Celestine (20 page)

Such a network, dependent on centralized, precise ‘railway time' rather than local sun time, had been undreamt of twenty or even fifteen years before. It meant that travellers had only the shorter journeys to make by horse-drawn means: they no longer ran the same risks of ending in a bog or frozen by a snowstorm on a long, lonely road. Presumably the inn in Chassignolles was on Jean Dorian's itinerary. Although nearly three times as much wine was now being produced around La Châtre as had been earlier in the century, it was generally agreed to be mediocre stuff, an acidic rosé. Silvain-Germain would have needed better and more varied liquor to offer these days to a newly discerning public – or so Manjouin's rep would have tried to convince him.

Jean Dorian's writing is elegant and clear, his French almost as good as the schoolmaster's and more direct in style. Only one word defeated me for a while. It was
‘fisiquement'.

Mademoiselle Célestine,

I have just received your letter of the 24th inst. in which you tell me not to come back to your house. I will submit to your will if you really want it so, only allow me to ask you if it is truly of your own accord that you write me these words, or if it is your parents who have induced you to write in this way? Your mother tells me that she lets you make your own choices, but I wonder about this as I certainly can't believe it of your father. I am therefore led to suppose that neither you nor your mother have been frank with me about your feelings, something I find hard to bear – especially where you are concerned.

I do beg you, tell me what it is that puts you against our marriage, apart from the idea that you would have to come and live with my people and that you are afraid of not getting on with my mother, or that you don't want to leave home. Believe me, my dear and good Célestine, that if I were to marry you and you were to tell me that it didn't suit you to live in our house, my wishes would be yours [
je n'aurais pas d'autre volonté que la vôtre
] for, in marrying you, I would be hoping to make you happy and be happy myself with you. For I believe you to be so sweet-natured and good that the man who has the luck to marry you could have no other desire but to work and love you. Do not therefore imagine that if you asked me to set up our own home it wouldn't suit me. I would stop at nothing; we are both of us young and together we could go into a little business [
commerce
– shop or café] of any kind you like. I could arrange employment for myself in whatever would suit you best, but for my part I would prefer a business where we would be our own masters. Do not believe, Mademoiselle, that I am guided by self-interest for, no, I would not expect anything from your parents. It is entirely the love and feeling I have developed for you that has led me to believe we could spend our days happily together.

If, even so, I am so unlucky as not to appeal to you physically, then I must resign myself. However, I do entreat you to tell me frankly if you are moved by the overriding wishes of your parents.

I will close now. According to what I hear, you are expecting someone else to visit you on All Saints Day. This does not worry me; I just want to know what your real wishes are and if you could look upon our union with pleasure. Being afraid that my letter might not be given to you, I shall send it care of Madame Merlin. You will therefore be able to think things through without your lady mother [
Madame votre mère
] concerning herself. I dare hope that you will do me the honour of replying directly from your own heart. In the hope and expectation that you won't leave me in uncertainty, allow me to embrace you a thousand times and to be, with the deepest respect, your devoted and humble servant –

A Marguerite Merlin had been the sacristan's wife and Célestine's great-grandmother. The Madame Merlin who was to hand on this letter must be of a later generation of Merlin cousins. She presumably did so successfully, or it would not have survived.

Of all Célestine's suitors, Jean Dorian strikes one as the most generally worthy on both emotional and practical grounds: ‘the man who has the luck to marry you could have no other desire but to work and love you … we are both of us young and together we could go into a little business of any kind you like…' Had Célestine accepted the offer from this young
commerçant,
who was so representative of the future that was fast arriving, her later life might have been very different and, I am inclined to feel, happier.

But perhaps, indeed, she was not drawn to him
fisiquement.
Or perhaps – as seems equally plausible from what we can surmise of Silvain-Germain's strong character and what Jean Dorian hints about him – Célestine's father was simply set against his only and admired daughter leaving home and wanted a docile son-in-law for the business, such as Henry Lorant from Crozon. Perhaps Célestine really was ‘so sweet-natured and good' that she inevitably deferred to her father's wishes. At all events, the commercial traveller did not win her.

Célestine was certainly an only daughter, and her presence must have helped attract custom to the inn. But was she an only child?

For a long time I was inclined to regard her as such. I had been categorically told by aged persons who remembered her that she and the man she married had inherited the entire business. This, given the Napoleonic law requiring parents to divide their estate equally among their children, was enough to indicate only-child status. Indeed this law itself was, by the mid-century, having an effect on family size. The desire to avoid splitting up the family land holding or business is traditionally advanced as the principal reason, if not the only, for the persistently low French birth rate at a period when the rates of other industrializing countries were rising. Historically the population of France had always been bigger than that of Great Britain. In 1800 there were twenty-seven million French people as against eighteen million Britons. The area that is now Germany had twenty-five million. But by the middle of the century the number of French had increased by only about three million; the British were overtaking them fast and so was Germany – a fact which became something of an obsession in French political life. It continued to be so into the next century and through three wars with Germany and is still capable of rousing governmental paranoia today.

In Chassignolles, the population increased in the first three decades of the nineteenth century by almost half as many again to close on a thousand, but this is mainly accounted for by more children surviving to grow up and by people in general living longer. During the 1850s and 1860s it stabilized. It began to increase again in the 1870s, but the rate was not dramatic. It passed the twelve hundred mark in the mid-1880s, and did not reach its peak of about fourteen hundred till the eve of the First World War. (It has been declining ever since.)

