Celestine (31 page)

Today the old card parties, like the Saturday-night open-air hops on the village squares where the shuffle of feet was as loud as the live music, are themselves seen through a veil of nostalgia. The rural dances that take place today happen in specially hired hangars complete with revolving lights. From hired equipment hugely amplified music fills the night air with vibrations, for one night turning a sleepy village into a vision of the wicked city. And yet … disco dancing has replaced the once-shocking foxtrot and tango just as these once overtook the polka with its scandalous Second Empire reputation. A generation before, in the youth of George Sand, it was the waltz, and the very idea of dancing in couples, that shocked those to whom dancing had always meant folk dances in circles and squares. How great is the real change? When, in the mid-1980s, our son attended a rural
bal
in the Indre valley, he reported that, in spite of the volume of noise, it was extremely decorous by urban standards. Most of the assembled youth of the area knew each other, many were as ever related, and a large amount of very proper cousinly kissing on both cheeks took place. There was little heavy drinking, since these boys and girls had been accustomed to alcohol at home from childhood and getting drunk has no social cachet in France at any level. Even the presence of a group of young soldiers on leave did not lead to any disturbance. Bernardet would have recognized the atmosphere from his own youth. Célestine would have done so, from the dancing under the stars that rounded off the festivals of her youth once the townspeople and the stall-holders had gone home. What the historian Daniel Halévy wrote in 1907, in the first edition of his ongoing work
Visites aux Paysans du Centre,
still seems to be true today:

Progress has taken place, yes – but so what? Past times were hard; does it really make so much difference if they are no longer? To compare the present with the past is to calculate – so much more of this, so much less of that – and happiness cannot in fact be quantified in this way. Comparisons have to call up memories in review. But happiness is a state of mind without memory …

Many people undoubtedly were happy in Chassignolles by the 1900s, benefiting from just those changes that others deplored. But the era has now, in its turn, assumed the pristine glow of a golden age, the time of irretrievable safety on the far side of a momentous historical divide: in this case, the First World War. ‘Village life was never the same after that war,' I have been told by the very old. The same perception as their ancestors, perennially discovered in a new form.

Marcel Jouhandeau, who was born nearby in the Creuse in 1888, did not subscribe to the idea that any essential changes had taken place by the 1900s. He wrote in his memoirs:

There are eras that are destined to be blessed … The first forty years of the Third Republic seem to me to have been such an era. From 1890 to 1914, how fair was my native place … This happiness was no doubt due to the fact that everyone had received much the same upbringing … From this derived something miraculous: a moral unity, a confidence, a relaxed trust and mutual helpfulness. We all spoke the same language and hardly needed to speak because we understood one another anyway. Everyone shared more or less the same ideas about what mattered … What a delight and a source of strength to have to do only with people you have known since childhood and whose family have done nothing that you don't know about for the last hundred years!

How happy such a narrow world really makes everyone is debatable. Lifelong enmities and griefs can flourish in it just as much as peace and security. But nevertheless I do feel that many of the growing population of Chassignolles at that period enjoyed their lives more, for simple, practical reasons, than previous generations did, and more innocently and optimistically than the post-war generation could.

This lost era will be the first one in Chassignolles not to vanish entirely into myth on the disappearance of its last witnesses. By 1900 photographers no longer had to confine themselves to carefully posed, breath-held portraits such as the one taken of Marie-Rachel in the 1860s, but could take exterior shots of daily life. These were made into picture-postcards, much used in those days for ordinary communications, since telephones were for the rich or for emergencies only. Half a dozen different postcard views of Chassignolles survive, including one of the new girls' school looking prim and rather forbidding, one of the Yvernault café with the extended family and retainers drawn up in front of it in their Sunday clothes, and one of the Chausée establishment similarly arranged. There are also two of the roadway at this point crowded with decorated carts, men in bowlers and some with musical instruments, women with cottage-loaf hair and figures to match, a boy posing proudly with his bicycle, others in Pierrot costumes, some blurred little girls who hadn't stood still when they were told to – and several raised umbrellas. People grin self-consciously, others stare dutifully into the lens. The sky lours.

