Celestine (2 page)

Some sentences sprang fresh as flowers from the pages; others seemed for the moment impenetrable. I found that each letter was in a different hand except for two that were from the same young man, writing first in hope and then in bitter disappointment. Even so, he was not bitter at Célestine: she seems to have had the gift of inspiring respect and affection in youth as in old age: ‘… I havent put myself about to talk to your parents because it wouldnt be any use, I wanted to know what you thought first of all tho' I do think they wouldnt a been averse … All I can say is, I wish you from the bottom of my heart a husband who will always be faithful to you, for you dont deserve to be Cheated on […
je te souhaite du plus profond de moncoeur un marie qui te soie toujours fidelle car tu merite pas detre Trompé
].'

In the dusk, which in that part of France, south of the Loire but just north of the mountains, descends with a pinkish, theatrical light, I returned to my own cottage on the other side of the village. I took with me the cat footstool, Célestine's cat with its worn, wool smile. I also took the letters. Once ephemeral as butterflies, they had been cherished and kept for reasons of obscure pride, comfort or regret; messages from a life already past to Célestine, they had undergone a long hibernation. They had been transformed into messages of another kind, making ‘for ever' come true in a different way from the one the writers originally, bravely intended; they were to be cherished for new reasons. Now, when Célestine herself, all her correspondents, every single person they knew and most of those they were ever going to know, had vanished as if they had never been, I would bring them to life again.

Chapter 2

I had come to the village some dozen years earlier on just such an evening of unearthly light. I arrived there by chance, with my husband and our then small son, driving south on minor roads, hesitating before obscure signposts by fields where white Charolais cattle drifted in ghostly herds and mistletoe hung in swags from the trees. It was a relief when we saw a church spire and a water-tower ahead and at last drove into an irregular square with a café and two petrol pumps and a tree. We stayed the night in one of the café's four hotel rooms, ate a home-cooked meal, went for a brief walk round unknowable houses in the starry dark that surprised us by its sudden cold. In the hot May sun of the following morning we played ball with our child in the hotel yard, packed up the car and drove off, mentally rolling up behind us like a map this unremarkable village. However, by chance we returned, in a different season. And then returned again. The place's situation near the geographical centre of France, an area crossed by many itineraries yet generally consigned by the French themselves to that unexplored and apparently unexplorable region
la France profonde,
began to speak to us.

On our fourth or fifth visit we asked the owner of the café-hotel, Suzanne Calvet, who had inherited it from her father when it was a plain village inn, if she knew of any houses for sale? It was 1972, the autumn before the Common Market was due to include Britain in its reluctant embrace.

‘I'll go and ask the men in the bar,' she said.

These, since it was morning, were a coterie of elderly citizens all wearing the striped trousers and black alpaca jackets that had indicated respectability in their youth. The consensus was that there were two possible houses for us. One was a pretty but large and dilapidated property by the cemetery. (It was later bought by a local faith-healer and teller of fortunes, but good fortune it did not bring him.) The other house was agreed by all to be extremely tiny but in good condition. Georges Bernardet, who had acquired it in 1938 for the widowed aunt who had brought him up, was known to be a conscientious owner. ‘The Proprietor' was his village nickname.

‘Bought it for her out of what he saved when he was doing his military service, he did.'

‘How he managed to save beats me. But that's him all over.' Comfortable, slightly malicious chuckles. They were café-frequenters; Georges Bernardet was not.

‘Ah, it's so small, it wouldn't have cost much then. Doesn't cost much now, come to that. Same price as a small car.' To me: ‘You buy it, Madame, you won't regret it, the roof's sound … Well, go and look at it anyway. Last house in the village on the Séchère road, the corner by the cross. Its garden's all down to cabbages this year. Georges never leaves land idle … You can't miss it.'

Four months later, on a day when January hoar-frost was petrifying every leaf, blade of grass and spider's web, the house became ours. Or, more accurately, it became mine, since I was the one able to be present in the attorney's office in La Châtre for the ceremonial signing of documents that French law requires.

