Celestine (29 page)

No building in Chassignolles, except perhaps the renovated Domaine, had ever been planned except by a group of men standing talking and measuring things with strides, but even in prospect the purpose-built Mairie-School was impressive to all. A loan was to be raised, and designs were drawn by an architect from La Châtre. However, the planning, like that of the first school, did not go entirely smoothly. With a bizarre symmetry, the spirit of Vallet manifested itself, this time in the person of his daughter, the improbably named Frauzine, she who married ‘a gentleman called Choppy' considerably older than herself. By 1880 she was a rich widow who happened to own a sheepcote and pens in the village on a large site that was considered the only suitable one for the new construction.

But Madame Choppy did not want to sell. It was decided by the following year that if she was really so opposed to progress she deserved to be expropriated. By the summer of 1882 she was still refusing to ‘bargain amiably' (
traiter à l'aimable
) about the price to be paid for her land, so the Council fixed it at 3,600 francs. Needless to say, in spite of huffing and puffing, they settled a few months later for 5,000. Needless to say also, after another year the building under construction turned out to cost more than the original budget. Nevertheless, level-pegging with the cemetery, it was opened on schedule in 1884. The future, long heralded, was at last beginning to arrive.

*   *   *

The whistle of the train was much nearer now. The station in La Châtre had been opened two years before, with a grand banquet, the local bagpipe band and a last-minute confrontation between the Mayor of La Châtre and his opposite number in the adjoining Commune, on whose territory the station had had to be built and who demanded recognition of the fact. Later the same year the first-ever chance came to see the sea, an unknown mystery to most of the landlocked inhabitants of central France. A special train was advertised, leaving La Châtre for Tours one Saturday in late August at 7.15 in the evening. It acquired other coaches further up the new line at Châtillon and at Loches, and joined up with a train at Tours that had come from elsewhere in the Loire valley. Then the whole procession steamed off towards the Atlantic coast, arriving at Les Sables d'Olonne (a name redolent of the new age of the excursion ticket) at 5.45 the next morning. There, after what one can only hope was an unforgettably golden day on the beach, and was certainly a long one, they returned to the railway coaches shortly before ten in the evening, and spent a second night sitting up crammed together on slatted wooden seats under swinging oil lamps, before at last reaching La Châtre just in time for work on Monday morning. If you wanted a seat with some padding in the second-class coach, that was five francs extra, but there was no first class – and no restaurant coach or
commodités,
in those days before corridor trains. The whole enterprise was designed as a popular one and billed as the experience of a lifetime. Participants were warned to bring only such baggage as they could keep beside them ‘without annoying others'. Fashionable bathing wear would hardly have been in the wardrobes of La Châtre and its neighbourhood at that time, and I imagine the baggage consisted of capacious baskets of reassuring home food and drink to keep everyone going:
rillettes du Berry, pâtés de pommes de terre
and local
vin gris
that you could trust. Who knew if anything suitable would be obtainable in that strange land called the seaside?

Mass summer holidays were not to become general in France for another fifty years, and then hardly affected country dwellers. All the same, this post-harvest excursion seems a far cry already from the days when the Atlantic coast meant the intimidating port of La Rochelle, place of imprisonment in the hulks or near-definitive departure for the New World.

The following year, the Mairie of Chassignolles expended 22 francs – nine more than the cost of the excursion ticket – on acquiring for the first time a map of the Indre. No longer would the geography inside a man's head, the knowledge of how far he could walk in a morning or a day, suffice as a perception of distance.

Almost as soon as the Tours–Montluçon line was in place, more railway schemes were being suggested. This time, these were ‘local interest' lines, branches designed to connect one market town with another and with their satellite villages, and they were proposed in bewildering quantity. It can be difficult now, when almost all these small lines have disappeared again from the maps, to determine which were built as fully-fledged lines with cuttings, embankments and country stations, which were more like suburban tramlines (
tortillards
), and which were never more than a hopeful pencil line across the map and a fervent endorsement from local councillors, who thought that a station was just what their village needed.

After 1890 every Commune hoped for its own railway, and Chassignolles was no exception. The two lines which seemed to offer the most likely prospect were the one running west from La Châtre to the old Roman town of Argenton, and a more problematic one that eventually made its way south from La Châtre to Guéret in the heart of the Creuse, where the foothills of the Massif Central begin. This line, which did not actually open till 1906, was proposed first in 1890: the intervening sixteen years were occupied by lengthy argued decisions as to which remote old villages – Crozon? Cluis? – should be transformed by its passage, since there was no single obvious route for it. At first it looked as if it might cross straight through Chassignolles. Even in 1900, by which time it had become clear that adjacent St Denis de Jouhet was going to be the favoured village, the Chassignolles council was still urging the logic of a station near at hand, between St Denis and La Châtre. The Croix Pendue crossroads was surely the natural place? Indeed Les Béjauds farm might make an excellent site for a station …

One can see the desired station, out of a standard railway pattern-book, rising effortlessly in village imagination above the trees, even as the new Mairie had in reality. If it had come, the prospects for Chassignolles might indeed have been greatly changed, but it was not fully appreciated in the village that railway lines, unlike roads, always take the flattest feasible route. La Châtre itself had had to settle for a station on level ground outside the original town. Many villages, such as Sarzay and Crozon, found themselves with an isolated station bearing their name but in practice too remote to be of much use. One such country halt in the Indre was
so
remote that it was derisively known as the Gare aux Loups – Wolf Halt. Chassignolles, a little higher than any neighbouring village and always rather proud of the fact, never really stood a chance of a station on its doorstep.

In any case, the other proposed local line, from La Châtre to Argenton and then on to Poitiers, was by the 1890s assessed as ‘nationally desirable', which meant it received finance from the appropriate ministry in Paris. It was already being built to cross the edge of the Commune, where Chassignolles' land ended at the old main highway, two and a half miles from the village itself. In 1901 Louis Pissavy-Yvernault was at some pains to explain to his fellow-councillors, who were still talking hopefully about a station at Les Béjauds, that the Guéret line must fit in with this Argenton one. With the two lines running parallel for several hundred yards near the main road, they could ask for a station there. No, it wouldn't actually be a Chassignolles station – but there were good paths in that direction; the inhabitants of the Commune would find it useful for deliveries of fertilizer (that abiding preoccupation) and for sending off their goods; they could also use the trains to go to markets and fairs north, south, east and west …

The numbers of these distractions had increased enormously in the last thirty years of the century, replacing the older, semi-pagan religious expeditions made on foot. Cheered by the thought of fairs, the Council reluctantly agreed to a station on the main road, but stipulated that it must be a proper station, with a platform and someone to accept parcels. Three years later, when the line was open, there were loud complaints because the earliest morning train coming from Argenton did not get into La Châtre till after ten in the morning – and whoever heard of arriving that late on market day?

In the end the Guéret line, when it did swing away from the Argenton one, still only cut across a far corner of Chassignolles' land – the Bois de Villemort. The Council, however, made sure that the railway company built them a special halt there too at a level crossing. The last wolf was driven out and civilization, in the form of a full-time crossing-keeper in his own house, had officially come. In practice, the miniature
château
of Villemort was the only other property near enough to the halt to derive much benefit from it. It was by then occupied by a family of tenant farmers called Gonnin, of whom we shall hear again.

The line was opened by the Minister of Public Works, travelling on the inaugural train, to be greeted at each new halt with flags, bunting and Sunday hats. On the territory of Chassignolles there assembled Mayor Appé, the Council, the two village teachers who had finally replaced old Charbonnier, a teacher's little daughter with a bouquet of roses, and almost the entire population of the Commune come to watch. A young pupil at the brand-new Chassignolles girls' school drew a careful picture in her exercise book called ‘The Arrival of the Train at the Station'. The station – gable, clock, name-plaque and all – is easily recognizable; so is the curve of the line – but the engine itself has been much drawn and then rubbed out, as if its impressive size and sheer complexity were too much for the conscientious artist.

