Celestine (26 page)

Taking a further step back in time, where several different strands in the web of history unexpectedly meet, it is worth recording that the formidable Yvernault brothers had inherited not only all their father's extensive property, much of it in land in various adjacent Communes, including Chassignolles, but their Uncle Charles's share also. This black-sheep uncle had got deeply into debt in Paris as a young man, where he had lived dangerously in the world of Revolutionary intellectual ferment and its aftermath of outrageous, febrile fashions for red neck cords, see-through muslin and assumed speech defects. As the price of rescue from his financial predicament, and perhaps as a punishment for harbouring Advanced Ideas, he had had to surrender his patrimony to his white-sheep brother (Louis' father). ‘But what am I to live on now?' he asked as he signed away his income.

The story runs that the brother replied: ‘Bah, I'm allowing you to keep our little mill over at Angibault. You can go and be the miller there.'

‘Me – a miller? But –'

‘What alternative have you?' asked his brother rudely. There was no alternative. Black-sheep Charles betook himself to isolated Angibault, where, dressed ‘like a half-bourgeois', he resignedly directed the operation of the mill's great water-wheel and sluices: a far cry from the Café Procope and the Seine. The young George Sand, who met him when he had been there a good many years, wrote of him in her preface as ‘a gentleman of a certain age who, since he had associated in Paris with
Monsieur de Robespierre
(thus he always referred to him) decided to let nature have its way round his mill locks and streams: the alder, the briar, the oak and the guelder rose grew there in profusion.'

In her novel, George Sand transformed this melancholy, dispossessed nature lover (who sounds more like a disciple of Rousseau than of Robespierre) into one of nature's socialists, a young and high-minded working miller, the
beau farinier
of Angibault who defeats low cunning and triumphs in a pure love. Purity was not particularly evident in Charles Yvernault's life, but perhaps the generally democratic image was further enhanced by the presence in the mill of a young unmarried peasant housekeeper who, over the course of years, became the mother of five children.

So, at any rate, runs the alternative or word-of-mouth family history. The memory of hushed-up scandal still carried enough of a charge in the 1920s, a hundred years later, for it to be omitted by the pious chronicler of the received version; he is silent, in any case, on the whole George Sand connection, since the family traditionally disapproved of everything the writer represented, politically and socially. The chronicler's widow, one of Marie-Rachel's granddaughters and the teacher of catechism to the village children, was particularly firm in this view. In old age she burnt packages of George Sand's letters to another member of the family which had come to rest in her Chassignolles attic. Their potential value, both literary and financial, was considerable even then and would today have been enormous.

According to one of the letter-burner's descendants, the peasant family who tenanted and worked the mill at Angibault for several generations were well known in the area to be related to the grand family of Chassignolles, though neither side ever mentioned the fact. He himself inherited the mill when young as his part of the family goods, and once said genially to the miller in the course of a conversation about funds for repairs: ‘After all, Monsieur, we are cousins, aren't we?' The elderly man gave him an anxious sideways look. ‘Well, yes, M'sieur Jacques … but low be it spoken.' And moved on at once to other matters.

When I plucked up courage to visit old Madame L, Marie-Rachel's last surviving granddaughter, in the Domaine at Chassignolles, she received me kindly in a décor of tapestry-seated chairs and family portraits. She said nothing of the black-sheep Charles or of certain other things. But she discoursed on Marie-Rachel and showed me a cabinet photograph of this girl, who seemed to have become something of a family icon: a pretty but strained little face between the lank, centre-parted hair and the bunchy dress of the period.

Marie-Rachel, who was born to the ironmaster and his wife in 1841, was the fourth daughter to arrive since their marriage five years before and the only one to survive infancy. The unfortunate mother was consoled by her husband with the thought that ‘When we lose them all we should really rejoice, since they go to swell the heavenly choirs with more voices to praise the Lord.' This, however, was no longer a time when babies in the French countryside died off wholesale; the received version of the history goes into no details, but one may surmise that the marriages between cousins over two generations had resulted in an accumulation of recessive genes, leading to weak or malformed babies. Another pair of Yvernault cousins, though more distant ones, also married at that period, had a daughter who, while she lived a long life, was described in the census of 1861 as
boiteuse,
‘lame' – an admission that, in a genteel family, may indicate rather more than just a club-foot.