Bernardet had ridden in on his mobylette. I did not then know, but came later to understand, what an exceptional event it had to be to bring him into the town. Tall, heavy, battered-looking but wearing his sixty years well, he was ill at ease, constantly resettling his cap on his thick grey hair. He was mistrustful of the lawyer, the traditional enemy. Some months later, when it became apparent that an extra and wrong land registry number had been put in by mistake on the purchase document, Bernardet was not so much annoyed as grimly triumphant to have his suspicions vindicated, and gave the attorney a piece of his mind.

That day he was circumspect, however; disposed to be amiable to me but on his guard, sizing me up over an exceptional, ceremonial drink in the café afterwards. Was I going to like his house – understand how to live in it? Would I and my husband really be happy for the time being with the earth closet he had rashly agreed to construct for us at the bottom of the garden? He spoke carefully in his elegant, Sunday-best French, which was different from the tongue he employed at home. When the subject of the cabbage-patch garden came up, however, he became more animated, even gallant.

‘I myself will do the garden for you, Madame, as I mentioned to you when you first looked at the house. That's good earth you've got there. I like to see it put to proper use.'

The next summer, and for sixteen summers after, the garden in late summer was a neat vision of potatoes, carrots, leeks, lettuces, haricot beans and tomatoes. Once in a while there was a coolness from him if we failed to be there at the right time to harvest everything he provided. We would beg him to use the stuff himself, but this was not part of his plan. He never entirely came to terms with our itinerant habits, but after many years he relented so far as to regard these as our fate and our misfortune rather than our own foolish choice. Once or twice, coming upon me with papers spread out on the table, he expressed sympathy for me – it must be hard on the brain, I ought to take care not to overdo it – and general relief that he himself had never been constrained by a Higher Authority to take up book-work.

Choice and free will were things of which life had provided him with little experience, yet he had turned his own fate to good advantage. Born into a large and poor family, bred to labour on the land of others, he set himself to acquire territory of his own. Over many years, intelligently and persistently, he worked his way into a position of modest comfort and universal respect: this was the real drama of his life.

Its one great adventure was a different matter. Called up at the beginning of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner at the fall of France along with half a million other Frenchmen. He was sent to a transit camp on the borders of Belgium, where his job was to get requisitioned horses ready for transport to Germany. It was clear to him that soon it would be men who were being deported thence, and having established an image of himself as a trusty, he made his plans to escape and did so. How he managed, without papers, money or civilian clothes, to make his way over hundreds of miles of occupied France was something I never entirely understood. Once, in conversation alone with me, he mentioned that
une personne
had been of crucial assistance at one point. French uses the female form to describe any person, so the word was opaque, but I felt that if his helper had been a man he would have said
quelqu'un
or
un type
(a chap). At other times he said that whenever he sensed a German patrol might be near he would take to the fields and pretend to be tending the crops, a role in which he presumably looked so convincing that he was never questioned. Once he hastily joined a family who were digging up potatoes, muttering to them ‘I'm your cousin…' Potatoes, cabbages and turnips – the main crops at that season in the chilly north – also provided his food. The motorized and provisioned troops of 1940 covered territory at speed; half France was in German hands almost before the distraught populace had grasped the scale of the defeat. But stragglers, deserters, escaped prisoners, and refugees were back to the pace of foot-soldiers living off the land, as in the days when France was ‘sixteen days wide and twenty-two days long'.

His keenest anxiety during that journey was that he did not know whether his home country, that
pays
to which he was pertinaciously, almost instinctively making his way, was now in the Occupied Zone or in Pétain's nominally Free one. In fact the Department of the Indre was just within the Free Zone: the line of demarcation was the River Cher, which bisects the old province of the Berry into two Napoleonic Departments, each named after its river. Bernardet only discovered the position of the frontier when he reached its banks. There he wandered for hours, avoiding the bridges which were now equipped with gun posts, gazing morosely at the farther shore. From any deserted water-meadow a swimmer could have made it easily to the other side. However, the rivers that criss-cross Bernardet's landlocked native countryside are all smaller than the Cher. The Indre there is easily fordable; the larger Creuse is twenty miles away. So Bernardet had never learnt to swim.

His saviour, who appeared at last as night was falling, was that classic figure of French folk-tale, a small boy herding cows. The child showed him where he could wade across, armpit deep. Some sixteen hours later, having walked in exhilaration all through the night, he strode into his own village. He went straight to his aunt, in the house that is now ours.

He never travelled again after that. He had done it, and that was enough. Why should he wander in other people's kingdoms when his own, so intimately known to him in all its rises and descents, its variations in soil, its pastures and crop fields, vineyards, copses and vegetable gardens, was there demanding his attention?

Late in life, he did occasionally get on the train to visit his daughter, established in the suburbs of Paris, but this was on the understanding that her garden needed expert attention which her garage-mechanic husband could not be expected to provide. Each to his own skill. I believe that in his seventies, also, he did once relent so far as to accompany his wife on a day trip to the Atlantic coast, but till then it had been almost a matter of pride to him that he had never seen the sea.

After the war, when the aged, limiting structure of French rural life was at last cracking open a little, one or two friends suggested to him that a man of his acknowledged capabilities might aspire now to a different job. The local Gendarmerie, perhaps, where a good friend was established? Or the railways? His army sergeant, in civilian life a railway worker, would put in a good word for him there. Bernardet considered these propositions but turned them down: the thought of a life unencumbered by the demands of either the fields or the animals that meant so much to him did not, after all, appeal.

He grumbled furiously at times, but that is a general trait in farmers, subject as they are to forces of God and Government perpetually beyond their control. Not that he believed much in God, and he had a covert contempt for all forms of organized government from the Élysée Palace to the village municipal council. His ethic and his passion was work; it was his pride that, apart from all his farming skills, both current and remembered, he could turn his hand to a whole range of other things: he made gates, ladders and wheelbarrows, chicken coops and pigsties, he retiled roofs, laid hedges.

His great model in life, his personal version of the admired grown-up that is internalized within us, was his maternal grandfather. ‘Ah, my grandfather could have told you that,' he would say, when I sought some piece of knowledge about the village's past. This man, whom I eventually discovered to have been a contemporary of Célestine Chaumette, grew up within a mile of her. They must have been acquainted: in those days the inhabitants of a rural area hardly ever encountered a face to which they were unable to put a name. But socially there would have been a gap between them. He was the son of a day-labourer, while the daughter of the innkeeper was almost a member of the bourgeoisie. The word originally indicated no more than those who lived
au bourg
– that is, within a little town or village however rural, as opposed to those who lived on a more remote farm or hamlet among the fields – but certain social differences tended to follow from these different circumstances, and still exist today. In the last century the differences would have been more marked. Clearly, Célestine could read and write herself (so, as we shall see, could her father) whereas Bernardet's grandfather was completely illiterate. He is said, however, to have been able to ‘calculate anything in his head'. When still in his teens and working long days on someone else's farm, he took to fetching stone in the evenings from a local quarry with a hand-made cart and a borrowed mule. He fetched lime, too, from a river-bank, sawed wood and seasoned it. With infinite labour in snatched hours, he built a two-roomed house for himself and his future wife outside the village. It is standing to this day.

From the vantage-point of the present Bernardet himself now seems a figure from another era, one of those people who are irreplaceable because they can no longer be made: the mould is broken. It is a comfort, of a sort, to realize that the idea that the modern world has invaded and destroyed an ageless, unchanging peasant culture at some recent date (1950? 1939? 1914?) is to some extent an optical illusion. Moulds have repeatedly been broken over the previous centuries; peasant cultures, however apparently static, have often before been in a state of deep-seated change: otherwise, paradoxically, they could not have survived. Bernardet, in his turn, regarded his grandfather as a representative of the world he felt had slipped away already by his own youth: the world of the reaping hook, the wolves, the fairies and the all-night
veillées
where nuts were shelled for oil and wool was carded, and where the folk memories of unlettered men and women went back before the Revolution.