Celestine (39 page)

Today, bottling surplus garden fruit, beans or tomatoes in sealed glass jars, still an almost sacred duty to housewives above a certain age, has in itself become a traditionalist and declining craft. Jars of plums, years old, shining faintly under a layer of dust, accumulate in dark sheds, another treasure whose value is now questioned. One year, Grandmother becomes too old and no more jars are added to the store. Her daughters are too busy, between home and job, or have come to prefer the deep-freeze anyway; her granddaughters do not know how to bottle.

Madame Démeure inherited the shop and spent her life in it while also bringing up, with distracted energy, a tribe of children and foster-children. A complex tension has operated within her, composed partly of a genuine, altruistic desire to create for others the happiness she herself knew as a foster child, and partly perhaps from a lifelong need to be the central figure, the ‘little queen'.

‘I was really upset when I had to give up the business to claim my pension. I knew the shop would be missed and I missed my customers, they were like my family to me. When you run the shop, everyone confides in you.'

Outgoing by nature, and trained from childhood to look about her and adapt to changing times, Madame Démeure is not one to sit and mourn. The front room that was once the shop is comfortable now with a carpet, well-stuffed armchairs and a tapestry wall-hanging – of a clog-maker, in memory of her husband's trade. Almost alone among those of her generation to whom I have talked, she has a clear perception that though the village was once far more animated than it is today, it was also extremely dirty:

‘When I was young, apart from the main street everywhere was muddy. The back lane round by Mademoiselle Pagnard's [part of the site of the one-time burial ground] – that wasn't made up at all till after the second war. And along by the baker's and Madame F's house – the old girls' school that was – there was a great big ditch that sometimes smelt horrible.'

… ‘Why? Well, it was partly everyone's slops and no modern conveniences, but it was also the stills. In those days distilling went on for half the year, with people queuing up for their turn. The machines used to stand in the spaces near the church, steaming away, with all the waste stuff trickling off into an open gully that ran across the street then and making a kind of black treacle. Oh, Chassignolles is much prettier and sweeter these days, I promise you – and far more flowers in pots in front of the houses.' Madame Démeure's own flower display, which in her retirement she has plenty of time to cultivate, is one of the finest in the village. You cannot, however, eat flowers.

Like everyone over fifty, she can recite nostalgically the names of the shops and workshops that once lined the street: the smell of coffee and the chocolate wrapped in silver paper in the shop that had superseded Chartier's, the Tabac established in one wing of the tower-house, the cycles being repaired in another, the three working smithies with their scent of hot iron and scorched hooves, the ladies' hairdresser with its discreet sachets of blue-black dye, the succulently leathery odour of the saddler's workshop. This litany was enshrined, even at the time, in song. In 1929 the village staged another of its Cavalcades, and the postman of the period, Henri Jouhanneau, composed a set of verses and a rousing refrain, extolling the local amenities to the tune of
‘Quand il y aura des coqs dans un village'.
With the passage of time, this light-hearted piece of promotion has become a precious record, much appreciated when the Mairie arranged to have it reprinted and distributed sixty years later:

Hotel de l'ormeau, chez Marcel Yvernault,

Salle pour banquets, noce tout ce qui s'en suit,

La menuiserie, peinture et vitrerie

Dans ces quartiers c'est tout un petit Paris …

Henri le cordonnier, si vous êtes mal chaussé,

Vous trouverez toujours des chaussures à votre pied …

Chez Charpentier des sabots, des galoches

Et sur mesure, il n'y a qu'à commander …

Si vous avez besoin d'un brancard

Rentrez chez Pagnard, sur la route de Crevant,

Ses ateliers se trouvent de chaque côté

– Un peu plus loin c'est l'épicerie Châtelin …

Montez plus haut, à l'hôtel Raveau

Vous goûterez délicieux jambonneaux …

Madame Raveau was currently running the inn which had once belonged to the Chaumette-Robins and would be bought after the second war by Mesmin Chauvet, he who demolished the outside staircase.

