Celestine (4 page)

The English were driven out of La Châtre in 1360.

Bernardet, too, had a story of a tall, fair family called Langlois living in the next house to his when he was a child – one of the group of houses across the way from ours. ‘And you see the house after, the one that's falling down now? Well it seems that belonged at one time to some people called Sarassy and they were dark as gypsies. Perfectly respectable people, but – it was in their blood. The Saracens were hereabouts. In the olden days. Think of Sarzay – yes, the castle. Well, that's a Saracen castle, I reckon.'

‘Saracen', in French parlance, used to denote all Muslims and Arabs, rather as the English used the term ‘Moors'. The last and most northerly battle with the Moors took place near Poitiers in 732, and by the tenth century they had retreated again to Spain. The name Sarzay may indeed be some far echo of their presence, but the fortress there is the one built by the Barbançois four centuries later to intimidate the English. In myth, ‘the olden days' tend to form one condensed period, situated at some date remote, but not too remote, from living memory.

In France this period falls naturally before the Revolution, where it is conflated with the Ancien Régime and conceived of as a timeless, seamless epoch. It is also, in spite of traditions about Wicked Lords and folk memories of serfs eating frozen grass by the winter roads, perceived as a golden era, the location of fairy tales. It is the pristine land seen in the miniatures of the
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
and on the flower-sprinkled tapestry landscapes of the Lady with the Unicorn, which were woven at Aubusson a little way to the south. It is a world full of dangers – huge, trackless forests, outlaws and brigands, cruel blows of fate, parents forced by necessity to cast out their children, wicked step-parents, stolen children being eaten in castles – yet it is also a fundamentally moral and democratic world. The beautiful daughter of the poor woodcutter really does end up marrying the Prince who has seen her while out hunting. The little drummer boy with the merchant father has the confidence to cock a snook at the King who, having first scorned him, has now heard about the richly laden ships and is trying to marry off his daughter:

Petit tambour, je te donnerai ma fille

(Little drummer, you can have my daughter)

To which the drummer replies in the same tone of egalitarian intimacy:

Sire le Roi, tu peux garder ta fille,

Dans mon pays 'y en a de plus jolies

(You, your Majesty, can keep your lass;

Where I come from, we have prettier by the mass)

These kings and princes of folk-song don't sound quite like Charles Sept or Louis Quatorze. They seem more like landed gentry or even just prosperous farmers, rich and powerful only by the standards of the closed societies in which they lived. In the same perspective Bernardet had a story that the house where the ‘Saracens' lived, which had an imposing barn, had earlier housed a
maréchal de France,
a Field Marshal, and that his fine chargers had had the barn as their stable.

I gazed over the peaceful, semi-derelict scene. Barbary ducks, belonging to Monsieur Chezaubernard, the retired hedger-and-ditcher in the end house, waddled and fussed on a patch of waste pasture.

‘You don't actually remember that time yourself do you, Monsieur Bernardet?'

‘Not myself, no. But my grandfather did.'

In his mind there existed, only just beyond his own experience, a Chassignolles as busy and populous as in his childhood but a more glorious and self-contained microcosm of the world elsewhere. It was a place where a military chief stabled his horses and falcons were reared for hawking parties, where monks held court in the church as in a palace and where the house with a miniature tower and courtyard was home, not to a man who repaired bicycles, but to a nobleman with gold in his coffers.

Where La Châtre is concerned this vision may once have had a basis in reality. La Châtre is the small town seven kilometres from Chassignolles, the place where for centuries the village has gone to market, or for a day out, or to seek a situation or an education, to plead a cause or to shelter in the hospital as a last resort. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the draining of the marshes and the cutting back of the forests was ensuring the Berry's continued, if quiet, prosperity, the walled town of La Châtre had its own might and self-sufficiency. No modern communications sucked its power away to distant administrations. Real noblemen built grand houses there founded on the wool of the Berrichon sheep that ranged the partly tamed heaths and moors to the north of the town. There was a dungeon tower high above the Indre where soldiers were garrisoned and political prisoners were kept, and a chain of water-mills and tanneries along the river's edge.

