Celestine (19 page)

Through her choice of husband, Célestine might have gone on to make her life far from the confines of Chassignolles. She could have become part of that great migration from the countryside that transformed the main towns of every industrializing country as the century went by. The French historian Daniel Halévy wrote in 1910:

The peasant population … for so long mute … had its own effect, without anyone realizing it, on the heart and soul of the nation. We owe perhaps to the countryman much of what is best in Paris … The Parisian masses have come from the Upper Bourgogne via the valley of the Seine, or from the Auvergne, the Bourbonnais and the Berry via the Loire and the Beauce … The tenements of Paris are in themselves villages come from the Centre.

Célestine might well have found herself in a Parisian tenement or in one of the newer blocks then going up as part of the Second Empire reconstruction. She had the opportunity. She did not take it; she went no farther than La Châtre and that only for a time. Perhaps this was her considered choice; perhaps it was another's decision, masquerading as fate. As Baptiste Aussourd remarked, ‘your Parents … have the right to decide your Destiny'. And yet it is hard to believe that a girl as sought-after as Célestine did not influence her own destiny, if not by what she undertook, then by what she refused.

Chapter 10

In the spring of 1864, when Célestine was almost twenty, she received two more formal proposals. It was a year since Baptiste Aussourd had been courting her and six months since the school teacher had tried his chance. Another country winter had passed with its curtains of rain, its abrupt quilts of snow that cut the village off for days at a time. In the wide fireplaces, where the incongruous iron stoves of the late nineteenth century had not yet been installed, the great oak forests were being very slowly but surely consumed; for months, the fire was never allowed to die out entirely. The embers were carefully blown into life each dawn to reheat the soup that was still the standard country breakfast. But often in the dead of winter fires blazed the night away, for everyone still gathered at
veillées,
those night watches where some specific task was undertaken – carding wool, beating hemp, shelling walnuts, dipping rushes in melted tallow. Songs were sung and stories were told of ghosts and fairies and ‘the old days' that, in the modernity of the 1860s, seemed to be retreating at an unprecedented rate. Later, towards the end of the century, when the traditional work parties had ceased to be central to the economy or the way of life, the
veillées
declined into simple card parties, pastimes for the old. But in Célestine's youth they were still going strong, encouraged if anything by the slight increase in prosperity – more people, more spacious kitchens, mulled wine. It was a last spurt and glow of a very old practice before the same prosperity brought its inevitable extinction.

But however much fun the winter
veillées
were, they were too public to further private relations. Indeed, the whole of life was public in these crowded homes where separate bedrooms, even for married couples, were almost unknown. To the young and desiring, winter was interminable and the stirring of spring a liberation that we can now, in our homogenized world, hardly imagine. Among the many blessings was that the transparent green haze on the trees would thicken into a screen, and woods would once again be fine and private places. The Chassignolles birth dates, taken over a long span of years in the mid-nineteenth century, tell their own tale. Fewer babies were born in the autumn than at other times of the year, with November, the low point, producing on average less than half the numbers born in the peak month of January. Obviously this does not relate to anything particularly propitious for birth in the dead of winter but to conditions nine months before: in February, the countryside was too inhospitable even for the most enthusiastic lovers, whereas by April the activity known ironically in the Berry as to
bergerer,
to ‘go a-shepherding', was underway again.

But this was easiest for those with good reason to be out in the fields anyway. At Célestine's social level, the significance of spring was that once the roads and paths were drying out the fairs and
fêtes
began again. In the mid-century all social classes still participated: the retreat of the bourgeoisie into their new stucco villas had not yet got underway. But as the day's business drew to a close, ‘The townspeople and others who'd come from a little way off climbed into their assorted wagons and were on their way before night came down on the rough tracks they had to follow. The small stall-holders packed up, and the local Curé went off to enjoy a supper with some friends of the cloth who had come over to watch the dancing.' (George Sand,
Le Meunier d'Angibault
)

