Celestine (30 page)

Chapter 14

In Chassignolles in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, the inn prospered. After Anne Laurent's death in the mid-1880s we find Célestine and Pierre in sole possession, along with their son, Charles, now a young man. Pierre became a municipal councillor for a while. The name ‘Hôtel Chaumette-Robin' was now displayed in large letters on the side wall of the whitewashed building. A big room with a wooden floor was built out towards the stables. It could accommodate a larger party than the old upper room reached from the outside stairway, but it was principally a place where dances were held, an improvement on the dusty old square.

There were two other well-established inns, one kept by the wife of Chausée, a smith, on the opposite side of the church, and the other by Ursin Yvernault, son of Jean. With the increased refinement of village life, at any rate among the craftsmen and shopkeepers, the inn was seen less as a drink shop for rural labourers and more as a respectable venue for business transactions. But while both Chausée and Yvernault were essentially vintners (
‘vins en gros'
) storing large quantities of wine and selling it by the barrel as well as by the glass, the Chaumette-Robin establishment was something more. It offered coffee, lemonade and ‘kept a good table' in the back room that now served as a restaurant. It was genteel enough to attract visitors out on a Sunday drive in the pony cart or carriage on the now-gravelled roads. It had stabling at the rear, and was regarded as
the
inn to the south of La Châtre for miles around.

It is remembered that Célestine, now in middle life, set the tone of the establishment. If a customer showed signs of putting away a great deal of liquor, rather than encouraging him she would say softly to him so that his friends could not hear: ‘Now,
mon fils,
haven't you had enough?… Why not think of going home?…'

‘… Even though,' Madame Caillaud added meaningfully, ‘this affected the inn's takings.'

Commerce was expanding. The census for the mid-1890s lists in the village in addition to the three inns, two grocers (one still the venerable ex-pedlar's), three blacksmiths, a baker, several clog-makers, a cobbler, two tailors, two dressmakers (one Mademoiselle Pagnard's grandmother employing two apprentices), one remaining weaver (the inevitable hard-up Chaumette cousin), two carpenter-cabinet makers, a wheelwright (Mademoiselle Pagnard's father) and sundry other specialized occupations such as plasterer, post-master and ‘owner of the
alambic
'. This was a travelling still, which converted the skins and pips of each grape harvest into a fiery liquid known as
la goutte.
An elaborate blackened contraption of pipes and boiler, it is still to be seen today in November parked steaming ghostily on a grass verge in a quiet part of the village; though the band of people left with the right to make use of it is shrinking every year and no more are being given licences. A hundred years ago it was busy for six months of the year, for every self-respecting local family by then had their patch of vines for their own delectation. The phylloxera plague of the late 1870s was a blow, but it was not the financial disaster in the Berry that it was in areas where finer wine was grown to sell. In any case, in Chassignolles the energetic Victor Pissavy presently organized the Communal buying of a hardier, American strain of plant.

Meanwhile his mother-in-law, Madame Yvernault, supported by Mademoiselle Guyot and the nuns of her school, were organizing a liberal distribution of wayside crosses. There was a Virgin now too by the cemetery, to keep an eye on a disused loop of old path that had become a favourite stroll for couples on summer evenings. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and hence the cult of the Virgin, had received a boost since Her timely apparition at Lourdes and the development of that small Pyrenean town by the promoters of railway tourism. A shift had taken place since the days when a central character in
Le Meunier d'Angibault
had complained of the peasants' superstitious attachment to wayside shrines. Now, it was the well-to-do who went in for cults and symbols, and for the refurbishment of old chapels that were then opened with pomp by Monsignor from Bourges. Religion in France might be under secularist attack but, as in England, it was socially correct. The more prominent Chassignolles households, such as the Graizons (Madame Caillaud's family), the Pagnards and the Robins, gravitated towards the Church as part of a lifestyle that included schooling at Mademoiselle Guyot's establishment and good relations with the Domaine. Yet, overall, unquestioning religious faith no longer held the place in life it once had.