Où vous pourriez bien vous désaltérer,

Bureau de tabac, cigares et cigarettes,

Du bon vin gris, c'est chez la Mélanie …

Mélanie, estranged wife of Jean Chausée, was now running the Café-Tabac. The Hôtel de France had passed to the Aussirs.

Presented with this picture of the village as a hive of traditional labour and home-grown produce, it is rather a relief to find that the second half of the refrain introduces a sudden riotous whiff of the Twenties:

Allons, les choeurs, suivez notre cavalcade

Et apprêtez-vous à charlestonner,

Dans dix minutes on va rentrer au bal,

On va guincher, on va black-bottomer.

So even villagers in central France were not unaffected by fashions from the far side of the world, though I wonder how literally they charlestoned and black-bottomed? And to what? A tinny jazz record by then, perhaps, on a wind-up gramophone? Somehow I cannot quite imagine Bernardet throwing himself into that, dancer though he was. An athletic waltz to an accordion, perhaps, back erect, cap well pulled forward.

When the song was reprinted, the Mairie got someone who remembered 1929 well to add a few notes. These ended with the remark that, although work was long and laborious, ‘people took plenty of time off for living; there were a good number of jokers and skivers [
farceurs
]'.

That too comes as a relief after the stated conviction of many of today's elderly that ‘the young don't know what work is'. It also has the ring of truth. Charles Robin, complete with mouth organ, hunting horn and abandoned skill as a chef, fulfils well the description of a joker who took time off to live.

*   *   *

Long before Charles and Blanche had declined into their final role as village oddities, their daughter Zénaïde had left the Berry to embark on a life elsewhere.

The original idea behind her boarding-school studies in Bourges was that she should become a teacher, the classic route into middle-class society for the bright boy or girl. However, once grown up, she went to work in Paris,
dans l'administration,
the vast, fusty womb of French governmental bureaucracy.

It seems, on the face of it, a choice hardly comparable with Raymonde Vincent's break for liberty in Paris at the same period, but appearances may be deceptive. I do not know that Zénaïde ever embellished her income and her life by modelling for artists, but I would not be surprised; she was a handsome girl and is alleged by those who remember her to have ‘moved in bohemian circles'. Paris between the wars, with the cosmopolitan liveliness of its boulevards and the traditional working-class culture still intact in its cobbled side-streets, was one of the better places on earth in which to live. It was a city in which baths were a middle-class luxury but in which a furnished room could be rented for next to nothing, and anyone in regular employment could afford to eat the set meal in one of the innumerable family restaurants. Zénaïde spent many years in a little flat in the ancient Place Dauphine on the Left Bank. With an individual flair that seems to presage the 1960s rather than reflecting her own era, she decorated it with genuine antiques and small pieces of mirror-glass set in patterns. She never married, but I am told she had various gentlemen friends –
‘la belle vie, quoi?'
The women who stayed in the village, hands reddened and swollen by a lifetime's work, are half censorious, half indulgent.

‘Ah, she was a very nice person, Zénaïde, kind, warm, good fun – but a little dotty, not really a good-wife-and-mother type. She was more of an intellectual. And eccentricity ran in the family, as you know.' Jeanne Pagnard speaking. She herself actually visited Zénaïde in Paris, which was a mythical place still to most of the citizens of Chassignolles between the wars; but then trips to Paris ran in
her
family, following the tradition set by her emancipated grandmother.

Another who stayed with her, rather later, after the Second World War, was a boy of ten. He was her distant cousin from the Yvernaults of the inn, who had intermarried with the Chaumettes a full hundred years before, though in the family the precise nature of the connection had been lost. He wrote to me:

‘She was a dreamer, affectionate, dynamic – a person out of the ordinary. I was very fond of her; her open-mindedness [
son esprit libre
] was like a breath of fresh air to me … She let me go about Paris on my own just as I wanted to, which brought home to me for the first time my own need for independence.' Today that village boy is a university lecturer.

