Celestine Read Free Page B

foundation. He figures here not just for his own sake but as a rural norm against which the different, more ambitious and yet more fortune-tossed lives of Célestine and her kind need to be seen.

Chapter 3
    You have most likely passed through the village, or its prototype. Anybody who has travelled across the large, beautiful, essentially reclusive countryside of France has been to it, in one of its thousand variants. In the language of bureaucracy, it is the chef-lieu of a Commune: the basic, untranslatable unit of French local government that is presided over by its own elected mayor. The Commune is home to some six hundred people, but that includes the population of a dozen outlying farm-hamlets as well.
    In the village itself there is a fine church dating from the thirteenth century but much altered since, a Mairie built after 1870 which used to house the boys’ school as well but does no longer, and a modern primary school for both sexes constructed out of the girls’ school that was the latest thing in the 1900s. There is a diminutive post office, open four hours a day, where a new centralized computer performs manoeuvres to do with pensions and electricity that a few years ago were achieved just as efficiently with handwritten entries in small books. There is a busy garage, another down the road that attends to two-stroke motors and agricultural machinery, a Tabac run by the garage owner’s wife as a service to the village, and the café-restaurant. Two other modest cafés have closed in the last twenty years, when their elderly owners wished to collect their trade-related pensions and could find no one who felt it was worth taking on such small businesses; one of these was the place where Célestine Chaumette served customers a hundred years earlier.
    Shut now, for the same reason, are the barber’s and the forge. The last working horse clopped to his rest about fifteen years ago on the death of his master – similarly shod in name at least, since horseshoes and clogs are both called sabots. The thriving baker’s shop still works seven days a week, sustaining the French tradition that daily bread should mean just that. When not at his ovens, the baker himself delivers the warm loaves for miles around. Since he and his wife are not getting any younger either, the village surrounds them with a nervous appreciation. ‘During that terrible weather, five years ago now, when it got down to twelve below freezing, do you know Monsieur Mayer never missed a round? Some of the farm tracks were quite snowed up, and he went on foot to the doors to make sure people got their bread. Such devotion…’ In France the baker plays the role taken in England by the milkman. It is the baker who finds yesterday’s bread still in the bird-proof box by the farm gate, penetrates the unlocked kitchen and discovers the owner incapacitated beside the stove, or ranges the barns and orchards calling a name till a feeble voice responds from beside a fallen ladder or a toppled straw stack.
    There is no grocer’s in the village today. Once, counting those ‘in a small way’ there were five. A grocer’s van from the town calls weekly, trumpeting its horn as it comes to rest in the square behind the church, opening up flaps and extensions in a minor transformation scene that leaves you wondering if the houses around might not embark on the same trick – but all that happens is that customers emerge from doors like weathermen. The last proper grocer’s shop, which closed some ten years ago, is much missed. It was almost always open, Madame Démeure having been brought up in the business from childhood and having the interests of her customers truly at heart (said everyone). She was sometimes heard to wail, ‘It’s no use my saying I’m shut for the afternoon – people keep coming in just the same’, but she must have liked it that way, since she did not lock the