Fear was in retreat. Many people were still poor – the applications to the Communal benevolent funds show this – but the very fact that the funds existed, encouraged since the 1880s by legislation, was an advance on the past. Prosperity is a relative concept, and the historian who takes a longer view of this period has to note that in the last part of the century France, compared with her European neighbours, was economically depressed – that the prices obtainable both for farm products and for manufactured goods suffered from outside competition. Nevertheless, the perception of the ordinary Frenchman, rich or poor, was that from about the middle of the century the standard of living had begun gently to rise. It continued to do so, with pauses but without major setbacks, far into the following century and indeed almost into the present day.

By the Third Republic, the world in which you could easily die of cold and hunger, in which starving vagrants roamed the countryside and any stranger or even neighbour might cast the evil eye on you, had passed into history. The brutalized peasantry, direct descendants of the feudal serfs, was largely replaced in popular tradition by the peasantry as the spiritual guardians of France, and now called
nos braves gens de la campagne.
The Wicked Lord had been replaced by the Pissavy-Yvernaults; the schoolmaster was mightier than the Curé, and the newspaper told you more than the Almanach had. Paraffin and acetylene lamps were chasing away the hobgoblins that had thrived in the dark beyond the rushlight's tiny spark. Drained swamps, covered wells, disinfectants and respectable earth closets down the garden were proving more effective against sickness than prayer had ever been. Fertilizers, imported seeds, mechanical reapers and steam-powered threshing machines were delivering the earth's bounty more reliably than religious processions for sun and rain. Even though such processions still continued sporadically in the Berry into the 1920s, there was no longer, by the 1890s, the same need to place desperate trust in the old saints of field and spring. And if magic spells were no longer expected to work in a literal and demonstrable way, then nor was prayer. It is a natural sequence to which no religious leader has ever found an entirely satisfactory solution. More than wolves were driven out by the trains.

There were other modern inventions that must have seemed more remarkable yet to Célestine's generation, who, in their own youth, had pioneered the written communication sent by post. Telegrams, at first brought on horseback from the office in La Châtre, had been known for some time. But in 1898 the telephone suddenly makes its futuristic appearance in the Minutes of municipal meetings. This was the work of Louis Pissavy-Yvernault, then in his thirties, and his friend and relation by marriage Paul Dutheil, a regular army officer, later to become a General. Dutheil's father was a lawyer and landowner and the family occupied the only other ‘big house' in the neighbourhood. These young men were making Chassignolles an offer that, though generous, must surely come under the heading of enlightened self-interest. The telephone line had arrived in Châteauroux five years before and was shortly due to be installed in La Châtre. To extend it to Chassignolles would cost 100 francs a kilometre – 700 francs in all, which was reimbursable by the State. But the cost of an actual instrument and its installation would be 300 francs, and this sum was what Pissavy and Dutheil were offering. It was not a vast amount to them, for differentials were large, but it is instructive to see what it represented to the ordinary villager. At this period, the annual income of a smallholder or a farm-worker in central France often amounted to less than 600 francs a year – much of this sum notional in the case of the smallholder who consumed his own produce or bartered with his neighbour. Even such a respectable and sought-after job as rural postman paid only 800–1000 francs a year, depending on length of service. Wages were higher in the towns, but so was the cost of living.

In fact the telephone did not operate in La Châtre for several years more, and I do not know if the offer of a subsidy was promptly taken up in Chassignolles. But certainly ten years later a phone was in place in the Mairie and in the post office premises – also then owned, as it happened, by the Pissavy-Yvernaults. Night telephone calls from one Mairie to another, with urgent instructions to millers to open sluices, helped in 1911 to avert the worst consequences of a flood which rivalled that of 1845, the year after Célestine was born.

*   *   *

In 1904, Célestine turned sixty. Her generation might well have been excused for thinking that the half century just ended, their century, had seen such changes that little more need be anticipated. Modernity, the official goal of progress, had surely more or less arrived and the future could not now hold many more new inventions?

With the disadvantage of hindsight, one feels daunted on their behalf that the vast further technical developments of the twentieth century, with their attendant capacity for destruction and social dislocation, were only just beginning. But to the ordinary citizen in the early 1900s all technological development had so far seemed more or less benevolent; such dissident views as were expressed tended to be on the lines of ‘what you gain on the roundabouts you lose on the swings'.