Marie-Rachel, however, was ‘a beautiful, healthy child' who grew up in isolated Crozon as the sole focus of her parents' tender care. It seems they had decided to have no more. Everything was to be for this daughter. Long afterwards her mother, by then the sole survivor of the trio, wrote of her ‘life so pure, so hard-working, so pious, so charitable, so gentle, so gracious … She was gifted, from her earliest years, with a tenderness which I never found wanting, she loved to give, it was one of her joys. She also possessed, from earliest youth, a sense of orderliness … She never left anything half done…'

To this holy picture of a girl too good for this world, the bereaved mother did, however, add one transforming detail: Marie-Rachel was once, as a small child, found praying in her room at an unexpected time of day, and said when questioned that she was asking the Mother of God to lower the price of wheat. Since the grain riots (see
here
) occurred when Marie-Rachel was six, this anecdote has an authentic feel.

It was customary for girls of good family, whom their parents hoped to marry well, to be sent away in their teens to board at convent schools. There, it was hoped, they would accumulate enough docility and expectation to co-operate in a suitable marriage, and also shed the country accents they might have picked up from peasant nursemaids or little local playmates. Louis Yvernault and his wife accompanied Marie-Rachel to distant Paris by the convenient new railway line from Châteauroux and established her with the well-born Sisters of Sainte Clothilde in the Faubourg St Antoine. According to the brochure of this establishment: ‘Nothing is neglected that may embellish their personalities. While following current developments in the education of the female sex, the school aims above all to conserve their simplicity of heart. In brief, the wish of the Ladies is to see their pupils combine firm principles with amiability and gentleness, and learning with a modest reserve.'

One cannot help thinking that life held more promise for the daughter of a local innkeeper.

The Yvernaults made regular trips to Paris to visit their daughter, and brought her home once a year for a summer holiday. In 1857, when she was rising sixteen, dysentery was widespread in the Berry. According to the chronicler:

Louis Yvernault, with his usual kindness, visited the sick to bring them moral comfort and material assistance as necessary. In the midst of this, he had to leave for Paris with his wife to fetch their daughter … carrying the disease unbeknown with him. He became ill, and on arrival at their hotel in Paris had to take to his bed. He died on 27 August, after several days of acute suffering.

Madame L of today, partisan for her own countryside, claimed that it wasn't a local germ that killed great-grandfather but cholera picked up in Paris itself, that known centre of sickness physical and spiritual. Whatever the truth, one feels a pang for this usually masterful and energetic man of barely forty, dying of terrible diarrhoea in a hot rented room full of Second Empire draperies, with only hotel servants to wait on him and his distraught and genteel womenfolk. Marie-Rachel herself subsequently wrote an account of the whole event: ‘not a complaint nor a regret ever passed his lips … “Have confidence in God,” he exhorted us, “He is so Good!”' When it became apparent that God was going to let His faithful servant down on this occasion, Louis changed his reflection to ‘Don't be so distressed. What is this life compared with Eternity?' All three of them seem to have had the absolute and concrete conviction that they would be reunited in a better world, together with the first three baby girls who had preceded them and would be waiting there – possibly transformed like their sister into perfect
jeunes filles.
No wonder the Catholic Church in France at this period rather discouraged second marriages: the practical problems posed in Eternity by such temporal readjustments would hardly have been manageable.

Louis Yvernault returned to Châteauroux as he had come, but in his coffin. The train arrived at four in the morning and it took a horse-drawn cortège another six hours to negotiate the valley of the Indre and reach Crozon. There, the entire workforce of the forges was lining the route to see the Master laid away in his own new cemetery.

Marie-Rachel settled once again into being her mother's constant companion: ‘My darling girl kept away from all dangers. She never read a novel, preferring serious works; she would take my advice and have me read aloud to her while she sewed…' In fact
so
serious was this paragon (as one can believe from her photograph) that the family doctor had to suggest little excursions, a change of air from time to time for her health's sake.

