Celestine (33 page)

He died at nine o'clock one November morning in 1914, and his death was formally declared an hour later by that nephew who had been a new-born child in the house next door when Pierre and Célestine were young marrieds. One must hope that the nephew, now a railway employee, and other Robin relatives, were in a position to help pay for the funeral.

In Chassignolles, the report of his death made hardly a ripple. The Commune had other deaths on its mind. The young men and even the not-so-young were going off to war. The chief miller had been called up – how would the corn be ground? So had one of the bakers, brother to Ursin Yvernault of the café. The Chaumette-Robin inn was already part of a world that had gone.

III

A Time for Reaping

Chapter 15

It was just before nine at night. The frogs were making their usual racket in the still water of the pool, and in the depths of the sky the stars had already appeared. Soon everyone would be going to bed, but it was a beautiful evening and each person wanted to make it last. Most of them were stretched out on the dry grass of the verges that separated the houses on each side from the dusty white road. Bats flew low in front of open doors before disappearing into the gardens, slipping between the branches, glancing by the edges of haystacks and the walls of barns, leaving a faint trail in the air behind them, a sign of fine weather to come.

I too have often seen bats disporting themselves on fine evenings as I go down for the milk at Les Buts. So runs the opening paragraph of
Campagne,
an autobiographical novel published in 1937 by Raymonde Vincent, evoking a peasant childhood in the Berry in the early years of the century. The book opens on 3 August 1914: what the morrow was to bring, as well as fine weather, was the declaration of war, announced in the isolated countryside by a drummer on foot just as for the Napoleonic wars a century earlier. The noise temporarily silenced the frogs and it could be heard coming from a distance over the hot landscape. The tap and rattle of the drum was alternated with the sound of a voice: at each farm gate the Garde-Champêtre stopped and read out aloud the list of men from the Commune who were to report at once to the nearby town.

Of course this description relies, for its effect, on the reader understanding all that the coming war was to mean. At the time, however, in the remote countryside, the war came as a complete surprise to most people, who much resented being pushed around by Them in Paris, particularly with the harvest only half in. There was wild talk in some places of the young men taking to the forests to avoid the
levée
– another echo from Napoleonic times. By a strange revolution of time and chance this did come to pass in the Indre, not in 1914 but in the next war, when France was occupied and Frenchmen were threatened with forced labour in Germany.

Raymonde Vincent's testimony is particularly valuable because at that time she herself was living on an isolated farm, away from even that modicum of progress which by then was established within the villages. She was one of those who, as Daniel Halévy wrote: ‘… lived far from towns and main roads and remained for a long time mute and unrepresented. Yet they were there, they did things, loved, and had their effect without anyone realizing it on the heart and soul of the nation.'

But Raymonde was not mute; she was one of the first generation to benefit fully from universal free education. In her book, the aunt who helps to bring her up cannot read, her hard-pressed father (‘The Master') can read only ‘with difficulty', but she and her elder brothers go to school, at least enough to become literate. In her real-life teens, after the war, she worked as a
petite main
for several textile businesses in Châteauroux. At eighteen she took the road to Paris, where, after various adventures and a period posing as an artist's model (the classic route into a different existence) she married a university lecturer. But she retained an affection for the rural world from which she had escaped, and it became the stuff of her books.

She evokes the Berry with a sure touch – the black lace of the forest at the end of winter against a pink sunset sky that presages spring; a wavering string of lamps going home on a wet night; a winter's day of mist and the voices of hidden crows. But beyond the simple physical scene she conveys the loneliness of the landscape, even in a time when the fields were more populated by labourers than they are today; and the way the children, whose job it was out of school to mind the flocks, spent countless hours with no distraction but their own thoughts.

‘How immense the world is on a day of strong wind, when you can see only the slate roofs of the big house through the bare trees of its winter-naked grounds. A herd of cows stand with bent heads beneath the unceasing rain. It seems that nothing will ever change, that time has no weight.'

If the child cowherd was lucky, he might have his head stocked with stories, such as were still told on winter nights round the fire while the
veillées
survived, or gleaned from sparse school history lessons or from a more chance source:

Robert had been living for a long time already in the constant company of the highly coloured, solemn and passionate characters of legend … They spontaneously left their own world to enter his. There was, for instance, a great medieval lord, discovered one day in a page from an illustrated paper which had been used to wrap up something Aunt Victoire had brought back from market. This lord had a most noble nature. Robert was struck with enthusiasm for him, and the two of them undertook a long, mystical journey that lasted more than a year. During this time Robert was to be seen galloping back and forth across the meadow astride a stick, raising his arms in the heat of the chase … stopping at last by a hedge and launching into a speech in a noble language of his own creation before the invisible crowd that now surrounded him.

A little while later, when constrained by the Curé to attend catechism classes, the child finds in the Gospel stories new food for his imagination, and tries to walk on the duck pond. He feels sad when he learns that Christ finally ascended to Heaven, but comforts himself with the thought that He might appear one day in the home field along with the cows.

Once past twelve, all schooling was at an end. A child from a poor family would be likely to be sent off to work on another farm in the traditional way, a life that might be still more lonely and monotonous:

‘[The two boys] had found Elizabeth, who was minding her goats in a small pasture in the middle of the woods. She was sitting in a sheltered place wrapped in her large cloak, and she was occupying herself by striking the frozen ground with a hazel branch.'

Once they were separated on different farms, brothers and sisters rarely had the time or the opportunity to visit one another. ‘Sometimes the others would be forgotten for a while, but when contact was suddenly renewed the earlier indifference seemed dreadful and one's whole being swelled with remorse.'

