A People and Their Love of the Land : CELESTINE: Voices From a French Village by Gillian Tindall; Holt; $25, 292 pages
Old Bernadet wrote her before the winter he died: “Your primroses are a marvel to behold.”
Sixteen years after he sold Gillian Tindall her summer cottage in Chassignolles, Bernadet continued to cultivate the garden, free. “That’s good soil you’ve got there. I like to see it put to proper use,” he told her. He was a man of serious things; he planted potatoes, carrots, leeks and haricots, and was disappointed if she left in the fall before they were all brought in. Toward the end, though, he put down flowers. They were a love letter, if not quite to her.
The French love their land. Even to the overwhelming majority who long ago left--in the last 50 years the number working in agriculture has dropped by more than 80%--its cultivation has a special significance. Cultivation in the largest sense, that is: not just pulling vegetables out of the French landscape but, as its special beauty makes evident to a traveler, educating it into grace.
Tindall writes of the “great and largely silent tradition of France’s peasantry; those who ‘come and till the soil and lie beneath,’ but whose anonymous presence is still widely perceived in France as the country’s moral foundation.” The late Francois Mitterrand, an urban sophisticate, used an attachment to the French heartland (“la France profonde”) to out-authentic--shamelessly, some felt--his political opponents. He didn’t kiss a pig, but he marked his high electoral moments with dinners at a provincial hotel in the Nivernois region on the upper Loire.
It was only 50 or 60 miles east of the Berry village that Tindall uses for her 150-year account of “profonde” France. Drawing from minutes of the Chassignolles municipal council, dating back to the early 19th century, from departmental archives, census records and old newspapers, she writes of immense change and small, haunting continuities. She fleshes it out with her own observations of village life and with 80-year-olds’ recollections of their grandparents.
Names recur. A Pirot figures as mayor in the 1840s; another Pirot is mayor as Tindall is writing. In the 1850s a third Pirot is the subject of a plea by the leading citizens urging the minister of justice to mitigate the sentence of their townsman for attempted murder. At most, they argued, it was a misunderstanding with his in-laws over an affair of property, and one or two drinks too many.
Families are traced. A Pissavy, son of a nouveau riche merchant, marries into the iron-making Yvernault dynasty; decades later it is the Pissavys who are the old family and the village patrons. Other figures appear, often as a mention or two used mainly as hooks to hang some aspect of rural change. Tindall writes of rural peddlers giving way to village stores, an isolated subsistence economy to small-scale commerce, and footpaths expanded to roads to railroads. She describes the food that the peasants ate in the 1850s--rye bread, potatoes, a little cheese; their bathing habits--next to none; their stature--short; and a world of other things.
She arranges her social history around a small cache of letters she discovered: marriage proposals written in the 1860s to Celestine Chaumette, daughter of the local innkeeper. Celestine, who was born in 1844 and died in 1933, is an emblematic figure: Her life spans the passage of a world not vastly different from that of the Middle Ages into modern times.
Although we learn a good deal about her life, she remains sketchy. The author stretches her limited human materials to make them personify her extensive exposition of rural change. With some lovely exceptions--Bernadet is one--they are illustrations, not protagonists. “Celestine” is a valuable and intelligent book, but it falls considerably short of “Akenfield,” the English village classic to which it has been compared; and where the shape and tides of rural life emerge unforcedly from the old voices that tell of them.
