Celestine (15 page)

The old rural idea had been that roads from one
pays
to another were unnecessary and even undesirable: they might bring strangers in who would eat up your food. There was clearly a final echo of this paranoia in Buzançais. Even in the well-established rural towns the belief was that the coming of a main road would bring higher prices for basic commodities, though, if anything, the opposite was the case. Before the railway had linked it with the world, Issoudun itself had been resistant to invasion. Indeed its bourgeoisie were so determined about this, according to Balzac (in
La Rabouilleuse
), that they actually succeeded in getting the chief road from Vierzon to Châteauroux, which should logically have gone via Issoudun, diverted through Vatan – where it remains to this day.

But once a few more routes had been constructed country people discovered that they could use them to take their own produce to markets farther afield, and the notion of the desirability of communications was gradually born. In 1817 the Council in Chassignolles had refused, to a man, to contribute towards the cost of building a stone bridge over the large River Creuse twenty miles to the south-west, on the circular argument that there was ‘no trade with those parts'. (This is one of the oldest Minute records.) By 1836, however, when a new law provided for subsidies to enlarge paths that linked one Commune to adjoining ones, they were keenly in favour of this, and contributed to the building of the ill-fated stone bridge over the Couarde in the early 1840s even though it was outside the Commune.

The hunger experienced in the Berry between 1846 and 1848 was not a matter of absolute lack of food but of the number of people who, always near the breadline, slipped below it in times of shortage and raised prices. The new administration of the Second Republic, bent on humanitarian reform, including the creation of work schemes, did a survey of the poor: it found that the Indre alone had over five thousand ‘absolutely destitute' people out of a population of about two hundred and seventy thousand, which is approaching two in every hundred. Only half of these were considered fit to work, always supposing they could find work. Many of the rest were probably old, or very young. In its numbers of abandoned babies and small children (always a good index of general poverty and of particular years of crisis) the Indre was the third-worst Department in France.

But at the same time the very fact that the destitute could now be counted and, presumably, helped by the new charity offices, shows what a long way central France had come since the starving serfs and brigands of a hundred years earlier. By the same token, the unmarried girls who abandoned their babies did so knowing that they would probably be found and taken off to the local hospital run by the Sisters. If the infant perished before being found and the mother was officially identified, she might be charged with infanticide. If it were retrieved dead from a place where it was never meant to be found, such as under a pile of straw or in a stream, she could be punished with half a dozen years in prison. The fact that such cases were now brought to Court is itself an indication of the way society was evolving and becoming more ‘civilized'. In the Berry there had always been a popular horror of the crime of child-slaughter, but that was probably because it had also been rather common. The ‘midnight washerwomen', whom the late-night traveller was apt to see as he weaved his way home from a celebration, were authoritatively stated by some to be ‘the souls of mothers who have killed … They incessantly beat and wring what looks like wet linen but which, seen close up, is revealed as a dead baby … They are condemned to wash the corpse of their child until the Last Judgement.'

Those unwanted infants who escaped this apocalyptic fate and survived to reach the hospital were presently put out to nurse. The census for 1846 shows quite a few of these foundlings placed in Chassignolles households. They were known locally as
champis,
children found in the
champs,
the fields, and though they seem to have died off rather more than legitimate children, many did live and flourish. One of George Sand's novellas is a sentimental but well-documented tale of such a foundling making good. A real-life example appears in the Chassignolles census for 1846, having already grown to manhood. The seductive name of Valentin Aimable had been bestowed on him. He worked as a labourer and, at twenty-three, was married and already had two small children.

There are also examples of much more recent date, including the father of the present baker. A foundling in the streets of Paris
circa
1900, fostered in the Black Valley and later apprenticed to a miller, he saved up to buy the goodwill of the Chassignolles bakery, and became a linchpin of the village. His son (the devoted Monsieur Mayer) took on the business after him.

By the middle of the nineteenth century France had the means for relieving absolute want and suffering, but the memory of death by starvation continued for a long time in popular myth and political propaganda. In a paradox which is not uncommon, the symbolic figure of an emaciated peasant driving his worn plough team, silently attended by a still more skeletal being with a scythe, received fresh currency in the 1840s in a popular print after Holbein, just at the time when the reality was passing into history. But not till the generation that had known real hunger at first hand had died off, around the end of the century, did the fear of it die out also. It is customary to speak and write as if, in any one era, the population expressed homogeneously the attitudes and expectations relevant to that era, whereas in practice the world is always well supplied with people and prejudices of the time that is past and with half-formed expectations of a world yet to come.

When Célestine appeared she was no doubt placed ceremonially in the arms of her great-grandfather, Silvain. His birth, counting back from his declared age on his death registration, took place in 1756. All his ideas and assumptions were therefore formed in the feudal, pre-Revolutionary era when the monks were still occupying the church and the houses round it. After the changes that came, even in the conservative Berry, in the wake of the Revolution, the Directoire and the Napoleonic wars, this lost era must have seemed as quaintly antique as the time before the First World War now seems to us. I see Silvain Chaumette in my mind's eye clad to the last in the wool-and-goat-hair breeches that were by then obsolete wear and with his thin old hair in an eighteenth-century pigtail under his round black Berrichon hat.

In contrast, the next generation, that of Célestine's grandfather François, of Antoine Pirot and also of Louis Vallet, grew up in a time of unprecedented change and this too must have gone on informing their hopes, expectations and fears throughout life. The anti-monarchist
coup
of 1848 took place, it has been said, essentially because people still living remembered 1791. By the same token, that brief Republic failed and was replaced by a more autocratic, Bonapartist regime because people also harked back to the days of Napoleon.

