Celestine (40 page)

*   *   *

But what of Célestine's last years?

Because the packet of letters from her distant youth had surfaced in the small house, I assumed for a long time that she had returned to live there in her widowhood with her feckless, ageing children. She is certainly remembered appearing in Chassignolles in the years after the Great War, wearing the white cap tied with ribbons beneath the chin that by then most women had abandoned – mistakenly, one might think, for it was a becoming article of dress. But Jeanne Pagnard was adamant that she did not live in the village. ‘Oh no, not with Blanche!'

Sure enough, the Chassignolles census for the period does not list her. I found her in 1921 in La Châtre, still in the Rue des Chevilles, where Pierre had died in November 1914. The alley had declined further during the years of the war. The roofer and the clog-maker who had been there earlier had moved on, several houses were derelict or used for storage. Célestine was one of only three inhabitants, all old women, each living on her own. One, of seventy-three, is described as a ‘servant' and another of seventy-eight as a
journalière
– a casual worker. There was no safety-net then for such marginal members of society. It is something of a relief to find that Célestine, also seventy-eight, is described as ‘without occupation', but on what did she live? On some relief fund for the widows of indigent licensed victuallers? Or on the charity of her husband's relatives?

There is, however, a happier note on which to end Célestine's story. According to both Mademoiselle Pagnard and the Bonnins, she had ‘a friend' in La Châtre who lived very near by. The word Jeanne Pagnard used for this person was
bon ami,
the traditional term for companion-lover: she at once corrected herself, but the general message was clear – ‘Of course they were both old people by then, and he was the retired Curé from Crevant! But he was her special friend and they spent their days together.'

So perhaps it was choice rather than absolute necessity that made Célestine remain in that ramshackle street behind La Châtre's church. Her life had been spent largely in thrall to the demands of others. The passing years had denied her the happy family of descendants she might reasonably have expected and had taken from her almost every advantage she had known in better days; but, like the granddaughter who followed after her, she finally made her own unconventional arrangements. It is satisfying to know that she who had been reared for something better than a life of peasant labour, and who was so sought after in girlhood, was not after all bereft in old age of the company and affection of a suitable man.

By 1931, when Célestine was approaching ninety, her companion had died – it is thought, during the particularly severe winter of 1929. She had become too old to sustain independence any longer and had moved to Châteauroux, to the charity home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Charles was quite without any resources and had Blanche on his hands. There were no other near relatives who could look after her and nowhere else she could go. Her granddaughter had her life and her job in Paris, and even the provincial French respect for family duty did not demand that Zénaïde abandon everything to care physically for her grandmother. It is, however, remembered that Zénaïde, ‘who'd always been fond of her old Granny', paid for Célestine to have some extras that the Sisters did not provide, including a cup of sugared milk every evening.

Célestine died at last in February 1933. The motor hearse that brought her from Châteauroux back to Chassignolles travelled at a matter-of-fact speed over roads that she had once known as muddy tracks for donkeys and packmen. The few personal possessions she still had with her were similarly returned, and were stuffed into the already-full oak presses without anyone examining them.

Célestine was laid away in the cemetery that was new when her mother was buried there. Her son followed her only a year later. They joined many Chaumette cousins, Jeanne Pagnard's grandmother, the pedlar great-grandfather who opened the first shop in the village, many Apaires, Bernardets, Pirots, Yvernaults and others, named and unnamed, whose lives and labours and aspirations had gone to form the village Célestine had known, and where she herself had played such a central role over many decades.

Chapter 17

Sixty years have now passed since Célestine's death, another lifetime of physical change and social evolution. Born to the first stirrings of a new era, she died also on a cusp. Looking back now at the rural France of the 1930s, it seems to us and to the nostalgic survivors of that period that the intricate, well-peopled structures of traditional country life were then still intact, the archetypal world that we have lost. And yet the number of cars on the roads was increasing year by year, the first tractors were appearing on the bigger farms, the wireless and the daily paper had installed themselves even in remote farm kitchens. Planes appearing in the skies above the fields no longer occasioned excitement and wonder; within a few years, another war and a psychologically traumatic Occupation would move France on once again. Combine harvesters, Family Allowances, medical insurance for all, secondary education, television, declining Church attendance, efficient contraception, bathrooms in every home – all these phenomena of the later twentieth century were already waiting in the wings when Célestine took her last ride.

