Celestine (43 page)

People love these old and not-so-old machines. Gratified to find themselves suddenly tourists in their own past, they stand in front of them and reminisce. The Bonnins particularly appreciate them, unabashed by any idea that their own current lifestyle might almost be considered, by people elsewhere in France, as a repository of bygone customs and skills. It is they who still milk nonchalantly squatting on their haunches, without so much as a stool, they who will spend an hour or more coaxing in from the field a cow who is being difficult. It is they who, come sun, cold or rain, take themselves off to the Bois de Villemort on May Day to gather wild lilies of the valley, in unself-conscious commemoration of the days when the annual selling of the lilies in the local market town was an important source of female pin-money.

I feel divided in my mind about the dancers in smocks at the
fêtes
and the loving reconstruction of Sarzay. On the one hand, there is the simple perception that if places, objects and customs are not preserved, then they are lost, and that therefore preservation efforts must on balance be a good thing. But there is the more sophisticated knowledge that to preserve things deliberately, for the sake of doing so, is to lose them in another way, and to risk keeping the shell of a world at the expense of its meaning.

A degree of double-thinking inhabits this page. Indeed, it has inhabited the whole book. We cannot help knowing, even if others do not, that our very presence in Chassignolles is not an unmixed blessing. However low a profile we keep, however much we cherish and support Communal endeavours, we are in ourselves harbingers of profound and continuing social changes. When we first arrived, the phenomenon of the holiday or weekend home was barely known in the Berry. ‘Off again so soon?' old Marie D used to say in disappointment. ‘But what about all those carrots in your garden you haven't finished yet?' Twenty years and several autoroutes later, the part-time householders (invariably known, whatever their origins, as ‘Parisians') are an accepted fact of life in central France, and, as for us, people in Chassignolles are used to us. But I become more and more aware that when there were twenty-seven different shopkeepers and artisans in the centre of the village, there were no spare houses for outsiders to buy up, and that this was, for the village, a healthier situation.

A descendant of the Pissavy-Yvernaults, encountering me in the Mairie one morning with old Minute books piled around me, says shrewdly:

‘You've taken over one of our houses. Are you taking over our past too?'

Stricken with guilt, I protest.

‘But you didn't want it!
You
could have done this research. But you haven't.'

He relents.

‘Quite true. I haven't … Maybe we need you. Maybe you are giving our past back to us.'

I rest my case. For me, to give back in this way, with interest, something of what Chassignolles has given to us, is a matter of pride and satisfaction. But so many people are not there to receive my hopeful gift. It has been estimated that, over the length and breadth of rural France, taking one area with another, one in sixteen of all habitations is standing empty, not even in occasional use – this, in a country where pressure on dwelling space in the larger towns remains unremitting. The figure cruelly contradicts the entrenched rural belief that property is what counts and that one can do no better thing than leave a snug house and a patch of ground to pass on to those who come after.

Moreover, this progressive desertion is the more sinister in that it is not immediately obvious. On a lonely road you come upon a cluster of buildings, nicely positioned so that the living quarters and barn face the south and a rolling view, while the store house is on the cooler north side under shady trees. There is a covered well, perhaps a donkey-stable or cow-byre, a pigsty and a dog kennel. The gate into the yard has been carefully secured with twine, so at first sight the place seems well looked after. The tiled roof is in good shape, smoke might be about to come from the chimney. There is firewood enough for several winters neatly stacked by the side of the house under old plastic fertilizer sacks. The shutters are shut, the inhabitants seem to be out in the fields … But then you see that the grass is growing lush in the yard, undisturbed even by the separate tracks elderly feet should have made to the well, the byre, the store. It grows green and long too round collapsing bean and tomato stakes in the undisturbed vegetable patch. The vine along the front of the house straggles unpruned. The hay visible in the dormer of the barn is blackened: it has been there years. A padlock on the great door is beginning to rust.