What did François wear when his granddaughter was a child? (He died when she was seventeen.) Almost certainly, the dark-blue linen smock of the region and, by this date, dark woollen trousers, all woven in the family. Clogs on his feet, inside them thick wool
chaussons,
half socks and half slipper, dyed brown with walnut juice. He probably never owned a pair of boots though he, like his father, would have had the round hat and a brightly coloured cravat for Sundays. Waistcoats in quilting or sheepskin, extra shirts and the like, even extra pairs of trousers, were piled not over but under the smock in cold weather.

With Silvain-Germain, however, we move into a different era. Born just as the destructive wars had come to an end and a monarchy had been restored, he seems like a harbinger of the future, an example of the kind of man who was then rather rare in a village but who, by the end of the century, would be found on every corner. Even if he wore the standard smock and clogs during his working day, his status as an innkeeper, man of letters and presently Secretary to the Mairie is likely to have been reflected in a set of more bourgeois clothing for best, in the factory-made cloth that was now obtainable locally. These could have been made up in the village, where someone who styled himself tailor (son of the Garde-Champêtre) had set up by 1846. With the new cloth came more closely fitted town styles; dark cutaway coats were being seen in the countryside, along with gaily checked or striped materials worn for stylish contrast. A young master blacksmith who, like Antoine Pirot, was admitted to Châteauroux prison in the early 1850s, was brought there from the Court in what were evidently his best clothes, including a black suit, leather boots, a black cloth cap and a waistcoat striped black, violet, blue and white. Another skilled man arrived with proper shoes, an assortment of colours in his trousers and waistcoat, and a cravat in ‘brown cotton with flowers' – this at a time when the more ordinary inmate appeared in much-mended wool and goatskin.

The difference from one generation and/or social class to another was still more marked in the women. The girl from a neighbouring village, working as a servant in Chassignolles, who was sent to prison for theft and took her illegitimate baby in with her, entered gaol in standard peasant garb: a ‘coarse' chemise, a blue cotton dress, a grey checked apron, a linen underskirt, a cloak, a black fichu and white cap, blue wool stockings and clogs. This outfit, plus some swaddling clothes for the baby, was all she possessed in the world.

In
Le Meunier d'Angibault,
the miller's old mother wears on Sundays a small apron of Indian-printed calico ‘which she had looked after carefully ever since she was young, valuing it greatly because in those days it had cost four times as much as finer stuff would have cost today'. In the same book, the social and chronological evolution of another family, the on-the-make Bricolins, is indicated by the way the women of the family dress. The grandmother appears ‘as a peasant' and is illiterate; the mother is dressed ‘like a priest's housekeeper' – that is to say, in a dark dress of bought stuff, made up with some regard to the prevailing style, and probably worn over the stays (corsets) that were unknown to the peasantry but obligatory among genteelly bred women. ‘She knew how to sign her own name legibly, and could find the time of sunrise and the moon's phases in the pedlar's Almanach.' Meanwhile her daughter Rose, in keeping with her modish name, reads novels from the same source, does the housekeeping accounts for her father, and has learnt new dances such as the polka as well as traditional folk ones. For dancing and for church she wears a pink muslin dress copied from a fashion plate. She probably, though George Sand does not say, wears several layers of petticoats under this and even drawers – also unknown in traditional peasant society.

Just so, a few years later, when Célestine was in her teens, would her wardrobe and accomplishments have been different from those of her mother, who grew up as a shepherdess and at the time of her marriage could not write, and her grandmother Marie Petitpez, wife of François. For Célestine, too, was reared as a literate, refined girl, destined in hope for a wider life.

It must be said, however, that by modern standards no one, refined or lowly, rich or poor, dressed in hemp or dressed in silk, was then particularly clean. Most French people of all classes never, in their whole lives, submerged themselves in water, or even stripped to wash except at long intervals. Many peasants never washed at all, even after the labours of a summer's day – a good sweat was held to be cleansing in itself. It is true that in a life of incessant toil fetching water for one's personal toilette might seem just another tedious chore, but even those villagers who had servants to go to the well for them did not indulge in much cleanliness beyond cosmetic attention to face, neck and hands. Nor did they wash their personal linen often. Laundry was done in great loads that were allowed to accumulate for months, and of course the heavier garments were never washed at all. The schoolmaster's or Secretary's black coat was almost as impregnated with its owner's odour as was the shepherd's smock, and even the muslin dress worn for strenuous dancing at a festival may have been carefully hung back in the wardrobe with its lingering human scent undisturbed. Till the end of the century no one in France, even in the towns, began to suggest there was anything wrong with smelling of oneself. When the first bath was installed in Chassignolles (in the Domaine, in the 1920s) the village wondered with amusement why the wealthy Pissavys were so dirty as to need it.

The people of Chassignolles were all rather short by today's standards, and even by the standards then prevailing in France. In the year of Célestine's birth, the contingent of young men sent by the Department for military service ended up sixteen men below strength because many of those originally summoned were later rejected as ‘too small'. Even a generation later, in 1870, a number of Berrichon conscripts were rejected for this reason, from a cohort whose average height was no more than 1.64 metres (five foot five inches). I have reason to believe that the Chaumettes were on the tall side for their time and place, but this is not to say a great deal; George Sand's miller of Angibault, known as
le beau farinier,
is particularly admired for his unusual size, which is given as five foot, eight
pouces
(thumb-tops – inches).

*   *   *

Le Meunier d'Angibault
appeared in 1845 but seems, like many nineteenth-century novels, to be set in a timeless zone a few years earlier. In it, the impoverished noblewoman arriving in the Berry to visit her mortgaged castle, Blanchemont (actually Sarzay), reaches Châteauroux by coach. The railway is not mentioned. Its much-heralded arrival was, however, the preoccupation of the 1840s, and was the great chronological marker which, in retrospect, can be seen to have divided the old world from the new.