Today tanneries and mills are silent and no modern manufactories have replaced them. The dungeon-tower is a museum full of lace caps and stuffed birds – the birds being the unfortunate bequest of a leading citizen of a hundred years ago. The modern military installations, like the industries, are thirty kilometres away in Châteauroux, and so is the prison, the Assize Court and, now, the nearest railway station. La Châtre is still a shopping and service centre, packed with people from the country round about for the Saturday outdoor market, but the great houses with high gables, flights of stone steps or courtyards behind elegant gates, are lived in by local attorneys, general practitioners and insurance agents.

The very lack of twentieth-century sprawl, and therefore of twentieth-century social and architectural pressures, has, superficially, made La Châtre seem unchanging. Her population, at around five thousand, is much the same as it was in the middle of the last century. It has merely shaken itself out a little from the narrow lanes and medieval tenements of the old town into a sprinkling of suburban villas on the western side; and these have not altered the basic appearance or street patterns of the town any more than the stuccoed residences did in the Avenue de la Gare when they were added in the 1880s. You can still set out on foot from the market square and be in the fields within a few minutes, with no sound but larks and the running river.

La Châtre has also managed to cling on to the physical trappings of power, even though much of the reality has moved to Châteauroux, Limoges or indeed Paris: no doubt this is because the other market towns of the Lower Berry are even smaller. The town is a Sous-Préfecture – a ceremonial cog in the centralized administrative wheel. It has a Town Hall whose eighteenth-century façade hides the vestiges of a one-time convent: the town cinema is alongside it in what was, before the Revolution, the convent chapel. It has an income tax office (Hôtel des Impôts) and a Law Court (Palais de Justice), used now for small claims: the imposing front steps of the Court are speckled with moss. It has a Gendarmerie, various modern hospital buildings as well as the ancient one, a local high school, a sports centre, a swimming pool, a tourist office and a municipal library established in the grandest old private house of all – the austere Hôtel de Villaines, whose owners once ruled the town with all the majesty of
noblesse
being obliging.

It also has a Famous Literary Figure. George Sand (1804–76) did not live in the town itself but in the pretty, turreted manor house known grandly as her ‘château' two or three miles up the road, at Nohant. It is La Châtre that figures, street for street, in several of her novels, and the surrounding countryside was the inspiration of much of her writing.

In her lifetime many of her country neighbours were wary of her, regarding her as an eccentric woman with an immoral personal life and given to dangerous idealistic enthusiasms – an upper-class type that was by then well established. Her father was an officer in Napoleon's Grand Army, her mother had been a camp-follower and was the child of a man who sold birds on the streets of Paris. Her paternal grandmother, who largely brought her up, was herself the child of an illegitimate son of the King of Poland. Present-day Anglo-Saxon attempts to set George Sand up as a feminist icon, an original rebel against ‘bourgeois morality', are misconceived. But it must be said that the twentieth-century French tendency to canonize her not only as a Great Writer but as
la Bonne Dame de Nohant,
as if she had been some kind of country saint ministering to the poor and beloved by all, is equally wide of the mark. In life, George Sand had local enemies as well as admirers; her numerous novels are variable in quality and hardly qualify as ‘great'. What matters most about her today is that she was the first person in France to write about the rural and artisan classes with personal knowledge and sympathy. Unlike her contemporary Balzac, who made his own contribution to the enduring French urban idea of the brutal peasantry, and Zola, who added to it later in the century from a position of metropolitan ignorance, George Sand regarded the country people as individuals like herself. Her stories such as
La Mare au Diable, François le Champi
and
Le Meunier d'Angibault,
are a fount of incidental local information concerning the world we have lost – and which was being lost even as she was depicting it.