We might as well be in 1814 as 1914; in some respects so little had changed. Nor did it even after the First World War. Georges Bernardet, born in 1913 to parents with little land and many children, spent his first years in a hamlet on the far side of the Domaine which was the last one in the Commune to have its mud track surfaced with gravel. ‘There was no road there – nothing,' he told me. ‘We had nothing. We never went anywhere, not even into the village.' Georges himself escaped into rather more fortunate circumstances in his sixth year. But he still had to undergo a period of hard labour on another's farm in his teens. He considered himself lucky simply in that he got a ‘good master' who ‘trained him up properly' to rise at four a.m. to feed and water the horse so that it would be ready to be put in the harness between six and seven.

Other boys of his generation fared harder. I have been told of one – still alive today – who was treated ‘worse than a beast. Made to sleep in the stable, he was, and sometimes nothing to eat but what was given to the pigs.' This had shocked even at the time, for traditionally on a French farm there were few of the social distinctions that obtained in England, and all, from master to little swineherd, ate democratically round the same table.

And yet by Georges Bernardet's childhood times
had
changed. Hand-outs had gradually become available to relieve the worst of poverty: minimal and inadequate as such assistance was by the standards of the later twentieth century, it would have seemed a blessed luxury to earlier generations. For much of the nineteenth century, the destitute, as such, are absent from the Minutes of municipal meetings. Among the necessarily parsimonious discussions of paths, fairs and money to pay a teacher, their particular plight does not even figure. But from the eve of the Third Republic onwards payment of medical expenses begins to be mentioned. At first these were just individual grants for exceptional cases. In June 1870 the Council had a special meeting about one of their number, a poor relation of the innkeeping Yvernaults, and agreed (
‘ayant mûrement délibéré'
) to pay for him to stay in the La Châtre hospital to get a damaged hand treated ‘since he is genuinely indigent'. Some years later, when La République was beginning to make central funds available, a grant of ten francs per month was actually obtained from the Préfet for one ‘very poor and sick old man', and a similar sum for another in the early 1880s. It does not seem at this date as if illness in itself was regarded as suitable for charitable relief, but rather that money was given on the ground that illness or age or both combined were preventing the individual from labouring to earn his own or his family's bread; thus all the early recipients are men.

By 1883 we find the mayor (Victor Pissavy, of course) drawing up a whole list of people who, in his view, should receive free medical treatment. In another ten years a national law was passed codifying such rights and – at least in theory – obliging the Communes to pay for their own. In many places the new law was not enforced, but I have the impression that even before the 1890s Chassignolles, led by the Domaine, had a fairly clear concept of its responsibilities. The descriptions of illnesses also became more specific: for instance, in 1888, a sixty-seven-year-old tenant farmer was reported as having ‘pulmonary catarrh, and a hernia which has already once dangerously strangulated, also varicose veins in his legs. His children, who are servants in others' households, are having to support him out of their own small earnings.' The same year a member of another long-term village family was said to have ‘pulmonary emphysema and asthma' while his wife had ‘gastric problems'.

In 1905 came more legislation, this time in relation to the aged poor, and after this small sums are quite often voted in council meetings for women as well as men. Concepts of medical treatment were also beginning to progress beyond emergency action on hernias or broken bones. In 1909 and again in 1911 two separate sick women were actually sent to ‘take the waters' at Évreux-les-Bains, a thing inconceivable in the days when the Communal population had been smaller and less prosperous. But it was decided that, even when a sick person had been in receipt of relief, no money could be paid out for burials.

Of course none of this limited largesse touched the needs of failing innkeepers and their families, struggling to keep up appearances and avoid commercial ruin. As ever, social distinctions within the Commune were real, even if on a small scale compared with the vast differences within urban society.

By 1913 there had been more legislation, this time concerning the payment of old-age pensions to peasants and factory workers even when they were not quite incapacitated; assistance was also to be given to pregnant women and to large families. Of these provisions, the pensions seemed by far the most miraculous advance, and many of the old could hardly believe their good fortune. They remembered the days when as a matter of course you went on working for your bread till sickness or death claimed you – the one often following soon on the other, since it was not the custom to attempt any treatment for a useless old person's ailments. Now here was the nice postman turning up every week on their doorstep with money for them. It has been recounted to me that one old lady, ‘La Mère Philomène', could not understand why he did it. Her name makes her sound faintly exotic, and the census reveals that for most of her long life she was the one person in Chassignolles to be born in a far-off place. She had been a foundling child in Paris in 1837 and was put out to nurse in the Berry, where she stayed. By the end of the First World War she was eighty, a widow, living alone in a little separate dwelling at the back of a farmhouse a stone's throw from our own house; she went out cleaning for others. She decided that she ought to give the postman a present, both in genuine gratitude and to ensure his continuing support. She obtained a rabbit, killed and gutted it, and set off happily with it to the new post office. But the postman's reaction was disappointing. As a French civil servant he stood on his dignity:

‘It's my job to bring you money. I don't want your rabbit. You take it home and make yourself a decent meal with it.'

Perhaps he was afraid that if he accepted the rabbit word would be all round the village that he solicited gifts from the poor and needy. She insisted, he refused more brusquely. Finally she cried: ‘I won't eat it! It would choke me now…' flung the furry corpse down on the postal floor tiles and banged out of the office.

If only poor Mère Philomène had waited till the end of the year her rabbit would probably have been accepted. Either in consequence of a collective gratitude to the distributor of pensions, or as a result of a much older and more equivocal desire to placate the bringer of news from afar, it is still today the custom in rural France to make presents to the postman on New Year's Day, either in money or in kind. In a Commune with hundreds of households, the cumulative effect of all this giving adds up to a substantial subsidy to the postman's basic salary, and is recognized as such when the appointment is made.