Celestine (11 page)

Ideas figure distinctly in Jeanne Pagnard's mental landscape. She told me another time that she did well at school and was particularly good at maths: no doubt the account-keeping great-grandfather's genes making their appearance. After completing the village school course and attaining her certificate by the age of twelve, she would have liked to go on to some further education and there was talk of her doing so, but ‘our father had had bad luck during the War. We owned a plantation, and he'd just cut down a lot of wood to sell when war broke out and he was called up. He was away four years and by the time he came back the wood had rotted where it lay and was unsaleable.'

This, at any rate, was the story. The First World War is commonly credited with having ruined even more lives and institutions than it did in practice: it has become the new divide between the chronologically moving Now and the static Olden Days. Nevertheless it is literally true that conscription in France was implemented in 1914 in such a summary and dramatic way that the men who were carried off to war were forced to leave all manner of unfinished business behind them. Even the harvest had not been got in – a mistake that all parties concerned were careful not to repeat the second time round, in 1939.

Baulked of the course in bookkeeping in La Châtre or Châteauroux which might have carried her, as it did Zénaïde, into a different way of life, Mademoiselle Pagnard settled for becoming a dressmaker – a
couturière,
in the rather grand French term that is employed even at village level. In this she was following her father's mother, the daughter of the grocer and the person who became a model for her. Her own intimate knowledge of village events that had taken place well before her birth derives from a childhood spent largely in her grandmother's workshop. ‘There were always several girls there sewing, employed by her. It was jolly.' (
C'était gai.
) ‘More fun than my own home. And Grandmother loved to recount things.'

This grandmother, Catherine Chartier, had also achieved an education ending in a school-leaving certificate, a rare thing for a girl born in the 1850s. ‘She could write a really good letter. And she could add up and subtract. But I don't think anyone had ever shown her how to multiply. Because when she wanted to work out how many metres of cloth were needed for something, she used to put the price of each metre down in a column and add them up like that. When I got big I tried to tell her the proper way to do it, but she just laughed and did it her way.'

The man Catherine married, Charles Pagnard, was a gardener who worked for several local notables, including the engineer who owned the stone quarries in the next Commune. These quarries employed thirty or more men from Chassignolles, according to the census, and were worked with the latest machinery. It did not take long for young Madame Pagnard to make herself indispensable to this family. ‘The lady of the house was a Creole, from Dominique, very beautiful, and she used to get my grandmother to make copies of the latest Paris fashions from magazines for herself and her two daughters. There was one muslin dress I always heard about, with silk and lace rosebuds all around the skirt. Pastoral style, it was called. Pastoral!'

Madame Pagnard's grandmother, who had not at that time acquired one of the new sewing-machines, stitched away at this fabled dress while clad herself in a genuine Berrichonne peasant's cap. Her devotion paid off, for the family spent two to three months every year in Paris. This was ‘for the Season' and to allow its head to pursue Parisian engineering interests, including assistance to Monsieur Eiffel in designing the Tower that was raised for the first centenary of the Revolution. Their Chassignolles' dressmaker used to accompany them there, having become an indispensable, unofficial ladies' maid: in this way she experienced the Paris of Zola, of Haussmann, of
opéra bouffe
and sensational posters by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was a remarkable journey from one world to another at a time when, out of the thousand-odd population of Chassignolles, only ten had been born outside the Department of the Indre and most of these had come from the Creuse only a dozen or so miles distant.

‘What about her own children?' I wondered.

‘Oh, she left them with her mother,' said Mademoiselle Pagnard with a note of admiration in her voice. ‘You understand, she was much more advanced (
beaucoup plus évoluée
) than the typical country women of that time. She really made the most of herself.'

So, in her own way, did Jeanne Pagnard. Grandfather Pagnard also gardened for the family at the Chassignolles
domaine,
the Big House set in its own grounds to one side of the village. Young Jeanne Pagnard began sewing for them and formed a relationship with the family that has lasted a lifetime.

The Domaine is owned, and has been since the 1860s, by successive descendants of the Pissavys, who set up as linen-merchants in La Châtre. (By the inter-war period the ramifications of this traditional, Mass-going family had spread all over the Berry. Today they are proudly said to number 450 ‘if you count all the attachments' – one of whom is the local MP.) Mademoiselle Pagnard has been called on by the occupants of the Domaine over the years not only to sew for them but on occasions to act as responsible overseer for children and servants. She has a detailed knowledge of several generations of the family and speaks of them in the intimate and slightly possessive way of a retired nanny. They have become her own people, as significant to her as her cousins and their progeny and somewhat more special. Both her vocabulary and her rolling local accent have been modified by decades of educated conversation. She and old Madame L (née Pissavy-Yvernault) have spent their lives observing discreet but fixed lines of social demarcation, but today, hearing them talk together, the impression is of two old ladies who can speak more frankly to one another than to almost anyone else – two survivors of a world that is now disappearing in its turn over the horizon of history.

Chapter 7

In her stories, George Sand had to make her peasants speak more or less standard French to be understood by her readers. She explained in a preface that their real speech would have been impenetrable to an unaccustomed ear. For the remarkable thing about early-nineteenth-century France, compared with a more compact and unified country such as England, was that most of the population did not speak recognizable French. The Bourgogne, the Auvergne, the Cévennes, the Limousin, the Guyenne, Provence, the Berry and numerous other smaller areas each had its own language, which might be incomprehensible to the people of the next
pays
only twenty or thirty miles off. Just before the Revolution, an investigation revealed thirty distinct different
patois
in France plus many more local variants, and an encyclopedia of the period roundly declared: ‘
Patois
– a corrupted tongue spoken all over the provinces. The true language is spoken only in the capital.'