Someone took the trouble to put that padlock there, that string on the gate. There was a day when someone carefully secured the shutters before going out of the house, perhaps to hospital or to stay with a daughter ‘for a bit', leaving the pots, pans, table and chairs in the place, switching off the electricity, meticulously locking the door over whose glass panel a lace curtain still hangs petrified within. Someone that day believed the place to have value and importance, a continuing existence ahead of it. But, ever since then, the silence has remained unbroken. By and by, if it continues, the mice and the rats, the spiders and the birds, the wind, the rain, ivy, brambles and time itself will begin to do their work of dismantling.

Yet to see the long past as constant and only the future as broken and dark is, in itself, a misperception. The fact is, great cycles of growth and decay have occurred before, and settlements have been destroyed and rebuilt hereabouts before, several times over. This time, too, is only a stage.

The period in which nearly all land in the Berry has been perceived as valuable, worth draining, clearing, enclosing, cultivating, has been a relatively brief one: it has lasted less than two hundred years. When Célestine was born, about one third of the land in the whole area was unused at any one time, either lying fallow or simply unclaimed. The prospect of returning again to something like this figure – allowing heath and marshland to creep back and forests to reclaim outlying fields – implies such a profound revolution in thinking that it is too much to ask of any individual farmer today, yet it may be what the future holds.

*   *   *

Today the Domaine in Chassignolles, though carefully maintained, is shut up much of the year. Madame L is too old to stay there alone, and only comes for a few weeks at a time when she can be accompanied by a posse of her numerous descendants. In the wood nearby the Virgin still holds her Infant aloft, serenely indifferent to time and solitude, keeping her secret. Occasionally, not quite certain what depths I may be stirring, I bring her a bunch of wild flowers.

At the Domaine's home farm, the young and go-ahead tenant has installed an all-metal building with an automatic grain dispenser in which to rear ducklings
en masse.
Here, in an eternal well-lit indoors, the ducks are safe from wind, cold, heat, foxes, dogs, cats, birds of prey and passing cars, but I think that the Barbary ducks on the waste land used to lead a richer life all the same.

Marie D has been gone for years. Her house, empty for some time because her children could not agree among themselves what to do about it, has now been acquired by a younger branch of the Domaine family as a holiday home. ‘Parisians' occupy Villemort on a similar basis: for the first time in a long while the chapel and the Saracen staircase are treated with respect. So, too, is the tower-house in the centre of the village: once an abbot's lodging, then the Sieur Vallet's and his lady's, later a grocery, a Tabac and a bicycle-repair shop, it is now being restored very slowly with authentic materials by a maker of musical instruments. He was drawn to the area from far away by the bell-ringing tradition in St Chartier and by the musical recitals that take place every summer in Nohant in memory of George Sand's liaison with Chopin. I wonder what Jeanne Aussourd's wraith thinks of that.

The big mill at Le Flets where the Charbonniers were once millers has lost its wheel, and its millpond has silted into a green bog. A little higher up the hill a tributary of that stream has been dammed to make a series of lakes, complete with ducks, perch and carp, whose owners picnic and fish on Sundays. Le Flets and Les Girauds are much depopulated, but at Les Béjauds several new houses have risen from the earth, neighbours with young children for Madame Bernardet. She is cautiously gratified by this, while continuing to assert that nothing is as it was, and Les Béjauds' own particular annual festival has been revived.

Madame Bernardet herself, aided by her son but driven by her own need to maintain things ‘as they were in the Mister's time', continues to plant vegetables and flowers in our garden for us. She carries water in pails from the well across the road, having no faith in hosepipe water for making things grow. If she needs to clear garden rubbish, she digs in a pitchfork and twirls up a great load which she then carries away on her back as she always has done, a bent figure from an old lithograph. In view of her advancing age, none of this can last for much longer, and we regard each garden season that passes as an unlooked-for benefit.

Over the way, at the back of a derelict property, the one-roomed cot where Le Mère Philomène and her old-age pension ended her days is appropriated one winter by an antic figure who is to be seen striding round the roads talking to someone invisible or huddled up with a book under the shelter near the Mairie. He has also been observed painstakingly throwing bits of china into the river. It is said that he used to be employed
dans l'administration
in La Châtre and to be ‘so clever that his wits have turned'. There is a good deal of anxiety about him, but it is generally agreed that he is ‘a citizen like anyone else' and harmless, and he remains in his chosen lodging. In the charitable tradition of long ago, when ragged wanderers were common in the countryside, offerings of food are occasionally left at his door.