The received story is that, in spite of all this, Marie-Rachel fell in love, making her own choice rather than leaving it to her mother but exercising that choice ‘keeping in view Faith, wisdom and reason'. Her intended was Victor Pissavy, one of the four sons of the energetic Guillaume Pissavy who had left the Auvergne to establish his cloth-peddling business in the Berry. All four boys had been educated as gentlemen at various religious boarding establishments, but when Victor met Marie-Rachel he was back in La Châtre working in his father's warehouse. By one of those coincidences which are of no particular significance but please by their neatness, this warehouse was the same rambling old building that the young Robins were to take on as an inn eight or nine years later.

According to the chronicler, Victor Pissavy was ‘an attractive young man, slim, physically supple, dressed in the style of the time in either a jacket or a cutaway which particularly suited his height. He wore a high, stiff collar, a waistcoat and cravat of the same shade, spats, and always had an elegant gold-knobbed cane in his hand.' The perfect dandy. The embodiment of the new middle-class commercial
chic.
One wonders if Marie-Rachel's dead father the ironmaster would have entirely approved?

There is a hint that his widow did not. The official version, from her own pen, is that she and Marie-Rachel went to Paris to ask the advice of the girl's erstwhile confessor at Sainte Clothilde and that the hopeful Victor accompanied them on this expedition. There seems to be something wrong with this story: suppose the confessor had been disapproving, would it not then have become quite improper for Victor to be in Marie-Rachel's company at all, even with her mother present?

Madame L, speaking some hundred and thirty years later in the pretty drawing-room of the property in Chassignolles which Marie-Rachel brought to Victor as part of her dowry, assured me that the marriage had indeed been ‘a love match' but said that the young man had at first asked for her hand ‘incorrectly' (a term that would suggest he simply failed to ask Madame Yvernault's permission before proposing) and that the Paris confessor had been called in to arbitrate and soothe everyone.

Their great-grandson, my main source for the alternative family history, had a different version again. According to him, the Yvernault family did not consider a son of the
nouveaux riches
Pissavys a good enough match for the daughter and sole inheritor of Louis. The Master of pedlars had transformed himself into a wholesale draper, but sheets, even wholesale, were much less socially acceptable than iron, selling was inferior to manufacturing – and then there was the matter of the family's relations with That Woman at Nohant. Victor's doctor brother, Édouard, was known to be on cordial dining terms with George Sand. Whether or not the whisper had reached Madame Yvernault at that time that Édouard Pissavy was also the lover of George Sand's daughter Solange, I do not know, but certainly this was a contributory factor to the indignant burning of George Sand's letters in Chassignolles two generations later.

As if to confirm the family's worst suspicions about the Pissavys, Victor (I am told) schemed with Marie-Rachel to stage an elopement. Perhaps there was indeed more courage, passion and guile than appears in the repressed little face in the photograph or in her mother's account, for however seductive Victor was he could hardly have brought off his plan without Marie-Rachel's active participation. Maybe she had managed to read a romantic novel or two on the quiet without her mother's knowledge. She had probably met Victor through her La Châtre cousins, the Guyots, for it was with the connivance of one of their servants that she managed a meeting with him in the town one night. The young couple went off together, not to reappear in their respective homes till the next day. ‘And after that, of course,' said their great-grandson gleefully, ‘they had to let the boy marry her. There was nothing else for it.'

Perhaps this was what was really covered by Madame L under the heading ‘incorrect behaviour'?

Nothing of this surfaces in the official version, where there is no hint that Victor Pissavy was ever on anything but excellent terms with his wife's mother – as indeed he had to be. In 1864, after two and a half years of marriage, Marie-Rachel gave birth to their son, another Louis. She died shortly afterwards of what the chronicler calls ‘a crisis of albumen', and which we would recognize today as the consequences of untreated toxaemia of pregnancy. For reasons both human and financial, the bereaved young husband and the doubly bereaved mother-in-law could only make common cause over the upbringing of another cherished only child.