That is a nationalist and Paris-centred view.
Patois
was not a faulty version of ‘real' French; it had its own genesis. Medieval France had had two equally important tongues, both descended from soldiers' Latin: the
langue d'oc
and the
langue d'oïl.
The
langue d'oïl
was the language of northern France, from the wealthy plains south of the Loire up through Paris and Reims till it petered out in Flanders. Once the centre of power was concentrated in Paris, this tongue therefore became the basis of standard French. The
langue d'oc,
which was spoken over most of central and southwestern France and gave its name to a substantial area, lost status and, without any cohesive force, fragmented into numerous versions. It was, however, extremely long in dying, as were the other local languages of entirely separate origin such as Breton and Basque. In Eugène Le Roy's famous novel about a Périgordine peasant,
Jaquou le Croquant,
a Gendarme comes to interview a little boy and does so in the local tongue. The child's comment is that the man ‘spoke the
patois
like the people do in Sarlat' – not as in his home village. That employé of the State may not have spoken French at all at that early-nineteenth-century date, or, if he did, he would not have spoken it as his first language. The historian Weber calculates that even late in the century, when improved communications and the reforms of the Third Republic were between them revolutionizing country life, French was still a foreign language to a good half of France's citizens. Many would say this situation continued to a much later date.

The Lower Berry lies just, though only just, within the area where the prevailing tongue belonged to the same family as standard French – the
langue d'oïl.
This meant that the
patois,
in all its variants, died out earlier there as a separate language, merging more easily into the mainstream language than the distinct southern dialects would do. In 1835 the newly formed Ministry of Public Instruction, whose great mission was to make the disparate citizens of France all speak one tongue, published a report. This noted that the Department of the Indre was French-speaking, but the other part of the Berry – the Department of the Cher – was less so and that in the Creuse immediately to the south hardly any French was spoken at all. The term ‘French-speaking' should, in any case, be treated with more caution than the optimistic Ministry inspectors may have applied. Understanding questions in French and producing a few adequate answers for the alien gentleman in the black jacket and riding boots is one thing; talking the language round your own fireside is another.

The fact that early minute-takers such as Aussourd or Vallet or Charbonnier recorded Council business in French does not necessarily tell us about the actual words used round the table, for there was then no set formula for writing
patois.
Any written record had to be in French, more or less, and this applied also to private correspondence. What, then, did the Chaumettes and their neighbours speak among themselves? I think it was recognizably French of a sort and could be turned into ‘proper' French by education; but in everyday conversation it would probably have been so peppered with local words as to puzzle a listener from Châteauroux or Bourges, let alone from Paris. Even today I notice people in Chassignolles, those born in the first three decades of the present century, taking care in conversation with me to select the standard words for ‘beans' or ‘barrel' or ‘wasp' or whatever; talking to one another they will use a country term. Or a child, whose everyday talk is of international
futbol
matches and video games, will unself-consciously use an archaic term in some such sentence as ‘The cow's had her calf.'

If
patois
survives even today, then how large a part of speech it must have been a hundred and fifty years ago. But the Chaumettes, father and son, with their ambitions and their inn in the centre of the village, were probably among the more competent speakers of regular French. The reason I know they were ambitious (apart from the evidence of the inn itself) is that Silvain-Germain, the son, learnt to read and write fluently. This was at a time when fewer than one person in twenty in the Indre could read, and since this figure included townspeople the proportion of those literate in the country must have been far smaller. But it was beginning to be seen as a desirable skill: George Sand was sometimes asked for reading lessons by the individual workers on her estate, and found many of them quick to learn.

I do not know for certain how Silvain-Germain acquired his skill, though I can make a guess (see below). He was born in 1816 or 1817 and was therefore in his teens already and past the usual age of education in 1833, when the Government passed the ‘Guizot Law' with the intention that each Commune should set up and maintain a primary school. Till then, only sixty-two Indre Communes out of 247 had any sort of school at all, and these accounted for only about three thousand pupils. Unsurprisingly, no mention of any Chassignolles school appears in the Council Minutes at that date.

Yet the population of the Commune, like that of most of rural France, had grown since the beginning of the century, from 673 in 1801 to 984 thirty-five years later, and much of this growth was post-Napoleonic war. In the census of 1836 over half the population were described as
garçons
or
filles,
and although these were the terms then applied to unmarried persons of any age the great majority of them were in fact young. There was no longer the high infant mortality that had kept populations down under the Ancien Régime. A run-through of the registers in the Mairie for that year (a typical one) reveals thirty-two births, six of them ‘natural' children, as against seventeen deaths, and nine of these were those of adults well on in life. The prevalent modern idea – much pushed by at least one populist French writer – that in the past child death was a commonplace against which parents simply hardened their hearts, is not borne out by such figures. Of the eight child deaths, five were those of babies or young children from elsewhere who had been put out to nurse in Chassignolles by the orphanage-hospital in Châteauroux, and such deaths tell their own tale. Only three ‘own' infants died in Chassignolles families that year. A fever, probably malarial, still made itself felt in the watery Berry then and severe local shortages were still occurring – the last major one in the area was in 1847 – but widespread plague and starvation were slipping into history. The young generation were surviving and multiplying and needed educating.

But new Law or not, it does not seem that Chassignolles organized itself a school after 1833. Not till late 1841, when Silvain-Germain was a married man in his twenties, did the Council begin to deliberate the step of acquiring a schoolmaster. The inhabitants, apparently, had been ‘manifesting a desire' for one.