And yet the Chassignolles we first knew in the 1970s still retained – retains even today – much from a far older world. Pictures without date, drawn from the last twenty years, assemble themselves in my head. Because they express survival and continuity, it takes me a while to realize that some of these images in themselves have insensibly acquired the patina of vanished things, absent persons.

*   *   *

I walk up the road from our house to the village, bound for the baker's. A thin old woman falls into step beside me, our neighbour. Her husband – he who had once crossed the sea to the Dardanelles and wondered politely which sea we had crossed – died a year or two back. His widow is lonely in her big, dim farmhouse with only her vegetable garden to scold. Too old now to keep goats, she wages an obsessional war against the mice in the shed who eat her potatoes: there is usually a petrified corpse strung up in the cobwebby window like a villain on a gibbet. Its beady eyes are open, it holds a fragment of cheese in its pitiable mouth. Marie D calls it, with satisfaction, a ‘scarecrow'.

‘You're going for the bread? I'll keep you company.' I resign myself to ten minutes of her random reflections on life and mice.

At the next corner we are joined by another pensioner, a man with a trim white moustache and a stick, whom at this time I know only by sight. He is in fact Monsieur Jouhanneau, retired postman. Cheery greetings are exchanged, for it is a beautiful spring day with a hint of summer warmth to come and may flowers once again whitening the bare hedgerows.

We embark on a ritualistic conversation about the season being advanced but treacherous, and about the risk of night frosts to the early fruit blossom. Marie D opines that people are at risk too – far too early to think of leaving off woollen underwear: ‘
“Pentecôte, découvre côte”
– that's what we always said, wasn't it, Henri?' (‘Don't uncover yourself till Whitsun.')

The old man assents politely, but I see that inside this vulnerable old figure there is hidden away the strong man, impatient of women's fussing, that he once was.

Having secured another listener, Marie D suggests they let me go on ahead:

‘Your legs are younger than ours. We can't walk at your pace. We're old just now [
vieux à présent
].'

The old man says: ‘It's lucky you and I have already been young once, Marie, for it won't come back again.'

He speaks with a faint incredulity in his tone, as if he, like others accustomed all their lives to the regular renewal of the seasons, finds it hard to believe that his own youth and vigour will not, like the may and the swallows, return.

Henri Jouhanneau, the composer of the Chassignolles Song, tramped the Commune on foot for years with his wallet of letters. Later, when the lanes were better surfaced, he took to a bicycle. Now another postman, another strong young man making the most of a routine job, roars round the same lanes on a PTT motor bike. When in a good mood, he matches the drama of this with a histrionic manner of delivering the mail –
‘Voilà, Madame! Encore une lettre de votre amant.'
He hands a circular for pig food or an electricity bill to a housewife, who may be flattered but is certainly disconcerted to be told it is a letter from her lover. Monsieur Gallant (an approximation to his genuinely dashing name) takes no account of who else may be within earshot. Mademoiselle Pagnard says: ‘Really, he shouldn't say such things. After all, they might be true…'

By and by Monsieur Gallant's own domestic situation becomes complex, and he abandons the Chassignolles post office for the life of a supply postman over the whole Department, an itinerant existence that may suit his temperament better. But with the passing years he moves up several grades into a grander, advisory role, and re-establishes himself with a second wife and a young family. He builds himself a cottage from a pattern-book, in the middle of a field with a fine view, and settles down to grow leeks and asparagus like anyone else. Turned forty, and still never short of a joke, he is well on his way to becoming a prized old-timer, like Jouhanneau before him.