The more easy-going branch of the Chaumette family continued to have large numbers of children, as did other families with little or no land to divide, but it is clear from the censuses decade after decade that many of the villagers did not go in for unrestricted procreation. No matter that the Church disapproved of any deliberate limitation; no matter that the classic French folk story ends ‘They lived a long time and had many children': the realities of life were otherwise. Silvain-Germain, with his role as Secretary, his inn and his one daughter, seemed to fit very well into this picture of ambition and prudence. As indeed did Célestine herself, who in turn was to become the mother of an only son.

I was, however, wrong about this. Célestine, I came to realize, had two brothers, though the fact that there is no casual mention of either of them in any letter written to her by a suitor may, in itself, be significant. I shall return to them later.

*   *   *

By the autumn of 1864 time was secretly beginning to run away fast for Célestine; that Destiny of which Baptiste Aussourd had spoken anxiously had almost caught up with her. Who was the boy whom Jean Dorian heard was planning to visit her on All Saints Day, about whom he bravely declared himself unworried? Perhaps it was the one who was writing to her in the first days of the new year. Although he addressed her as
vous,
this was probably a piece of letter-writing politeness, since he signs himself as her cousin and his surname was Laurent, that of Célestine's mother's family in Nohant. He wrote from La Châtre.

My dear Célestine,

The one who loves you is writing to you, but he does not know what you say in reply to what he said to you the evening before last in your house. And if what you say is the same as what he said, then Célestine I love you and will always do so. I would rather die than stop loving you. My dear Célestine, if your heart can answer mine these days will be the happiest of our lives [
le plus beaux jours de notre vie
]. If this matter should be accomplished, dear Célestine, I can promise you that you will find yourself in a position that could not be bettered. You won't have anyone to bother you; you will be on your own and happy with your husband Alphonse who will shower you with gentle kisses. Célestine, if you don't love me, tell me so, for no one yet knows about this but ourselves. I am waiting for your reply, dear Célestine, as you said you would write to me, but I can't wait longer, so I am sending you this letter. Please do try to come for the fair [probably a Twelfth Night fair] so that I can see you and we can have a talk. Or at least send me a reply at once, for, Célestine, as I told you, if the whole idea suits you then we must move quickly. If it wasn't for this, then we could take our time. Dear Célestine, I know you are going to say that I am young and that I haven't yet taken part in the draw [a reference to the lottery for military service] but you mustn't be bothered about that. As to age, I don't see there's much difference between us: I know I'm only nineteen and you, I think, twenty, but that doesn't seem to me an unequal match. Would you really rather have a husband eight or ten years older than you?

My dear Célestine, it's no use my writing any more now, even though there is more I could say than the paper could ever hold.

And so I finish my letter, my own dear Célestine [
ma bonne amie Célestine
] clasping you in my arms and kissing you with all my heart. Your cousin for life and your husband if it so pleases you. Laurent, A.

This letter was written on 3 January, and the remark about her surely not wanting a husband years older than herself is a loaded one. For just two weeks later, on 17 January at ten in the morning, Célestine was married in Chassignolles to Pierre Robin, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a family of oil-pressers of La Châtre. Her youthful days of competing suitors, of love-letters, of dancing at fairs and festivals, her
plus beaux jours,
were abruptly over.

Vous n'irez plus au bal,

Madam' la mariée,

Vous n'irez plus au bal

Aux fêtes, aux assemblées;

Vous gard'rez la maison

Pendant que les autres iront.

(You won't go dancing any more,

Married lady;

You won't go dancing any more.

No more fêtes or gatherings;

You'll stop and keep house

While the others go out.)

Traditionally, rural Berrichon wedding celebrations were lavish affairs that continued for three days on end, with a surfeit of food and drink, and a mixture of ancient pagan rituals and bawdy practical jokes. In the monotony and austerity that made up much of rural life, great store was set by these oases of excess and excitement. But I think that Célestine's marriage may have been a quieter occasion: certainly it was not long in the planning. In any case, the dead of winter in the Berry is not time for rollicking processions round muddy lanes tricked out in best clothes. After the church ceremony and another in front of the mayor, I expect they forgathered at the inn in the big room at the top of the outside stair and ate a lengthy meal. The women would have been in their best lace caps but the men by this date were mostly in the stiff, village-made suits they had worn for their own weddings, would wear for their children's and in which they would eventually be buried. Perhaps, as at Emma Rouault's rural winter wedding to Charles Bovary in Flaubert's novel of a few years earlier, the suits ranged according to the age and social position of the wearers from old, full-skirted riding coats, through frock-coats to various kinds of cutaways and modern jackets. The more humble relatives were clad in old-fashioned best smocks, pleated and belted. ‘Everyone had had a recent haircut; ears stuck out sideways, chins were all freshly shaved, some so early in the dark morning that small cuts were left here and there…'

I see it as one of those very cold, absolutely still days in central France when hoar-frost outlines every leaf, stem, twig and spider's web beneath a grey sky from which the sun does not emerge all day to break the spell on this petrified landscape.

Why this abrupt transformation of Célestine from much-pursued girl into married woman? The obvious conclusion is that, in spite of being
une honnête fille,
she found herself pregnant, and the respectability of the family demanded that the situation should be instantly regularized by the young man apparently responsible.

At first I believed this to be the case. I did not find the evidence in the Chassignolles Birth Registers for the later part of 1865, but an excursion to the Hôtel de Ville in La Châtre produced the fact that Ursin Charles Robin, son of Pierre Robin, oil-presser, and Célestine Chaumette his wife, was born there in the Robin family house on 2 October. However, more precise female arithmetic indicated that if the baby was born more or less to term he would have been conceived in the early days of the year and that therefore, whoever his father was, in the brief time before the wedding took place Célestine could not have known that she was pregnant. If indeed the child came ten days early, then he was conceived in total respectability on her wedding night.