Celestine (18 page)

The correspondent's writing is as elaborate as his syntax, with huge curling capitals as in a school copybook. He was in fact the schoolmaster at nearby Sarzay. He puts this beneath his signature, either from pride or from anxiety that Célestine might not know. With a touching bogusness he has also put a PS in a less elegant hand, ‘Forgive my ugly scrawl', as if hoping belatedly to create the impression of a spontaneity that is totally absent in this careful production. If Aussourd's letters read, paradoxically, like age-old peasant inarticulateness finding its own voice, Monsieur Allorent's composition seems redolent of the self-conscious world just being born: that of the
rentier
and the white-collar workers, of the ladylike wife and the
jeune fille bien élevée,
of trains and newspapers and morning coffee; a world in which eloquence was to be cultivated and yet where taboos and reticences unknown in simpler days were cultivated also. To Allorent, Célestine is ‘Mademoiselle', of course, and
vous.

‘I did not want to write to you,' he begins. ‘As I said, when we were together at the wedding, I wanted to come and visit you.' (One is not surprised to hear that their previous contact was the supremely respectable one of being guests at the same wedding. I cannot imagine Allorent being a regular customer at the Chassignolles tavern, or yet joining in the boisterous dancing at village festivals.) ‘However, I must bring myself to tell you that I have remained inert in this respect without being able to explain why…' He continues in this vein for a number of lines before speculating tortuously, ‘if, through your good-heartedness, I will find with difficulty an answer to my question?

‘My hand trembles as I trace these few lines. I can hardly write to you at all when I remind myself that when I was with you I could barely speak – hardly stutter a few phrases, on account of the state of my heart. I felt you must have a bad impression of me [
J'ai cru que vous pouviez avoir bien mal jugé de moi
].' He goes on, however, to hope that in spite of his silences she may have realized his admiration for her. Since then his feelings for her have grown from day to day ‘without my thoughts, crossing the distance which separates us, being able to question yours and form a chain of affection, one to the other…'

He is afraid of boring her, he says. He is, never fear, about to explain in one sentence his feelings for her – if she will allow him to. Since talking to her he had come to love her with
l'amour le plus tendre, le plus pure et le plus sincère
– ‘the strongest desire and greatest happiness of which I could ever dream is to be alone with you in the gentlest of bonds. One word from you, Mademoiselle, will decide my fate –

‘Will you have the goodness to pass on my deepest respects to Monsieur your Father and Madame your Mother. I am impatient to come and speak with them and with you.'

Against his signature he has written further, as if afraid he still had not made his point clear: ‘I am most tenderly devoted to you.'

Impossible as it is not to be touched by such tender devotion, one can see why Célestine was not drawn towards marriage with him. She may also have suspected that, for all the underlying distress, some of his fine phrases were lifted from one of the letter-writers' manuals that were then in circulation.

‘Allorent' is a local name; Ste-Sévère was probably his family home. It seems likely that in spite of his formality and his literary airs he was quite an ordinary young man whose new-found status had left him socially isolated. Cut off geographically and by lack of income from the town bourgeoisie, and by education and dress from their rustic neighbours, French country school teachers classically suffered in his way. Then and for most of the next hundred years, the Government policy was that there should be schools everywhere in the countryside, so that even children in remote farms might make their way there on foot. By the mid-1860s the Indre had 225 schools and there were over four hundred by 1870, most of them with one lone teacher (
instituteur
) in sole charge. It was the situation described, unchanged, at the turn of the century by Alain-Fournier in his novel
Le Grand Meaulnes,
which is set at the other end of the Berry: ‘… my appointment [is] as schoolmaster in the hamlet of Saint-Benoist-des-Champs … It comprises a few scattered farms, and the schoolhouse stands alone on a hillside near the road. I live a solitary life there, but if I take a short cut through the fields I can be at Les Sablonnières in three quarters of an hour.'

If Allorent in Sarzay was one such black-coated foot-soldier in the Government's campaign to ‘institute' France into one nation of patriotic, French-speaking citizens, then Charbonnier, newly appointed in Chassignolles, was another. He too was unmarried in the early 1860s; perhaps the two young men were able to be of some support to each other across the four miles of muddy paths that separated the two villages.

There was no doubt that the Government's campaign was beginning to work. Teachers such as Allorent, or Charbonnier, whose ‘zeal and devotion' were actually rewarded with extra pay by his cautious fellow-villagers, were a far cry from the drunken old soldiers and cobblers of a generation before. The Préfet of the period in Châteauroux recorded his own satisfaction with the ‘evolution' that was now occurring in the Berrichon peasant.

‘His children, relegated to a solitary life, hardly clad, are now properly dressed and go to be civilized at the local school.'

It would indeed be hard to overstate the solitary and uninspiring effect on a child of long days passed alone minding cattle or standing in a wintry ploughed field scaring away crows from a planted crop.

The Préfet may have been a little optimistic. School was not, of course, free, then or for another twenty years. And even when it did become so (apart from the cost of books and paper) almost one-third of country children did not attend regularly, particularly in the summer, when there was much work to be done in the fields. And ‘children' at this point meant boys; girls did not attend school officially till girls' schools were built or special classes opened for them. Even so, according to the census taken in 1872 (which went into such detail for the first time) about one in seven of Chassignolles' girls, including Mademoiselle Pagnard's grandmother, had learnt to read, and someone must have been teaching them. Célestine, I assume, was taught by her father, the Secretary, and he may have taught his wife too. At any rate, Anne Laurent was to run the inn alone for years after his death.