Another child's testimony to her, still more long-range, has reached Chassignolles. One day in the early 1990s a well-dressed lady ‘of a certain age' called at the Mairie and revealed that she had been a refugee child in the village during the war. She was passing through the Berry with her husband and wanted to see again the house where she had stayed, which she could only locate by describing its owner: ‘Zéna I called her … A wonderful person, so kind and such fun … I really have a golden memory of those months.'

I think this must have been in 1940 after the fall of France, when Zénaïde, in common with a great many other Parisians, retreated to their country roots for a while. Her parents had died some years earlier: she had kept their house, by now a packed repository of vanished lives.

According to Jeanne Pagnard, who vaguely remembered the little girl, she was the child of Zénaïde's current gentleman friend – ‘Not a born Frenchman, no, I don't think so. No, I don't know what happened to him…'

Zénaïde met her post-Impressionist painter, whose name was Norman Lloyd, during the Liberation of Paris four years later. By one of those turns of fate that seem to transform the random nature of life, he led her back again to her rural origins, for his own stock in trade was not Parisian streets but landscape. Though he was always referred to in Chassignolles as ‘English', his childhood roots lay in the space and light of Australia, which he had left for good as a young man to fight and be wounded in the previous war. After 1944, he came with Zénaïde to Chassignolles for the holidays, and after several years he took to spending summers in the place even when she was not there. He it was who built on the makeshift ‘English-style' bathroom, added the blue-painted veranda and trellis and embellished the front garden further with a cactus and pampas grass. A new side gate was installed, with a ship's brass bell that jangled and could be heard in the back, and in the end wall above the beehives bits of mirror were set in a pattern.

Charles Robin had not made very old bones. According to the family grave, he died in 1934, not yet seventy. His death does not, however, appear in the Chassignolles register for that year, nor in La Châtre, where relations on his father's side were still living, nor yet in Châteauroux, though he is known to have been there in the care of the nuns around that time. He is remembered singing a potato-pickers' song at a Christmas party. So exactly where he was at the end is a small mystery. It was an era when, in the country, most people still died at home – but where indeed was home, with his only child far away in another life? The mould was broken. The Chaumettes, once so numerous in the village, were all gone. If Blanche survived him, she would hardly have been capable, by all accounts, of caring for him in his last illness, but I think she may well have been dead herself by then.

I do not know because her name does not appear in the Chassignolles Death Register either, for any year in the 1920s or '30s. Nor does she figure on the gravestone. For some time I believed that, as she got madder and her husband declined in vigour, some of her relatives must have appeared from elsewhere and mercifully reclaimed her. Perhaps they did – but she cannot have gone far, for in death she was returned to Chassignolles to lie with the family to whom she had caused so much inadvertent harm. Both Monsieur Chauvet and Monsieur Aussir were adamant that she was ‘down there too'.

‘Are you sure? Her name's not there.'

‘'Course I'm sure. They're both there. I helped carry her to the cemetery on my shoulders. That was how it was still done, then.'

‘I should say so. It was me who made Blanche's coffin. A big coffin for a big fat woman.' Monsieur Aussir. He added casually: ‘The cemetery's full of my handiwork, you know.'

The shiny black plaque, which now lies broken in the dust, was engraved all at one time, replacing various earlier inscriptions whose indecipherable traces still faintly mark the stone.

It can only have been put up after Zénaïde's own death in 1954 because Zénaïde is on it. The initiator was almost certainly Norman Lloyd, he who inherited the small house and all the hoarded family chattels that it contained. So the stone commemorates not so much the actual bodies who lie there – Silvain-Germain, Zénaïde's great-grandfather, is mentioned though the cemetery did not exist when he died – but rather those whose memory was revered and had been handed down.

It would seem that, over the years, Zénaïde had spoken to her companion of her grandmother Célestine. She must have spoken too of Célestine's by then mythical father, first innkeeper, first Secretary of the Mairie, but she did not much mention, it seems, her own mother. Whether poor Blanche's name was ever, briefly, on the grave I do not know. But after Zénaïde's death from cancer of the breast (a repeat of Anne Laurent's seventy years before) the outsider who was the one person left to preserve her memory simply omitted Blanche from the record. This fact is in itself an eloquent comment.