Soon only the people of the immediate neighbourhood remained in possession of the dancing ring, all knowing each other, at their happiest now with no
étrangers
there. People of all ages and kinds took the floor ‘including the old fat female servant from the inn and the hunchbacked tailor'. Music was made with pipes, drums and the Berrichon version of the bagpipes, and any adjacent inn stayed open far into the night. For these special occasions the innkeepers in the Black Valley were in the habit of building small green arbours outside their doors. The most respectable customers could sit there and frumenty was served to the ladies. When it was Chassignolles' turn to hold a fair I think it took place next door to the Chaumette inn on a convenient triangle of open land with a market cross in the middle, where today the modern primary school and playground stand. About the time Célestine turned twenty the crumbling cross was replaced by a new one, which is still inconspicuously there today, jammed up against the school wall.

A letter that Célestine received from a young man in Crozon in March 1864, and one from another boy elsewhere in early May, both refer to the big traditional festivals of the season which, under the guise of religion, marked the coming of spring: Palm Sunday and Easter were followed by the more obviously ancient May Day. Similarly the
fête
of St Jean at midsummer and of St Martin in November – quarter days when debts were paid, leases renewed or ended and hiring fairs were held in La Châtre – related to a pre-Christian calendar, only lightly disguised. A character in
Le Meunier d'Angibault
remarks that ‘superstition is the only religion accessible to the peasant … God is nothing to him but an idol who bestows favours on the crops and flocks of anyone who lights a wax candle for him.' Certainly, decorated oxen and dances round purificatory fires, sometimes described by shocked observers as ‘obscene', still figured larger in Célestine's childhood, than the catechism classes administered by the local gentry that were later to become a feature of Catholic revivalism.

Yet organized Christian religion was becoming more present again in country villages than it had been all the first half of the century. In Chassignolles the unsolved question of repairs to the church, first raised by Geoffrenet de Champdavid, continued to haunt municipal meetings. It was still on the agenda in 1864, and by the following year the new mayor (another gentlemanly figure imposed by the authorities in Châteauroux) was declaring that the church was ‘in a state of dilapidation and old-fashionedness [
vestusté
] which might not only have an evil influence [
une influence facheuse
] on the religious sentiments of the population but also endanger their security'. In brief, the old, squat belfry looked as if it was going to fall down. Steps were finally, expensively taken and the result was a tall spire pointing the way to heaven and a new, vaulted roof covered in brick-earth tiles rather than the old wooden ones. The spire itself was grandly covered in slate – only to be partly demolished by lightning twenty years later, when the whole saga of repairs and wrangles about cost was set off again.

The letter from the young man writing to Célestine from Crozon
‘Mlle. Chaumette, habergiste à Chassignol … Pour être remis qu'à elle-même'
(personal delivery only) – is the only one in which a specifically Christian education seems to surface. Not that there is any overt religious sentiment, but the writer has a tendency to speak of ‘confessing his fault' to his beloved (for not turning up to see her at Easter) and of receiving Grace by her kindness to him. The letter ends with a hope that he may love and cherish her for life, accompanied by a sketch of a flaming heart which appears to share the iconography of the Sacred Heart. Henry Lorant (for such was his name) seems to have conflated sacred and profane love into one.

Crozon-sur-Vauvre, some half dozen miles away, had been the site of iron forges for centuries. A Pissavy son from La Châtre had recently been paying court to the daughter of the ironmaster there; we shall revisit the place. Apart from the forges and the foundry, which employed many scores of men, Crozon was a tiny little village lost in the beautiful wooded valley of a tributary of the Indre, with its own miniature cliffs and deep pools left by past iron-smelters. In spite of the substantial trade, there was no proper road there even in the 1860s, though plans were at last being made to enlarge the path from Chassignolles at the time Lorant was visiting Célestine. He wrote a fairly correct French in a slightly careless hand, and at first I supposed him to be a clerk at the foundry. However, a reference in his letter to not being able to get away on festival-days because of the
Grande occupation
in his house at such times led me to wonder if he too was the child of an innkeeper, and so he turned out to be. The widow Lorant was running the inn in Crozon in the 1860s with the help or hindrance of several young sons. For an exact social equal, Henry's address to Célestine seems a little ceremonial:

‘Mademoiselle,

Since I have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance I have not been able to rest for a single instant. For you have so much Grace and so many merits that I cannot Keep Silent any longer without making Known to you the desire I have to love you.'

