Celestine (6 page)

Although the speckled woods were then more extensive than they are now, you could still use this map to find your way to almost any corner of the Commune. And yet it is another place that it depicts. The village of 1843 had the same basic shape, clustered round the meeting point of several roads, that it has today, but there was then no Mairie and no buildings on the site of the present café, the baker's or the post office. Fenced vegetable gardens occupied the place of the cemetery: the crosses of graves filled the space round the church where the road now runs. The small, old houses along the line of the medieval fortifications and the house with the tower were there. But a close examination of most of the other buildings on the map suggested that even though they occupied the same spaces as the present-day houses they were not necessarily these houses. Today the village as a whole looks just old, in a generalized, settled way. But between Célestine's childhood and the First World War, much rebuilding must have taken place.

Our own house, for example, is built of local rough stone, rendered, and its pinky-brown floor tiles of fired clay are laid straight over the earth and participate in the changing damp or dryness of the seasons. The walls are very thick, the oak and elm timbers that support the tiled roof were hewn by hand and raised in the same pattern that you find in buildings hundreds of years older. But the fireplace is small and the one main window is a conventionally sized casement with factory-made fastenings. These last details speak of a building not constructed till the latter half of the nineteenth century. On the old map the rectangle marking a house on the site coincides with the position of ours, once you allow for the widening of the footpath into a road. However, the fireplace, as shown by the bulge of a bread oven, is at the other end. I think that at some time in the 1870s or '80s the building that was here was demolished and the materials were used to raise a new house on the same foundations.

Modest as our house is, I can imagine that when it was rebuilt it represented a distinct advance in comfort and modernity compared with the dwelling it replaced – huge old hearth, small, glassless window or perhaps just the hatched upper half of the door, like a stable door, to let in the light, beaten earth floor, animals stabled behind a flimsy partition so that their warmth might penetrate the human living space. There are still houses like this in the Commune. But most have today been relegated to farm use, and many more have evidently gone.

The process continues. The Monsieur Pirot of today pointed out to me that even since I had known the village myself at least three houses on its outskirts had been allowed to fall down and disappear, while others scarcely larger, in carefully ‘traditional' design with rustic shutters to please the planning authorities, had risen nearby.

‘People would rather have a home with a proper damp course and modern conveniences. It's only natural. And it's cheaper to build again from scratch, out of the pattern-book. The old materials aren't wasted, though. They're sold for what they'll fetch. Or people just take them, if they're left lying around, to patch up their own houses.'

I thought momentarily about the indestructibility of matter – the likelihood that some of the stones the thirteenth-century monks built into their fortifications are dispersed to this day round houses elsewhere in the village. I remembered an abandoned house near our own which had looked solid enough until one year its roof had become a skeleton, stripped of tiles, open to wind and rain. Now, ten years later, all trace of it had gone and the site had been incorporated into next door's vegetable patch.

‘Once the roof's gone on these old properties the walls just go back to the soil,' said Pirot equably. ‘They're just earth and stones.' The centre of Chassignolles, these days, is ‘classified as a monument', which is to say Listed, but I discovered soon after this that the municipal council was in a dispute with the Beaux-Arts, the listing authority, about the garage proprietor's right to demolish one of the last pre-Revolutionary cottages in the street.

Pirot, the owner of many cows, was less interested in old houses than in the shapes of the parcels of lands in 1843. Casting a practised eye over them, he was able to point out which segments are now in what use. The average land holding in the Commune today is forty to fifty hectares (about a hundred acres) either owned or rented, with many proprietors holding less. Many of the old field names are still current. With some of them – La Grande Salle, Le Champ Rouge – the origin of the name is obvious: the latter pasture still has a vein of iron-red soil across it. Other names speak of uses now forgotten except in this survival: La Forge, La Gitte (the animals' lair), Le Bute (archery butts), Le Champ Galland (the tournament field). Others again suggest lost history: was buried gold once unearthed in Le Champ de l'Or? What was the Roc au Sourd (Deaf Man's Stone) in the field of that name? And does the name ‘Pendu' (hanged) attached to both a field and a crossroads indicate the one-time presence of a gibbet?

Pirot could not tell me. But he remarked that there was a Chêne Pendu (literally, ‘hanged oak', but perhaps once the Oak of the Hanged) in a wood on the edge of the Commune.

‘In the Bois de Villemort?' I asked. We had sought it out one unnaturally still, balmy day in the dead of winter, when a luminous blue light had shone through the bare branches and crows had clattered among the dead leaves. The tree is so huge that an adult photographed standing beside its trunk appears in the picture as small as a doll. It had not been hard to believe that unpleasant retributions had once gone on in that isolated spot, though it is true that malefactors were not normally strung up in the depths of woods but by roads where passers-by could be impressed by this demonstration of justice received. I discovered later that the only record of bodies on the great oak is of those of eighteen wolves, strung up there after a wolf hunt organized in 1849 when strenuous efforts were being made to drive man's traditional enemy out of the Berry. The wolves remained unimpressed, for near the end of the century the Bois de Villemort was one of the last places where they were sighted or heard in the area.

Villemort – ‘dead town' – must indicate an abandoned settlement, but Pirot knew of no story connected with the name. The only human habitation near that place on the old map and still the only one today is a late-medieval gentleman's residence: one of those ‘castles' with a turret or two, an ancient chapel and an external staircase. Here is another hint of past greatness in this quiet place: huntsmen, hawks, hounds – all the vanished pageant.

