Celestine (23 page)

There are no other notes on his movements. His record ends
‘libérable du service actif le 10 août 1875'
– almost exactly five years from the day when he first joined up.

‘Libérable'
– entitled to be released. He did not necessarily avail himself of this right. ‘The historical archives have no further information on the individual concerned. There is no file, on him, a usual situation in the case of Other Ranks.'

It seems highly probable that he never again returned home.

We know that his sister kept, all her life, the scrawled demand for money signed with a hasty endearment. We know that thirty years later, in the 1900s (the earliest period that anyone now alive in Chassignolles can recall), his very existence had been forgotten. Of course his sister and a few childhood friends could not have forgotten, but no doubt they had long ceased to mention him. It would seem that, regardless of the provisions of French law, he had effectively disinherited himself from any claim on the inn. His mother had been gone since 1884, dead of that cancer of the breast she tried to treat with lumps of raw steak in what is now Jeanne Pagnard's kitchen.

Maybe, when Auguste did leave the army, he drifted with his ‘small debts' from Meaux to Paris or to another of the expanding northern cities, where he became caught up in money-making schemes, successful or otherwise. Or maybe he was drawn south again, back to the Mediterranean, and any original intention to contact his family again and repair ‘misunderstandings' faded and faded until it was extinguished by guilt and time. But I think it most likely that he returned to Africa and settled there, and that this accounts for his total disappearance.
‘Tout ça, c'est la faute de l'Afrique,'
as another old adventurer declares at the end of Pagnol's
L'Eau des Collines.

There were opportunities there for active men without families: even in La Châtre you could discover that, in the 1860s and '70s. What more natural than that he should simply remain in a place where it was never cold and where even the most humble-born Frenchman could have a servant to wait on him? His obscure life history encapsulates a whole era in France's development and her participation in the glories and follies of nineteenth-century expansionism. From the Auguste Chaumettes of France derived the bitter Franco-Algerian conflicts of the mid-twentieth century.

*   *   *

This is not, however, the whole of the story. Célestine, it turns out, had not one vanished brother but two.

In the seventeen years between 1833 and 1850, twelve Chaumettes were born in Chassignolles but nearly all belonged to the branch descended from Célestine's great-uncle Pierre. Submerged in this tide, whose various combinations of Silvain, François, Louis and Félix recur like some natural cycle, I almost overlooked the fact that one other Chaumette of Célestine and Auguste's generation was born to Silvain-Germain and Anne Laurent. His name was Ursin and he was their first-born, coming into the world in 1843.

I was for a while inclined to think that this hitherto unsuspected brother so close in age, who seemed to have been lost to village memory as completely as Auguste and who had not even left a trace in a letter, had perhaps died in childhood as did his neighbour, little Jean Aussourd. Otherwise, why had he not taken on the inn, at that time when a son almost automatically followed the father into a business if the family were fortunate enough to have one? French law gave him an automatic share in the place; older Berrichon tradition would have favoured him in any case, as the eldest. So his absence in adulthood was still stranger than Auguste's.

But there was no sign in the Chassignolles register of an early death, and when I got to the census records I found Ursin in place. He was there in 1856 ‘without profession' (the sign of a family comfortable enough not to need the earnings of a thirteen-year-old) by which time Anne Laurent's widowed father from Nohant had also joined the household. By 1861, aged eighteen, he was still at home but had become
‘leur fils taillandier'
– ‘their son, a tool maker'. This was a skilled trade, slightly more prestigious than that of a general smith but learnt in a smithy. Antoine Pirot, whose father was a blacksmith, had followed a similar calling. It was just the kind of occupation to be recommended to a young man who, once married, would also take on the inn: such was the classic pattern then and well into the twentieth century. On the evidence of this, Ursin was all set to succeed his father as a prominent member of village society, and should have gone on appearing in the records throughout the decades.

But he does not. By 1866 he had gone, never to reappear. In fact he was most probably gone well before: the tone of Henry Lorant's letter to Célestine of 1864 suggests that he (Henry) saw himself installed in the inn. Certainly Ursin does not seem to have been present during the eventful year of 1865. He was not an official witness at his sister's wedding in January; more significantly, he was not there in August either, when his father died. It was the new son-in-law, Pierre Robin, who was not even living in Chassignolles, who represented the family.

Come to that, Ursin was not there either at his mother's death, nearly twenty years later. It is this very lack of further evidence, and of any apparent trace in village memory, that tells its own tale. But what tale, exactly?

The most obvious and comprehensive explanation for Ursin's desertion was the one that I had originally assigned in my mind to Auguste – that he had drawn a ‘bad number' in the military lottery. This would have removed him for seven years and quite likely for ever. Back again to the Archives in Châteauroux and this time, as the sympathetic lady remarked, I was in luck. This was 1993, and Ursin had been born in 1843, exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier.

A hundred and sixty-seven twenty-year-olds appeared in La Châtre from villages round about on the appointed morning in the spring of 1864, minus a few who had failed to return from jobs elsewhere and would now be sought by the police, or who were away with a good excuse and were represented by their fathers. They drew lots, each man plunging his hand in turn into a basket of numbers. Only those with numbers up to eighty-five were then called for interview and examination by a committee of local mayors.

I did not have to seek long for Ursin: he was number twenty-nine. It was noted that he was born and living in Chassignolles, son of Silvain-Germain, that he was able both to read and write and that he was a tool maker. His height was 1.74 metres – about five foot nine inches, tall for that place and time, even taller than the
beau farinier
of George Sand's story. But, unlike Sand's rustic hero, he was also marked as
faible
– ‘weak'.

The final decision was taken by an army surgeon; it is scribbled against Ursin's name in his different, impatient hand:
‘Faible de constitution. Improp.'
‘Unsuitable.' The army had turned Ursin Chaumette down, and since a century and a half had gone by I was allowed to know it.

But did ‘weak constitution' simply imply that he was a skinny, gangling creature without the apparent strength for route marches? Or did it refer to something more specific, such as recognized poor health – a history of asthma, perhaps, or the dreaded
phtisie
(consumption). There is also, of course, the possibility that
faible de constitution
was used as a general euphemism for boys whose weakness appeared to be in the head, but the fact that Ursin was a tool maker and literate would suggest that he was not stupid.

I played for a while with the idea that he might have been just rather odd: the sort of young man who then, today and in any era, causes his family pain by his apparent inability to be or think quite like other people – the sort who may drift away and be lost to view. It was unusual to disappear from home in rural France at that time, but, in spite of the travel permits a working man was supposed to carry, it was not really difficult and probably most disappearances never got signalled to the authorities: the new highways were busy with wanderers. From the mid-nineteenth century a trickle of search notices put out by local Mairies hint impotently at family feuds, mental illness, tragedies that will never now be fully elucidated. ‘Louis Got, aged twenty-one, born at Vatan [in the Berry], left that town several weeks ago to work as a tailor in Paris. He was seen on 6 July in Vierzon … and said that he was going to look for work in Romorantin. At that time he still had with him his trade papers and a silver watch…' That young man, of similar age and social status to Ursin Chaumette, disappeared without trace in 1866.

There was, of course, the simpler possibility that the weakness discerned in Ursin by the army surgeon was a straightforward one which, before long, killed him off. Or he could have died in some accident – an injury at work that turned septic, a fall from a roof, a bolting horse and cart … But nothing appears in the Chassignolles Death Register for Ursin for the rest of the century.

Today, and for the past two generations, marriages and deaths anywhere in France are automatically reported back to the Commune where the birth was registered and noted in the margin of the original entry. So a completed twentieth-century entry encapsulates at a glance the life journey, both actual and metaphorical, of that particular individual. But during the possible life span of Ursin, or indeed of Auguste, this coherent system was not yet in force. Just once or twice I found pasted into the register a declaration from a distant Commune concerning the death of someone ordinarily resident in Chassignolles. For instance, a Charbonnier son died in Versailles in 1843 at the age of nineteen while working there as a builder's labourer, and even at this early date the Versailles Hôtel de Ville efficiently sent notification of this to his native village. But there is no such document at any date relating to Ursin, any more than there is for his younger brother. Nor, needless to say, is Ursin mentioned on the family grave.

But surely, one might say, the most likely explanation is that Ursin, like so many countrymen in the latter half of the nineteenth century, took himself and his particular skill off to a nearby town where he could hope for a more comfortable and modern existence? That is entirely plausible as far as it goes, but as an explanation for his complete disappearance it does not go far enough. Metal-working was an expanding trade; developments in agriculture were requiring more elaborate tools. By the 1860s the first of the horse-drawn reaping machines were beginning to clack in the fields that, for a thousand or more years, had been harvested with sickles and scythes. The earliest (hand-operated) mechanical thresher was actually invented locally, in Vierzon, during Ursin's childhood, a small but distinct advance on the exhausting flail. If Ursin had opened a Quincaillerie Agricole in La Châtre, Ste Sévère, Neuvy, Issoudun or any other of the small towns around, he could have done nicely. But in that case he would have remained locally known, returning to Chassignolles at times of death and marriage, a continuing if off-stage presence in the family history.

Even if he had gone much farther away, to the growing industrial town of Nantes or to the Atlantic seaboard or to Paris, he should not have been totally lost to his own
pays.
Most nineteenth-century migrants to the big cities joined kin or friends there, a network that linked certain jobs or trades with specific country areas of origin, so a sense of regionalism was retained. (‘The tenements of Paris are in themselves villages come from the Centre.') Often such migrants returned in old age to their childhood home, having inherited and kept their part of the family goods. Even today, the habit is not lost: people in the Berry cling tenaciously to small pieces of land or redundant farm buildings deriving from share-outs several generations back. The way in which property is necessarily allocated helps to perpetuate ties that might otherwise have been relinquished. Proprietary reference is made to ‘cousins' even when these are several times removed, and they are always addressed in the intimate
tu
form in spite of the fact that they may be virtual strangers.

In this way, Ursin's existence and that of his descendants, if any, should have remained a matter of oral record. I should have been told: ‘He let his sister have the inn, as she was there, and he kept an orchard they had as his share.' Or yet: ‘Célestine and her husband must have bought the brother out', or even: ‘She had a brother, I seem to remember, but he was never interested in the inn.' Instead, where Ursin should have been, in however shadowy a form, I encountered only empty space. Many years later, when Célestine became a widow without resources, it was as if this brother, like the younger one, had never been.

I began to form the theory that that able and respected man Silvain-Germain, who seems to have had a strong personality (‘Your mother tells me she let's you make your own choices but … I certainly can't believe it of your father') somehow alienated both his sons as soon as they reached manhood, and that each left home with sufficient drama and decision that even his death could not bring them back. Or was it their mother, Anne, who was the real cause of tension: might she have remained on reasonable terms with her ‘sweet-natured and good' daughter but driven the boys away? (‘If you see Mother will you tell her I am very hurt by her letter…') Either way, it cannot have been a happy story. It also looks, on reflection, as if the period of nearly ten years following Silvain-Germain's death, when Anne ran the inn on her own before Célestine and Pierre joined her, may represent a continuing uncertainty as to whether either of the absent sons might not after all reappear and reclaim the succession. And, perhaps, a reluctance on the part of Célestine and Pierre to go and live with her themselves.

Célestine's own son, born after Ursin had gone, was initially registered as Ursin Charles. Perhaps the intention was that brother Ursin should be godfather, as was the custom of the countryside. But later the boy was always referred to as ‘Charles', as if the very name of Ursin was forgotten.