This tone of high emotion (more borrowing from a manual?) is not entirely sustained. He tells her he has always desired ‘to settle down [
placer,
the same word that was used by apprentices and maids securing positions] with a well-bred girl coming from a good and honest family'. He tells her he much appreciates ‘your honourable father, who appears approving of my passion towards you [
mes délires
]'. Is it unfair to read a touch of patronage and self-absorption into this, or to think that he might have said something of what she might expect from him? On the following page, addressing Célestine as
‘Ma Bonne',
more a jovial, husbandly term than a lover's one, he excuses himself for not appearing at Easter – ‘You sent me a message by the Tissier lad that I had gone back on my word' – and suggests that instead he come to see her the following Sunday.

Well. She did not marry him. Even if he was right that Silvain-Germain regarded him favourably as a useful son-in-law for the business, Célestine was still at this point in control of her own destiny.

The boy who wrote to her in early May of the same year was never, I think, a serious prospect for her. He was the apprentice of the baker in La Berthenoux, a village on the far side of La Châtre. The village was famous in the Berry for a great cattle fair held there every year on 8–9 October before the autumn slaughter. By the 1860s this was beginning to change, as new fodder crops were being introduced that could keep cattle going throughout the year. Crop rotation had come in, even in the conservative Berry, along with commercially imported fertilizer, so land was used more efficiently than under the old fallow-field system. However, the October fair was still a place for serious trade, for the coming together of people driving their beasts on the hoof from all over the Berry and Poitou, and for jollity, dancing, thefts, fights and accusations of indecent behaviour or worse on the long walk home.

While it is clear from the young baker's letter that he had met Célestine at the previous October's fair and again at a recent spring one, he otherwise circles perpetually round the subject of his infatuation with her without conveying anything further. The helpless repetition of
‘Oh Mlle Célestine'
cannot have furthered his cause.

Far more serious from her point of view seems to have been the suit of the young man who was writing to her six months later, exactly two years after the schoolmaster had proposed. His letter was headed Paris – crossed out – and then St Août, a village between La Châtre and Issoudun, but it is on the notepaper of a Paris liquor merchant in the Rue du Cherche-midi on the Left Bank –
‘Manjouin et Cie, vins et spiritueux, Vinaigres d'Orléans, Absinthe et Vermouth'.
From this, and from his style – ‘Mademoiselle Célestine, I have just received your letter of the 24th inst.' – I deduce that the young man was a commercial traveller, one of that new breed ironically described by Balzac in
L'Illustre Gaudissart
as having been unknown in the past but now ‘social equalizers … representing the spirit of civilization and Parisian invention coming to grips with the good sense, the ignorance and conservatism of provincial France'.

Jean Dorian (such was his name) travelled for his firm in central France, where his family apparently lived. He may have spent some time in Paris to learn the trade and continued to make trips there as well as receiving his supplies. Such comings and goings were now, for the first time, made possible by the railways. The many plans for a cross-country line from Châteauroux down to La Châtre and beyond had not yet produced any results, but in the meantime two La Châtre families had begun running competing coach services geared to train connections: you could leave La Châtre at five-thirty in the morning for a guaranteed arrival in Châteauroux by four in the afternoon, this allowing you to take some refreshment and then catch a train which would miraculously get you to Paris very early the following morning, a mere twenty-four hours after you had left home! The same train could deposit you before midnight in Issoudun, Vierzon or Orléans. Another early-morning departure from La Châtre (4.15) would get you to a town on the Cher by 9.00 to connect with the 9.15, which arrived in Bourges at 11.05. Bourges was not only a substantial centre in its own right, but provided further connections to Paris and other cities.