On the old map the property at Villemort looks rather more extensive than it is today, with outbuildings that are now only shadows under an adjacent field when the light falls the right way. Similar ghosts of buildings appear round the Bernardets' farm-hamlet (Les Béjauds – ‘the falcon nursery') about half a kilometre from the village, and at other outlying farms. It has been suggested by the French historian Braudel that the sites of these well-established hamlets may go back to prehistory; that they are possibly older, in many cases, than the villages which developed later round crossroads and fords. Still, in the first half of the nineteenth century relatively more people lived in the settlements among the fields where they worked and fewer
au bourg.
There were not so many reasons, in the 1840s, to settle in a village that as yet had no shops, few artisans, no administrative centre but the church, and no school. What turned out to be the golden age of village life lay in the future – in Célestine's adulthood.

The tracks leading to these far settlements were as large as, or larger than, those leading in the direction of the next village and on to La Châtre. Evidently, in the 1840s, most paths were for short journeys within the Commune, from one field or neighbour to another, not for travelling from place to place in the modern sense. Indeed, in many parts of France at that time, including the Lower Berry, a general network of routes was entirely lacking. Some good long-distance highways had existed since Roman times, and others had been constructed, usually for military purposes, in the last half of the eighteenth century or during the Napoleonic wars, but these left much of the country untouched. The British traveller Arthur Young, in his enthusiastic
Journals,
put forward the idea that French roads were superior to English ones, but the maps of the time show this to be based on some highly selective travelling. As George Sand wrote in
Le Meunier d'Angibault:

In the centre of France, in spite of all the new main roads that have been opened in recent years, country districts still have such poor communications that it is difficult to get from the local people exact directions to another place even a short distance away … Try asking in a hamlet the way to a farm a league distant [
circa
two and a half miles] and you'll be lucky if you get a clear answer. There are so many little paths, all much alike.

I have seen it suggested elsewhere that some of these supposed paths were, in any case, not paths at all but strips of outgrown woodland between the fields, going nowhere, a snare and delusion for the wheeled traveller. They even had their own local name: ‘Mysterious retreating perspectives beneath thick shade,
traînes
of emerald green leading to dead ends or to stagnant pools, twisting abruptly down slopes that you can't get up again in a carriage…'

Today some of these old paths and false paths round Chassignolles remain as they always were, deep, green veins running between old hedges, well preserved but little used. Others have arbitrarily disappeared into the fields, while the same operation of chance has turned others again into tarmacked roads. Three proper roads lead from Chassignolles in the general direction of La Châtre, while a fourth, probably the oldest of all, descending a valley to ford a tributary of the Indre, is today almost forgotten and in places impassable with saplings and brambles.

Each time I looked at the old map I felt myself being drawn into it, possessed by the feeling that if I studied it hard enough it would, like a photograph gradually enlarging and enlarging under my gaze, carry me deeper into those narrow lanes, allow me to see the small oblongs transformed into the shapes of roofs and doors, eventually revealing the trellises of vines, the tracery of the plough, every tree, every stone, every dung-heap …

‘Was it something particular you wanted to find out?' said Monsieur Pirot.

I did not want to appear intrusive and in any case I did not yet have a formulated plan. I murmured that I wanted to check up on one or two things. Only then did it occur to me to ask how far back his other records went.

‘Oh, to the Revolution.' That magic date between Then and Now.

‘What – all here in the Mairie?'

‘Certainly. All the Birth, Death and Marriage registers going way back. They're in that cupboard there. And we've got the records of Council meetings too.'

‘Not back to the Revolution as well?'

‘Well, back a long way. As long as they had Council meetings, I suppose. They're very old books.'

‘That's wonderful. May
I
consult them?'

‘Of course,' he said, surprised that I should even ask. ‘Anyone can. But' – he added quickly – ‘it's Silvie the Secretary you want to see. That's her department. I don't know much about them. Yes, Silvie my niece. She's a Pirot too.'

Silvie, young and pretty and soon to be the mother of a baby girl, was already showing signs of being one of those linchpins on which village life has always depended: the person of some education and energy who is nevertheless happy to remain in a deeply rural society and help it to function. There are not enough Silvies in rural France today: this lament is heard on every side. And yet there are rather more now in Chassignolles than there were in the previous generation. They, in the 1960s, were tempted away to the towns, to the shops and businesses of La Châtre or the factories of Châteauroux or yet to the more visionary possibilities of Tours, Orléans or Paris itself. Today unemployment in the towns is perhaps making the remote countryside seem more attractive again – even with omnipresent fears about the future of the traditional French agriculture on which this part of the Berry has always depended.

Silvie was used to a trickle of enquiries about distant births, deaths and marriages. For people intent of proving that Great Aunt Marthe had been born an Aladenise and that
her
mother had been an Ageorges and that therefore a certain orchard should still be in the family, Silvie would copy out declarations of ancient life-events in her own French school handwriting. It was rare, however, that anyone came asking for the Minute books of the Municipal meetings, which were stacked on top of each other in the far recesses of the cupboard. She got the books out for me, blowing dust from hand-sewn covers, and seemed happy that someone should be interested enough to turn the long-unread pages. We were a long way here from microfiche readers and bar codes. By and by, when she saw that my interest in the books was not going to be assuaged in a mere hour or two's work, she let me look at them whenever I wanted, whether the Mairie was officially open or not. She also, with patience and good humour, helped me to reconstruct several family-trees by reference to the Birth and Marriage registers. I was lucky to find Silvie, though just how lucky I only realized when I tried to consult similar documents in a much larger urban Mairie and was met by a bland refusal even to let me have the books in my own hands. Only specifically requested entries, I was told, could be delivered in photocopy form.

‘Why?'

‘Because otherwise you might see something relating to someone else.'

‘But there are no rules about what I may specifically request, are there?'

‘No, no.'

‘Well, then…?'