The branch lines also brought, for the first time, a trickle of urban visitors to see such historical, literary and artistic sights as the Berry could offer. Cultural tourism was, like seaside tripping, taking its first hesitant steps. The guide book was born, centred on railway timetables and on the station hotels with water-closets and gaslight that were superseding the old high-street inns as respectable places to stay. One informal guide, published in the first year of the new century, complained that neither of the two book shops in La Châtre had anything by George Sand. One of the assistants explained: ‘You see, it's because everyone hereabout has read her books already' – which may, improbable as it sounds, have had some truth in it. The scandalous Republican, alias Bonne Dame de Nohant, dead these twenty-five years, had been sanitized into a Great Writer and therefore a text for generations of schoolchildren to copy in their best calligraphy.

The writer of the guide seemed surprised and put out to find La Châtre a quiet little town with a river still dirty from the remaining tanneries, but modern improvements pleased him no better. He took himself off to Nohant, which he similarly regarded as ‘very small and ordinary' (perhaps he expected a Second Empire mock-
château?
) but added: ‘However, Nohant today possesses a railway station, situated on the banks of the Indre near one of those mossy water-mills that George Sand so loved.' Warming to his then-and-now theme, he complained that quaint old beliefs were dying out, extinguished by the daily newspapers from Paris that the trains delivered. Another nearby market town (Neuvy St-Sépulchre, whose basilica church cultivates a drop of the Precious Blood) was actually lit by electric light! Cluis, where George Sand had gone to eat the vast, oozing, goat-cheese cakes for which the woodland forge-villages were famous, had coaches leaving in different directions for two main-line stations, and its own line was to open shortly. On another local train ‘the people around me only stopped talking about farming to have a brief go at the Paris Exhibition and the war in China. No use here trying to turn the conversation to Great Beasts or werewolves!'

In fact la Grand' Bête, once such a reputed creature round La Châtre, was not quite extinct. Twelve years later, just before the First World War, it took to leaping out of bushes at dusk on country roads when young girls were passing, and making
des propos inconvenants,
as the French primly called indecent suggestions. It disappeared for good, however, when a well-equipped girl threw pepper in its masked face.

*   *   *

During the 1980s the line through the Bois de Villemort past Crozon in the direction of Guéret ceased to be used even for freight. Mare's tail and bracken fronds are growing between the sleepers, the rails are lifting. Soon saplings and scrub, gorse and briars, will reclaim the embankments and the cuttings, as they have been reclaiming the Argenton branch line since the end of the Second World War. The secret lanes to nowhere, losing themselves in bogs, that are the setting for George Sand's pre-railway country romances, have by the accident of time and chance been re-created. The keepers' cottages at the many obscure level crossings are shuttered or have been turned over to other uses. The station on the main road two and a half miles from the centre of Chassignolles still has its blue enamelled name-plaque and unmistakable railway clock, but it has been lived in for many years by an elderly carpenter and his family. In the 1970s he built us a fixed ladder inside our house, using local oak and rule-of-thumb methods that Jean Apaire would have recognized.

It is easy, now, to underestimate the important role the little lines played in opening up remote parts of the country. Their era was unnaturally brief. Arriving a generation later than the typical British branch line, they were overtaken, even in their first heyday, by the coming of the petrol engine. From the 1920s, the lorry, the country bus, the charabanc and finally the private car gradually began to replace the trains. Their life did not even span one human existence. Madame Caillaud, Chassignolles' oldest inhabitant, saw the first train arrive with the Minister of Public Works on board when she was a small girl at her parents' side: her hair had been curled specially for the occasion. Later, she and a boy would meet on June evenings in 1914 beside the track where it ran through the dark woods. Before she was an old woman, she saw the line fall silent again.