
les plus anciens du pays
] cannot recall ever having seen before'. Riverside vegetable gardens became lakes, mills up and down the river's length were damaged. Between La Châtre and Chassignolles the stone bridge over a tributary stream (the Couarde), which had only been built the year before after much discussion, was swept away. (It was replaced by a wooden one, which collapsed ten years later under the weight of a heavy peasant woman with a basket of grapes.) Crops standing in the fields were spoiled. The harvest was poor and was made worse by storms that broke over the harvesters' heads.

The next summer, once again, was dry. By the end of the year, the price of bread had risen from twenty-four centimes a kilo to forty-two. During the same period the wages of casual labourers in the towns had been reduced by almost a third. George Sand, at Nohant, carried a pistol in her pocket at night, and for the first time in her sturdy life she took a man servant to accompany her when she went walking in the countryside, for fear of being attacked by one of the starving vagrants who were known to be roaming about. By recent legislation, vagrancy was a criminal offence, and in an attempt to discourage begging ‘charity offices' and workshops had been established in the main towns. La Châtre did not yet have one, but the indefatigable Delavau had plans for one. It had been noted, however, in Châteauroux, where one had been set up for several years, that its existence made citizens less inclined to give personally to the poor: the long saga of public aid to those in need, which has had such a profound and equivocal effect on all developed societies, was just at its inconspicuous beginning.

In Chassignolles, those landowners who grew enough grain to sell on the open market presumably benefited from the rise in prices, but there must have been many affected by the general, absolute dearth. Fortunately, among the woods of the Black Valley were – and are – plantations of Spanish chestnuts, and the harvest of these had always been important as an alternative basic foodstuff. But even in a small town like La Châtre troubles and confrontations were occurring. Already, earlier in the year, the real miller from the mill at Angibault a few miles away (who should not be confused with the one in George Sand's story or yet with an earlier one who was a personal friend of hers) had been convicted of abstracting another miller's bags of grain in the market-place. In the Berry millers were paid not in cash but in kind – a proportion of what was given to them to grind – and it was by selling their percentage in the towns that they made their money. Though peasants, they tended to be richer and more worldly-wise than their neighbours; in time of shortage they became natural targets for resentment and were suspected of taking more than their share and of hoarding. This miller was imprisoned for a year. In the autumn, when the harvest had now been inadequate for three years, another resented figure in La Châtre, a grain merchant called Gaultier, said to the would-be customer who complained to him
of his rising prices, ‘You haven't seen anything yet, you'll find yourselves eating grass' (
‘Vous n'avez pas fini; on vous fera manger de l'herbe'
) – a direct reference to the traditional bogey of starving Ancien Régime serfs from which the spirit of the Revolution had been created. This was in late 1846; within fifteen months the collapse of the July monarchy was to take place in the ‘Revolution of '48', followed by the short-lived Second Republic. Gaultier's words nearly produced a riot on the spot.

An actual, more serious grain riot occurred in 1847 in the small town of Buzançais in the northern Berry. There, women selling produce in the market were said to have worked on a group of day-labourers and incited them to stop a cartload of wheat that was setting off to Issoudun, the nearest town of any size. Issoudun was then one of France's smallest Préfectures: Balzac wrote that its drowsy airs would have turned even a Napoleon fat and lazy. But in Buzançais the cry went up that the sharp townsfolk were taking the bread from the mouths of the country people who had grown it. This was the age-old peasant fear, but it may have been exacerbated by the fact that Issoudun had recently acquired a railway station. Was the wheat going to be sent to the undeserving, alien people of Paris?

The affair escalated. The men raided the grain stores and houses of several well-to-do local landowners. Hostages were taken. One of these shot at rioters with his carbine and was in turn set upon and killed. At the noisy trial that followed, three of the rioters were condemned to death and twenty given life sentences. This was considered excessive even at that time, and was evidently an attempt to impose exemplary order in a situation that was, in any case, to be the last of its kind. Only the exceptional string of bad harvests could have produced this crisis at a time when local famines, let alone widespread ones, were becoming a thing of the past.

In a country as large and variegated as France, food lacking in one area could nearly always be supplied from another one if only it could be transported, and transport was slowly improving. Bad and rough as the cart roads were in the 1840s, there were simply many more of them, at least from one town to another, than there had been a hundred, fifty or even thirty years before. There was now, along the valley of the Indre between La Châtre and Châteauroux, a road of sorts and a stagecoach service, whereas in George Sand's childhood there had been ‘no road, or rather there were a hundred … a labyrinth of twisting tracks, of marshy ponds and great heathlands … people continually got lost'. The plots of two of her stories involve the extensive night wanderings of strayed travellers in this will-o'-the-wisp landscape. (Much of it today is a terrain of intensive cultivation, shorn of its old hedgerows, along the straight, modern Departmental road.)