‘C'est la Cavalcade!'
Denise Bonnin's sight, at ninety-two, is no longer what it was, but she instantly recognized the scene as a grand festival organised by Messieurs Chausée and Yvernault in mid-Lent 1912 as an encouragement to business in the village. It was one of her happiest memories. ‘We girls from the school [the religious school, not the new State one] put on a special show, like we used to each Christmas. I was dressed up as a boy with a moustache!' In more prosaic terms, the two-day
fête
was only half successful, since torrential rains descended as they do so unpredictably in this region near the mountains, and a planned procession, complete with comic turns, all the way to La Châtre, had to be abandoned.

Madame Bonnin identified a tall girl in white in a decorated cart as the Queen of the Fête, who she knew to have been Blanche Yvernault from the café, but though she pored over the picture for some time her old eyes would not let her recognize anyone else. I felt frustrated in the same way, though my own inability had a different root. ‘Once … on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone…' Here, among this cheerful stolid crowd on the postcard, must have been a number of people whose names I have seen so often in the records that I feel I know them – and yet I had no means of connecting these names with the faces before me. Appé, no longer mayor but the senior municipal councillor, must surely have been there, and Ageorges, the current mayor, whose relatives ran a café in the old schoolhouse, and the assorted teachers male and female, and the teacher's daughter who had presented the Minister with flowers on the inauguration of the station half a dozen years earlier? In the interests of promoting trade, the commercial bourgeoisie of the village was seemingly out in force: surely there was a Chaumette or a Robin in an odd corner, unrecognized? And what of the less respectable element? The
Écho de l'Indre
did not have much occasion, apart from the Cavalcade, to mention Chassignolles that year, but the village did appear several times in relation to one of its inhabitants, call her Stéphanie, aged twenty-six. With two men younger than herself, she was arrested for drunkenness in La Châtre during the summer, and by September the citizens of Chassignolles were sending a petition to the police to complain of her ‘immoral acts'. It is hard to imagine what these can have been that so aroused the wrath of the normally rather tolerant country people. Her father was a builder: she had grown up in the village in the ordinary way among people who ‘all … shared more or less the same ideas about what mattered'. What happened there? I should like to have been able to spot her among the crowd.

Another postcard eventually proved less frustrating. It showed a wrinkled peasant woman in apron, clogs and white cap, a basket on one arm and an umbrella on the other. It seemed to be posed, and when I first glanced at it I took it as a sign that the traditional peasant world was then just beginning to slip from reality into folklore. But Denise Bonnin took it for granted that this was a photograph of a particular individual whom she ought to remember too, and spent some time shaking her head over it in irritation. Sure enough, when I came to look at the very small print on it, it read, facetiously but with precision:
‘Une demoiselle chassignollaise de 1828'.
The figure also turned up, tiny but with the same recognizable stoop and accoutrements, in a general view of the church.

So, a real person with a place and date of birth. Back to the registers. These revealed eighteen girls born in 1828, of which four were still recognizable in the census for 1901. Of these four, one was Jeanne Pagnard's great-grandmother (she who was taught to cook by the teacher's mother). Wondering if I had achieved an identification, I took the book to her, but before I could embark on an explanation she said: ‘Oh, that's Marie Chièbe.'

‘Marie who?' (
Chièbe
is a dialect word for ‘goat'.)

‘Chièbe, Chièbe – I don't know what her real name was, but people always called her that. A little old woman, quite alone in the world, who ran errands for people to earn a few
sous.
See, she trotted round with that covered basket, she came from over at Les Girauds, I think … No, I don't remember her that well myself, but my grandmother told me that picture of her was taken by the Curé they had then. He was the only person in the village with a camera. People teased her about it afterwards, but she was that proud of having her picture taken. He gave her a copy, of course.'

‘I've seen that card in an exhibition in La Châtre, with a note saying she hasn't been identified.'