*   *   *

We ourselves, like migratory creatures following our own natural cycles, come back to Chassignolles at predictable intervals. Doing this, we become peculiarly conscious of the changing seasons, though their reassuring pattern tends to lull us into the false belief that no real change is in process. The cowslips that speckle the ditches if we arrive at the right moment in early April have disappeared like
les neiges d'antan
by May, when the buttercups are taking over the under-occupied pastures and the Remembrance poppies suddenly spot the growing corn fields. By high summer another transformation has taken place: neat rows of vegetables have been conjured from the soil, and our garden is temporarily surrounded on two sides by a dense curtain of greenery. Behind fruit trees, studded with early red apples as in a tapestry, rise oaks, and behind them two poplars. They mark from far off the marshy, willow-hung site of a duck pond, once fed by a stream and a spring where the occupants of our house used to fill their jugs. Pond, stream and spring have now dried up; they are casualties of the falling water-table from which the new water-towers and pipes have sucked their fill.

In the closed attic that we left swept bare, where the summer heat is trapped, a miniature drapery of cobwebs has grown, powdered with the dust of the outer air: leaf and blossom dust, pollen, the spoil of the occasional woodworm. Fresh droppings are scattered on the boards, and when we open a shallow drawer a terrified dormouse, with the black-and-white striped face of a mime artist, leaps out and runs for her life. Left behind, her children make squirming, sucking motions from the centre of a perfect nest constructed of moss and chewed dishcloth. We carefully move nest and occupants to the chicken loft, to Bernardet's incredulity and civil scorn. Later, when the charming dormice have become a plague – nibbling fruit from a bowl in broad daylight, preening their whiskers on beams within our sight, gorging themselves on blackberries whose seeds then reappear in blobs on the kitchen tiles – we harden our hearts and buy poisoned wheat. The dormice sensibly refuse to touch it. Years later again, we hear there is talk of declaring these exquisite little pests, now apparently rare, a protected species.

The sheer volume and variety of seasonal life remains a source of wonder as it noisily ebbs and flows. Where does it all go in the long, cold, silent winters; by what intricate regeneration does it return? Crickets, cicadas, butterflies, dragonflies like miniature helicopters – some years the eerie lights of glow-worms appear after dark around the ditches and the ivy, but other years there are none. Several times a hedgehog has occupied the garden, snuffling round like a full-sized pig. Always the lizards reappear, benign spirits possessing the house's southern face, rustling among the vine. The year we built a wall of hollow pot bricks, they colonized that as a safe labyrinth: we dreaded that in rendering the wall-ends we might entomb some of them, and our luck along with them.

Some summers there are brown field mice and even sleek rats, some there are none. Sometimes flying ants or mosquitoes or moths lay siege at dusk, moles build subterranean systems under the grass, and one memorable year hornets nest in the chimney. Lighting a fire on an evening of sudden, lashing rain, we provoke an angry hum; for days afterwards we are wary, people tell us stories of death by stinging; fragments of giant honeycomb with no honey, dry and sinister, plop on to the hearth.

One year, and not again, a nightingale sings passionately all night. Other times a screech owl nests in a nearby field; its rasping voice sounds at a distance like a giant breathing. Another year, when poultry are living in an adjacent orchard, a yellow moon hangs so bright and low in the sky that the witless chickens think it is the dawning sun and crow and cluck all night. They are irritably hushed every fifteen seconds or so by the hissing geese, whose intelligence must be marginally greater.

In the days of the chickens, they escape into our garden and lay us eggs under the hedge of lilac and hornbeam. We find this some compensation for the lettuces they peck, but Bernardet does not. He disapproves of the chickens, not just because they attack the vegetables he has planted but by association with their owner. When people have sat on the same bench together at school, a rivalry or an enmity begun then settles into a fixed attitude long after its origin has been forgotten. I have often become aware, in the village, of a steel cobweb of old resentments or reticences, just as tough as old alliances, which someone from another world can only treat with the greatest circumspection.