Her early works were more conventionally literary and worldly. It was not till the 1840s, when the first passable road had at last been constructed between La Châtre and Châteauroux and the new railway from Paris had got as far as Orléans, that she turned her imagination back towards her own youth. The customs, language, dress and beliefs of the Berrichon countryside, which for more than a century had seemed to travellers so timeless, were suddenly revealed to be vulnerable to change after all. Progress showed signs of coming, even in this quiet heart of France. George Sand, with her trousers, her cigars and her romantic Republicanism, was no enemy to progress in theory, but the same sense of the romantic made her wary of how far-reaching the results of progress might be.

The young people of today no longer see wandering, on a misty autumn evening, goblins, fairies or wills o' the wisp … Within my own lifetime, my village has seen more changes in its ideas and customs than for centuries before the Revolution … In only a year or two from now the railways will have levelled out the floors of our deepest valleys, carrying away with them as swiftly as thunder our time-honoured traditions and our wonderful legends.

She wrote that in 1845. That, as it happened, was the year after Célestine Chaumette was born in the untouched rusticity of Chassignolles, still almost inaccessible along mud tracks through the oak woods.

Chapter 4

We set out seeing the lives of those who have gone before from a distorted perspective. I became half aware of Célestine Chaumette (a name redolent of both rusticism and genteel nineteenth-century piety) before I had ever been in her house or found her cache of letters. She had been Zénaïde's grandmother, and Zénaïde, through her romantic association with the painter, was a colourful but indistinct figure and many years dead herself. Célestine had been, I was told, one of the last old ladies in the region to wear as part of her everyday dress a white goffered cap with a bow under the chin, like the ones in the museum. She had been a nice person with a presence of her own, evoked with respect but also with a degree of sadness, constraint, perhaps guilt. No one could recall just when she had died, but that event had not taken place in the village nor yet in La Châtre. She had been in Châteauroux, all of twenty miles away, in the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor. In French rural terms to end up with the Sisters, however devoted they might be, signifies some sort of social or family failure.

I had had one or two other things intimated to me about Célestine's later life, but once her letters were in my care I did not want to ask any more about that for the moment. I did not want to see her as a stooped old woman in black and a cap to whom life had not always been kind. I wanted to push aside the webs of time and change that separated us and rediscover her as she must have been when those letters were written to her: a quintessentially pretty, vital, sought-after girl.

However, I guessed that she had come back in the end to join her contemporaries in the village cemetery, so there I went first to look for her.

The cemetery is a friendly place. Even after a mere twenty years of coming to Chassignolles I recognize most of the family names. To wander round it is also to appreciate the cat's-cradle of marriages that bind the members of the Commune together. A middle-aged woman told me she had worked out, on a recent stroll among defunct neighbours, that she was in some measure related to over half the population, living and dead. In a burst of confidence she suggested to me that I might consider getting buried in the cemetery myself, ‘near me, then we could chat. That would help pass the time!' Behind the joke lay the country assumption that the dead do not at once become physically remote and other as they do in cities. The transition from working the land to lying beneath it is natural, almost matter of fact, and there is a corresponding aversion to the idea of being buried far off in alien soil. In the days before the funeral the person continues to lie on his own bed – though in his best suit – and is brought to the burial ground on a hand-wheeled bier with a great, placid crowd of known people, in their own best suits and coats, following behind.

Yet the realities of physical change and decay too are inescapable in the country. At some point the imagination has to relinquish the person, to consign him to a different dimension. Is this why rural French cemeteries are so oddly formal and, to English eyes, graceless compared with what lies all around them? The English notion of the graveyard itself as a place where sheep may safely graze, derived from centuries of Protestant psalm-singing, does not appeal to the Latin tradition. Chassignolles' cemetery has a fine view down a small valley, across a rivulet, towards the setting sun, but it is an enclosure of dust, neatly raked, of stone chippings, polished slabs, dirty glass and rusting iron. Not only grass but free-growing plants and trees are taboo.