Nearby, Monsieur Chezaubernard's snug house has been taken on by Monsieur Aparicio. He came originally from Spain, an itinerant labourer trying his luck in the usual way in the richer lands to the north. But that was forty years ago; Monsieur Aparicio has long held French nationality and now, in his retirement, is settling down with the approval of Chassignolles to become an old fellow who is good at fixing things. He has enlarged his vegetable plot over the empty site next door, where once there stood the house of the carter who carried packets and children to and from the neighbouring villages – the house we saw become a skeleton and return again to the earth. Monsieur Aparicio has another stake in the earth of the Berry. A stepdaughter of his, killed in a road accident, lies in the cemetery.

The village's remaining café-hotel has been bought by the Commune some time after Madame Calvet's retirement and done up with the latest in lighting. A tenant has been installed, but people shake their heads and wonder if the place can be made to pay these days by anyone not possessing Madame Calvet's enormous energy and devotion to duty – ‘The young, you know … Tcch.'

The small house that occupies a patch of land originally the property of François Chaumette (born 1795), the house to which Charles and Blanche moved just before the First World War and where Zénaïde lived out her idyll with her painter, has already completed a whole cycle of change. Embellished by Charles Robin with box hedges and by Norman Lloyd with trellis and a veranda, it has now had these pruned away again. It was sold (I am told for a figure that just about covered the stamp duty) to a retired farmer, and is once again an unremarkable slate-roofed French dwelling, as basic as a child's drawing.

The large, monographed napkins that formed part of Charles and Blanche's ill-fated marriage gifts are in our house on the other side of the village, carefully preserved from mice and moths. They are used on special occasions.

The cat embroidered by Célestine a hundred years ago is in a house in London. The wool is worn, but the picture is still distinct. The silk, more fragile, has gone from its eyes – had done so before the stool ever came into our possession. Shall I restore those eyes to their original brightness? To do so might be to destroy the object's integrity. And yet to add my own labour to a past one is another way of perpetuating that past, the things that people
‘ont peiné là-dessus'.

The letters to Célestine are in a filing cabinet. Each one, in its time, represented substantial trouble and pain. By all the odds, they should have been consigned to oblivion long ago, as lost as forgotten rain. Yet, like ladders and wheelbarrows, benches and ploughshares, they have turned out more durable than the lives and endeavours they express.

So too do houses and barns, gate posts, hedgerows, field slopes and the lie of paths, persist and persist, even when people that created them are earth themselves.

Afterword

Among the joys and frustrations of writing a book such as this is that, once published, it attracts further items of information. On its initial appearance in hardback I bestowed a copy on someone whose help and interest had been of great value to me and who (exceptionally for an inhabitant of Chassignolles) would be able to read it in English – Jacques Pissavy-Yvernault, descendent of the family who figures often in its pages. As he worked his way through it, he began feeding back to me further childhood memories of the area and its people.

‘I wish you'd told me this before!'

‘Yes, I'm a fool. But you didn't ask me that before!'

‘But how do I know just what to ask you unless you tell me?'

Among the things he passed on to me too late to be incorporated into the body of the text was a mid-nineteenth-century manuscript memoir (see
here
). Apart from its intrinsic charm, its value for me is that it confirms and illustrates conclusions previously reached by other means, which is why I translate passages from it below. It was written as a young man by Paul Pouradier-Dutheil, he who was a friend and relation by marriage of Louis Pissavy-Yvernault and who went on to have a distinguished if chequered military career: he and Clemenceau disagreed about the conduct of the Great War. The Dutheils were a local family (there is a Moulin du Theil a few miles from Chassignolles); Paul's father and grandfather were both lawyers in La Châtre and there the family lived, but they possessed a hunting lodge together with a farm and lands bordering on the Commune of Chassignolles – the Domaine of Chapin, where they spent the long summer vacations when the Court in La Châtre was not in session. One of Paul Dutheil's earliest memories, however, was of the time when the family journeyed there in a very different season. He was born at the end of 1854, and this event seems to belong to 1859: