Celestine (9 page)

In earlier days, Silvain the sacristan styled himself
tisserand
– weaver. His sons François and Pierre sometimes did also, though later François called himself a day-labourer and then, having inherited a piece of land, a ‘smallholder', before finally becoming an innkeeper. These shifts in occupation and status tell their own tale. For centuries, the area had been one in which handloom weaving was done in the cottages. (Tisserand and Tissand are common local surnames, along with variants such as Tissier and Tixier.) Hemp and flax were grown and harvested as a family enterprise – an important one, in which rituals and dances were employed to make the stuff flourish. Once it was safely harvested, it was left to soak in the Black Valley's numerous streams, spread out to dry again in the sun and then cooked slowly in the big bread ovens that were a regular feature of most dwellings built before the mid-nineteenth century. After that, though the stuff could be trodden underfoot like grapes, it was usually a local specialist, the
chanvreur,
with his own particular implement, who was called in to mash the baked fibres expertly so that they did not break up.

The
chanvreur
had a certain mystique attached to him, like a miller or a farrier: a man who was local but who went about the countryside and got to hear things. Sometimes special knowledge of herbs and healing was attributed to him (as it was to George Eliot's Silas Marner) and he might be feared. Elsewhere, and particularly in the Lower Berry, he was seen as a jolly, benign fellow, a teller of yarns, and it is in this role that he presides over George Sand's pastoral stories.

After all that laborious work, crowned by the
chanvreur
's visit, the magic stuff still had to be spun into a continuous thread – hours and hours of female work in the firelight – before it finally reached the loom. No wonder the eventual bolt of cloth was valuable either to use or to sell, and clothes made from it were worn for decades, passed on from one member of the family to another, patched and turned and cut down at last into frocks and pinafores for the smallest children.

I have seen the last vestige of a weaver's loom, still clinging to the low ceiling between the beams of the house once occupied by Pierre Chaumette and his descendants. And I have been shown pieces of linen and jute woven in the Commune that are still, after more than a hundred years, surviving as useful cloths in houses in the village. But they date from the time when the cottage industry had declined into a minor one with few commercial outlets. Once, almost every sheet, shirt, smock or coat that was worn, bought, sold or bartered in the Berry would have been made there, but already by the early nineteenth century the strategic improvements in France's main-road network, and the coming of the first steam-powered mills, were putting the hordes of cottage weavers out of business. An enquiry into their trade in 1840 revealed that the weaver ‘can no longer be rewarded as he was formerly, since mechanical spinning and weaving now creates cloth at too low a price for hand weavers to be able to compete'. Sure enough, by that time a wholesale linen sheet merchant had set up in business in La Châtre. He imported his goods by packhorse from the mountains of the Auvergne, where the rivers were strong enough to power the new mills and life had always been hard enough to make labour very cheap indeed. Of the family who started this business, prospered and so gained entry through marriage into the world of the local gentry, we shall hear again.

It was the same story with wool. Since the end of the Middle Ages, sheep had been one of the major products of the Berry. Once the Hundred Years War was over, great flocks of them used to drift on the uncultivated uplands between La Châtre and Châteauroux; they were cared for by young
pastoures,
boys and girls who led a life there in summer isolated from their families sometimes for weeks at a time. Each autumn most of the rams were slaughtered for meat, because of the difficulty of keeping beasts alive in the byres through the winter in the days before fodder crops were known. But the main point of the Berrichon sheep was the fleece, and this the villagers of the Lower Berry combed and carded, spun and then wove. But here, too, by the nineteenth century progress had begun to disrupt the ancient patterns of production. The industry continued, but it became concentrated in a few centres. A factory had been set up in Châteauroux specifically to process local wool. It dealt with linen as well, prospered in the Napoleonic wars and continued to do so, with a few setbacks and changes of ownership, for the next hundred years. It was the chief manufacturer of army uniforms in the 1914–18 war, providing employment for half the country round about and sending men to die in the mud with good felted Berrichon wool on their backs. By that time the home-weaving industry of the area had been moribund for sixty years.

So it was, I surmise, that the generation of men born around the time of the Revolution, the generation of Pierre and François Chaumette, grew up styling themselves weavers like their ancestors before them, only to find in middle life that the trade would no longer earn them or their sons a living. Most of them, as skilled artisans, possessed no land to speak of; they therefore had no resource but to hire themselves out as labourers to neighbours who, in most cases, were only peasant farmers themselves. This was a possible way of earning a living from the spring through to the autumn harvests, though it was well recognized that, even so, wages were barely enough to feed a growing family. But in the dead of winter, when the fields were bare and still, crows pecked in the snow and the owner and his family had themselves retreated to the farmhouse kitchen on a diet of stale bread, chestnut soup and hoarded potatoes, what was the landless labourer to do?

The plight of this or that one occasionally crops up in the Minute books as someone ‘really indigent', possibly ailing as well, and needing a hand-out to survive. Silvain-Bazille Chaumette, Pierre's son, appears in this guise after the middle of the century, and so do more than one of
his
sons.
‘Le sieur Chaumette'
– another Silvain, Célestine's second cousin – ‘day-labourer, is the father of five children, of whom two are still very young … He is poverty-stricken, without any resource but his own labour. His only son, whose work is indispensable to help raise the rest of the family, is likely to be called up soon into the Army…' That dates from 1883. Four years later it was the turn of Silvain's brother, Félix, born the same year as Célestine: ‘… he has asthma and a weak constitution which prevents heavy work. He has four children including two young daughters and also has to help his father, aged seventy-five, who is too infirm to work.' The father in question was Silvain-Bazille. The very next entry mentions another of this numerous family, Louis, then fifty, a weaver with rheumatism, obliged to come to the help of the same old father and also his father-in-law. Apparently the more prosperous branch of the family, Silvain-Germain's, was either unable or unwilling to help support these poverty-haunted cousins as they proliferated down the generations.

The more intelligent or fortunate ex-weavers were able to turn to good account the very conditions that had destroyed the weaving business. The improvement of a few roads and tracks which made it possible, for example, for alien cloth to be imported into the Berry from the Auvergne, also created new rural openings and occupations. Commerce was at last beginning to impinge on the subsistence-based rhythms of country life, and with it would come a new race of
commerçants,
tradesmen-villagers with special roles who borrowed a tinge of bourgeois character and practice from the local town. People began to set up as carters, as wheelwrights to service the vehicles that could now lumber along the widened tracks, as smiths to shoe the horses that were gradually becoming more numerous: till then, the work animal of central France had always been the slow-moving ox. Others opened village inns, places where travellers could find sustenance and a bed of sorts, just as in a town. The inn was also somewhere for a villager to get a drink if he possessed no vineyard of his own. The consumption of wine, which had traditionally been for feast days only, was gradually increasing in France, though the time was still far off when it would become the standard drink of the masses, automatically supplied even in the poorest restaurants. In La Châtre, by 1847, there were a score of cafés and drink shops when thirty years before there had been only one. Now the villages were beginning to follow the same trend. In Chassignolles, it was François Chaumette and his son, who were possessed of a well-situated village house and some spirit of ambition and foresight, who started the first inn.

The Chassignolles peasant did not necessarily pay in cash for his glass of the local
vin gris,
any more than he paid in ready money for his ploughshare or other up-to-date farm implement now being forged for him in the new smithy. Bills were normally settled once a year, and often not in coin but in potatoes, wheat or other grains: the tradesman, since he was not a producer himself, would need these. Day-labourers were also paid in kind. Right up to 1914, country people did not handle money much. They trusted each other, with credit that sometimes ran on from one generation to another, but they did not trust, for a long time, the cash economy of the towns.

One should not imagine either that this first Chaumette tavern was like the café of a later date, complete with bar-counter and an array of bottles, a price list and a yellow varnished notice about the suppression of drunkenness in public places. Not till later in the century were
cabarets
licensed and regulated by the local Préfet and his police. (
Cabaret,
the official designation, was then applied to any drink shop, however informal and rural. The non-French reader should suppress the inappropriate mental picture of a small nightspot, with literal
folies bergères
perhaps being enacted by the local shepherdesses!) Informally, the Chaumettes referred to themselves not as
cabaretiers
but as
aubergistes,
innkeepers, and their trade would have been carried on in their own kitchen with the addition of just an extra bench or two round the oak table. A traveller of the period complained that a rural inn might consist of no more than one room beneath a loft, plus a lean-to at the side as minimal guest accommodation furnished with straw palliasses and mice.

Another description occurs in George Sand's novel
André
(published in 1851 but set some fifteen years earlier). It is about a maker of artificial flowers in La Châtre – a provincial Mimi – who falls in love with the son of a local landowner impoverished by the Revolution. They frequent the same dances and fêtes, but he is far removed from her in education and prospects. She honourably decides to resolve this situation by removing herself to the house of a kinswoman all of thirty miles distant. André, accompanied by a male friend, pursues her in the best romantic tradition and catches up with her some way along the road in a small village:

They found the hire-carriage propped on its shafts at the door of an inn … Dawn had not yet broken. The driver was partaking of a pitcher of the vinegary local wine which he much preferred to better vintages. Joseph and André cast a hasty look round the room, which was feebly lit by the light of the fire in the grate. They saw Geneviève sitting in a corner, head in hands, bent over a table … Succumbing to the exhaustion of a night being shaken about over the stones, the poor girl was asleep.

Such was the nature of travel when it still took a whole day to get from La Châtre to Châteauroux, with the ever-present risk of the carriage straying from the path and overturning in a bog. Most of the poorer people never travelled at all, except on foot or, by a chance lift, up behind a wealthier neighbour on his horse. Once in their teens, a boy or girl would walk into the nearest market town for the seasonal hiring fair, where they would find themselves a situation, but before that day came a child reared in the depths of the country may never even have seen a highway, let alone used it. When Sand's François le Champi, aged ten, first sights the lumbering La Châtre–Châteauroux coach, he thinks it is some strange beast and runs from it in terror.

A similar coach, unheated, drawn by six or even eight horses, took three or four days to reach Paris. Not surprisingly, the English tradition of coaching as a dashing and even jolly experience, over a good network of gravelled turnpikes in a smaller country, finds little echo in French social mythology. Even the bourgeoisie of the country towns visited Paris only once in a lifetime, in order to say they had been, with much discussion about it both before and after. (The same is, however, still true today of many of the elderly in the villages.) In central France, journeys farther afield than Paris, Bordeaux or Lyons were simply not believed in; people who claimed to have been in Flanders, Italy or the Rhineland, let alone England, were hardly questioned at all, no one having any idea what to ask them.

The Chaumette inn, in its early days, would not have seen strangers from a distance, except insofar as the double word
étranger
(stranger/foreigner) was then applied to people living in another
pays
a mere twenty kilometres away. It catered to passing
chanvreurs,
pedlars and stonemasons, those useful but slightly suspect itinerants who roamed France more and more easily as the nineteenth century got into its stride. For local people, the inn took messages and packages to pass on, probably transmitted money on account and made small loans. They may have stocked a few dry groceries as well. Before village shops, post offices and savings banks arrived, the Auberge was the first village link with the world beyond its borders.

*   *   *

When I first got to know Chassignolles in the 1970s, two of these old-style inns were still in existence, besides the modern Café-Restaurant-Hôtel directed with entrepreneurial zeal by Madame Calvet (
‘Lunchs de Noces! Déjeuners d'Affaires! Eau Courante dans les Chambres'
). They were on opposite sides of the church: one was run by Madame Aussir, whose husband was a carpenter, and the other by Madame Chauvet, whose husband had been a tailor. In this, they followed the tradition that family innkeeping was usually combined with another trade, sometimes in the past a seasonal one such as butchery or oil-pressing.