Celestine Read Free Page A

that, apart from all his farming skills, both current and remembered, he could turn his hand to a whole range of other things: he made gates, ladders and wheelbarrows, chicken coops and pigsties, he retiled roofs, laid hedges.
    His great model in life, his personal version of the admired grown-up that is internalized within us, was his maternal grandfather. ‘Ah, my grandfather could have told you that,’ he would say, when I sought some piece of knowledge about the village’s past. This man, whom I eventually discovered to have been a contemporary of Célestine Chaumette, grew up within a mile of her. They must have been acquainted: in those days the inhabitants of a rural area hardly ever encountered a face to which they were unable to put a name. But socially there would have been a gap between them. He was the son of a day-labourer, while the daughter of the innkeeper was almost a member of the bourgeoisie. The word originally indicated no more than those who lived au bourg – that is, within a little town or village however rural, as opposed to those who lived on a more remote farm or hamlet among the fields – but certain social differences tended to follow from these different circumstances, and still exist today. In the last century the differences would have been more marked. Clearly, Célestine could read and write herself (so, as we shall see, could her father) whereas Bernardet’s grandfather was completely illiterate. He is said, however, to have been able to ‘calculate anything in his head’. When still in his teens and working long days on someone else’s farm, he took to fetching stone in the evenings from a local quarry with a hand-made cart and a borrowed mule. He fetched lime, too, from a river-bank, sawed wood and seasoned it. With infinite labour in snatched hours, he built a two-roomed house for himself and his future wife outside the village. It is standing to this day.
    From the vantage-point of the present Bernardet himself now seems a figure from another era, one of those people who are irreplaceable because they can no longer be made: the mould is broken. It is a comfort, of a sort, to realize that the idea that the modern world has invaded and destroyed an ageless, unchanging peasant culture at some recent date (1950? 1939? 1914?) is to some extent an optical illusion. Moulds have repeatedly been broken over the previous centuries; peasant cultures, however apparently static, have often before been in a state of deep-seated change: otherwise, paradoxically, they could not have survived. Bernardet, in his turn, regarded his grandfather as a representative of the world he felt had slipped away already by his own youth: the world of the reaping hook, the wolves, the fairies and the all-night veillées where nuts were shelled for oil and wool was carded, and where the folk memories of unlettered men and women went back before the Revolution.
    In old age, when he had retired from the heaviest farm labours, Bernardet softened his work ethic to the extent of adding a few flowers among the regimented vegetables in our garden. He had always, till then, regarded flowers as ‘the wife’s department’. A hedge of pink escallonia that we planted ourselves particularly took his fancy, and in the early summer of 1988 we received a letter from him that for once conveyed no practical message but simply told us: ‘your primroses [ vos prime verts ] are a marvel to see.’
    It was to be the last year he saw them.
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    Bernardet, though unique in his way, was in many respects a far more typical inhabitant of the village than were Célestine and her descendants. He and his family and his shadowy ancestors belong to the great but largely silent tradition of French 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