‘Huh, well you'd better remember then, so
you'll
know when I'm gone. Daugeron, the Curé's name was. Very nice man, quite progressive for that time.'

I also showed Jeanne Pagnard and the Bonnins the careful drawings of Chassignolles in the 1905 school exercise book that had come my way. It had belonged to a ten-year-old girl, Adolphine, the daughter of yet another blacksmith. It had been given on to me, long after her death (‘I know you like these old things'), by the woman who replaced her at the side of her bereaved husband – an outsider, with whom the village never really came to terms. These drawings are more informative and remarkable in their way than the postcards, since they show scenes such as apple-harvesting and the interiors of houses with a child's eye for specific physical details. Evidently no one explained to Adolphine that, in a picture, you do not draw lines with a ruler; farmhouses stand to rigid attention in her world, rain falls in regularly slanted curtain rods across a landscape of elms, sheep, ducks and Chassignolles' unmistakable church, rising correctly from its huddle of roofs. She was evidently a perfectionist, which is why the challenge of a moving railway engine, seen in perspective, defeated her, but she was also talented and almost abnormally observant. In spite of some rather odd perspective and proportion (the houses are unrealistically high, as they would be to a child) there is an absolute authenticity about the faded crayon drawings.

Denise Bonnin and her son and daughter all remembered Adolphine (
‘La Duchesse'
) well, but they were less interested that day in telling me about her than they were in discussing with nostalgic appreciation her exact depiction of a reaping hook or a donkey harness or a particular make of oil lamp. They were also keen to establish where each drawing had been ‘taken' from, arguing about changed rooflines and evoking the checker-board hedges of now-vanished vegetable gardens. Only later did Georgette remark to me that Adolphine, who married her father's assistant, was
phtisique
(tubercular) and died childless in her thirties. Her mother subsequently drowned herself (said Georgette) in a water cistern in the garden behind the smithy, while everyone else was at Sunday lunch.

Denise Bonnin's own older sister died ‘taking a cold on her chest' during the Great War, after her husband had been killed.

I look at those busy, happy drawings and at the fresh faces of the young men and boys in the postcards of the Cavalcade, and I feel glad that the future is always hidden.

*   *   *

It is true that in the early years of the new century Célestine herself does not seem to have been happy. But this was for personal and particular reasons.

In 1894 her son, Charles, had married. He was then twenty-nine and his bride was a girl of not quite twenty, Blanche D, born near Tours. I have been told she had relations nearer at hand, in St Denis de Jouhet, or perhaps in Crevant towards Crozon. The wedding was not held in Chassignolles and I have been able to discover little else about her antecedents. She is said to have been a good-looking, dark-eyed girl, bigger than her slim husband. The name ‘Blanche', then fashionable, suggests social aspirations, and apparently she was well educated and articulate. Her mother was dead and her father, who may have come from Paris, was said to be ‘a man of means'. In other words, a suitable match for Charles, as an only son.

What I do know specifically is that Blanche, although joining her husband in the family business, brought with her an extensive trousseau in a way that had not been customary when Célestine was a bride but had become so by the 1890s. The days when a new young couple simply took their places round the wide hearth with the existing household, sharing the few hand-made pots and pans, the home-stuffed goose-down quilts, were past except in the poorest families. I think it was probably to accommodate Charles and Blanche and their personal chattels in suitable style that adjacent buildings at the back of the inn were made over at this time into extra living space. With Blanche came sets of ‘best' and ordinary sheets and frilled pillow-cases – some lace-edged, like the lace-edged petticoats, camisoles and drawers that had also now become an indispensable part of a young wife's outfit. There were also heavily embroidered linen tablecloths and a stack of very large damask table-napkins: each of these had ‘R-D' (the couple's joint initials) in the centre in red thread, each woven with minor differences, as one would expect from bespoke work. They were extremely good quality and wore very well. I know this for a fact, since we are using some of them in Chassignolles today, a hundred years later.