One theme continually surfaces and, after 1900, intensifies: the complaint about the drift to the towns and the threat of rural depopulation. It is true that, from about this time, the practice of the men going off only seasonally to labour in the cities was replaced by a more permanent exodus. Wives tended now to accompany their husbands and find work themselves as maids, shop assistants or concierges. The Guide to Central France quoted in the previous chapter spoke of the boys and girls of the Berry all going off to work in the factories of Vierzon and Montluçon – an anxiety that seems rather overwrought considering that scores of Berrichon villages like Chassignolles were then reaching their peak of population. Another, more subtle version of this unfocused angst expressed itself in complaints that those who
did
stay on the land were the least able and ambitious of their generation, though this may have been the view from the city and based upon urban values. The alternative view was that even in the country the modern young were too sharp for their own good, and over-interested in
fêtes,
cafés, billiards and the latest styles in clothes. As the aged central character of
La Vie d'un Simple
expresses it to a companion, watching young girls coming out of Mass: ‘If they could come back, the women of the old days, those who've been dead fifty years, wouldn't they be astonished to see these dresses?'

To which the other old man answers that ‘it' (time and progress) might ‘all go back again': a countryman's cyclic image of time.

In general, at the turn of the century as in 1850, 1870 and indeed in 1920, 1950 and 1990, it was felt that old ways were passing, that folk customs were in decline and that the rising generation no longer respected the traditions of their parents and grandparents. Certainly it was true by then that the young no longer had to sit around in the long evenings participating in these traditions. The old social cohesiveness, born of necessity, had inevitably weakened a little. The young peasant whose father had had to do his courting in the fields and trudged through mud and fords to the weekly market, now had not only the branch-line railway but often a pony and trap and a decent road to use it on. Or, increasingly after 1900, he had a bicycle, that great new aid to freedom. It was during this rural heyday that regular Saturday-night dances (
bals
) were established, rotating week by week from one village or small town to another. These remained the principal entertainment and meeting ground for the rural young till after the Second World War, and still play an important part in country life. Later reminiscences of them therefore cast a valid light on earlier times.

Georges Bernardet, born in 1913, recalled the dances of his own youth as some of the happiest memories of a life otherwise spent in incessent toil on others' farms. When, in 1938, he had inherited a little land of his own and saved up enough to rent some more, he felt able to marry and that was a matter of pride to him. But there was a flaw in his pleasure.

‘Saturday came,' he told me once. ‘The Saturday after our wedding. And I thought, Ah, good, the dance is at St Denis this week. We'll take the cart down there with a few friends. And then I thought, Ah,
merde,
I can't. I'm married now. My dancing days are over. Not the done thing to dance once you were fixed up. But I hadn't thought about that beforehand, and I'd always enjoyed dancing so much. I felt really put out.'

Vous n'irez plus au bal

Madam' la mariée …

He and Madame Bernardet, who'd also enjoyed her youth, solaced themselves with late-night card parties – that vestige of the old
veillées,
where the conversation still tended to turn to the possibility of there being the odd wolf about in the region or of the wisdom of singing in the dark on the way home to keep evil spirits at bay. ‘And then when they turned out into the night,' Bernardet remarked, ‘they'd be so frightened they'd take to their heels at the sound of each other on the far side of a meadow!… But even if it had been a spirit or a ghost, what then? What harm could be done to us by people who were once just creatures here like ourselves?' It took more than dead ancestors to perturb him. Dislike of any group was more apt to be expressed by him as a mild, measured contempt, the same for Germans, Communists, gypsies, the rats in the barn and young people who didn't know what work was. Late in life, however, some of his ideas expanded or mellowed, under the influence of the television documentaries about distant places that he enjoyed. It is true that television has been a largely negative influence in rural life, isolating people of all ages, especially the old and the young, behind their own front doors, but to Bernardet and some others of his generation it has been a belated chance to see and learn things on which their brief schooling never touched.