What is certain is that by the time Célestine was a grown girl the
idea
of education, if not the reality, was established in the countryside. At the same time it was being discovered that ‘evolution' might have its disadvantages. It was not only the peasants in need of their children's labour who regarded school as a waste of time; many of the bourgeoisie were equally disapproving, though in their case the disapproval was for the
other
people's children receiving education. In 1871 the Préfet of the Cher (the northern half of the Berry) complained that if he talked about increasing rates of school attendance people were apt to wag their heads and conjure up vistas of deserted farms and flocks of sheep roaming unattended.

Yet even then these forebodings were not new. Twenty years before, in the middle of the century, the
Écho de l'Indre
was writing in an editorial:

… There are complaints on all sides that the young are leaving the land and that the rural workforce is being depleted. It is shocking the contempt that the sons of country labouring men have for their fathers' occupations … Everything they read [
sic
] and hear draws them towards the big cities. There, they only work at the less arduous trades which are more highly esteemed and they have more distractions and amusements – lively, noisy entertainments unknown in the countryside. Is it surprising that so many young heads are turned and join the rush to the great centres of population? There, luxury and pleasure awaits them, but also poverty and evil …

And so on and so forth. This peroration was written a full generation before changing farming methods, spreading communications and general literacy began to have a substantial effect on the traditions of country life, and a hundred years before the major exodus began with the coming of mechanized farming. Yet it strikes exactly the same note as the later choruses of complaint in 1900, 1920 or 1950. It might almost be Georges Bernardet inveighing against the idle young
circa
1980.

Evidently the young have
always
been disregarding the values of their parents, leaving the land and coming to grief among the bright lights of alien towns. They were no doubt doing so long before there was any question of education being to blame for it. In the poorer and more mountainous country immediately to the south of Berry there was already, by the early nineteenth century, a well-established tradition of men going forth to seek work elsewhere and only returning at long intervals to their own poor soil and their stoical families. The stonemasons from the Creuse formed itinerant labour gangs that were famous all over France: it was their work that transformed the major cities in the nineteenth century; much of Haussmann's Paris was constructed by them. Sawyers and carpenters also joined them from the forests of the Lower Berry. The Préfet of the Indre, the same humane functionary who had said in the winter of 1844–5 that the poor should be allowed to continue trapping birds to keep them from starvation, wrote a few years later: ‘Each year in spring numerous workmen from the La Châtre area … betake themselves to Paris to seek a means of livelihood. This traditional custom is all the more respectable in that these labourers are for the most part decent men of tranquil habits.'

France needed this mobile workforce as much as the men needed the work. The Préfet wrote as he did because spasmodic official attempts were made, from the time of Napoleon to the end of the Second Empire in 1870, to limit the labourer's freedom to travel from one region to another; permits were required, sometimes total embargoes were imposed. Ostensibly the authorities feared the vagrancy and crime that might follow the failure to find work. The fact was they also feared, with some justification, that a large urban pool of uprooted labour would be seething with unacceptably radical ideas and potential rebellion. The life of one Creusois mason exemplifies just this and also the triumph of self-help and enterprise. Martin Nadaud started his working life as an illiterate teenage hod-carrier, travelling the whole way from the Creuse to Paris on foot in 1830. A natural leader, he set to work to educate himself and his companions. He became a banned trade-unionist under the Empire – ironically, since Louis-Napoleon initially favoured unions – but was welcomed back to France after 1870 as a celebrated figure. He ended his career as Préfet of his native
pays.

Although few economic migrants achieved quite such distinction as Nadaud, stories of people making good were plentiful throughout the century. A trawl through the
Journal de l'Indre
in the period when the railway was just linking Châteauroux to Paris produces the cheering moral example of another Creusois mason. He was said to have left his native land for Paris in the last years of the eighteenth century and there, through hard work, amassed a fortune, built a grand house of his own and died leaving his heirs one and a half million francs. However, other newspaper items of the same period convey the clear message that all that glittered in Paris was not gold. As a warning to the overconfident, one described the Morgue in lingering detail.

The ambivalence then surrounding the whole subject of education, getting on in life and leaving home is clear. On the one hand the French peasant was urged to make the most of himself, to wash, to speak French, to read, to use new farming methods, to adapt to a money-based economy, to look beyond his fixed horizons. On the other hand there were many complaints when this process led him away from the land, often to settle permanently elsewhere. Despised and patronized as he had often been, the very texture of France was his creation. Who will look after the
paysage
when the
paysan
has gone to the town? The question, with modern variations, inevitably haunts this account; it is a still more crucial question at the present day.

Even the local newspapers, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, carried inducements for fit men without encumbrances to seek their fortune at a distance – Paris, or California or the new colonies in north and west Africa. Some men were tempted; at least one member of Célestine's own family was. Most, however, stayed more or less where they were. It is the strikingly homogeneous and stable nature of life in villages such as Chassignolles that makes it possible to trace the fortunes of whole families, generation after generation lying in the same earth and in the pages of the same registers. And many of those names which eventually disappear from the village records – including Chaumette – did not journey far. A Chaumette breeds horses now near Neuvy St-Sépulchre, an easy ride west from Chassignolles. Another makes clogs in La Châtre to this day and sells them to a few faithful wearers, along with carpet slippers, sensible shoes
pour les dames d'un certain âge
and good-quality espadrilles for the more frivolous-minded. When I plucked up courage to enquire about his ancestors he was, like many people, reticent at first, uncertain of being able to provide the right answer – ‘It's all so long ago' – and then progressively more interested. He produced his
brevet de famille,
part of the documentation with which all French citizens are armed against the fear of not existing, and offered the names of his grandparents. From these, to his surprise and pleasure, I could tell him his family-tree back six generations, through Silvain-Bazille and his father Pierre to the sacristan born in 1756, his and Célestine's common ancestor.