Celestine by Gillian Tindall

grandparents (roughly the same generation as Célestine) around the middle of the century, then the entrepreneurial Chartier was, like Silvain-Germain, born during or just after the Napoleonic wars and, like the innkeeper, made the most of what the time might offer.
    In the 1850s he set up as a travelling grocer, the forerunner of the modern vans. That is to say, he used to walk into La Châtre to buy his stock and then trudge with it in a pack round the countryside. As this was the period when such extras as sugar, spices, candles and even chocolate and coffee were beginning to be appreciated on the more prosperous farms, his enterprise was opportune. Later – I afterwards confirmed from the census records that this was in the early 1860s, just as Célestine had grown to womanhood – he opened his village shop.
    â€˜See that little place at the end of the run that’s empty now and got a great big poster on it for a supermarket? Yes, beside where the elm used to stand before it was cut down…’ It was here, in this miniature, dimly lit dwelling more like a stable than a house, that he carried on a business that thrived and continued to do so even when competition came. Although he was illiterate, he kept accounts in picture code, thus reinventing writing from first principles. ‘He was canny,’ said Mademoiselle Pagnard. ‘Sugar came in triangular loaves in those days, like small pyramids – you had to break bits off. Well, often people couldn’t afford a whole loaf, they just wanted a little. So my great-grandfather used to break it up, and he charged a little less for the bits from the bottom of the loaf because they weren’t quite so sweet. People knew and they came to him for that. ’Course, he charged other customers a bit more than the standard price for the pointed bits that were the sweetest.’
    The progression from itinerant packman to shopkeeper typifies what was then happening for the first time all over rural France. The trade of pedlar went back hundreds of years. In the centuries of little or no communication between one pays and another the pedlar was the only source of news, a breath from elsewhere. A sighting of the solitary figure, bent under his pack, moving at the field’s edge against a line of trees, brought the children of the farm running and the women from kitchen and cow-shed. It has been suggested that much of the peddling that went on was not especially lucrative, but it gave the chance to see the world to men too restive by nature to be content with the deadening rhythm of the fields. It might also provide a boy from a poor home with a pretext to seek his fortune, leaving the family with one less mouth to feed. But peddling, like all adventures, could be hazardous. Some men became victims of criminal assault on lonely roads, or were attacked by wolves or drowned in flooding rivers or were found dead of exposure in the winter snows. Others drifted into crime themselves or descended to begging. Begging was long a feature of the French countryside, and sometimes it took on a menacing aspect.
    The poorer peasants, locked in the struggle for sheer survival with their annual purchases of iron and preserving salt, may not have had much use for the pedlar’s wares, but there were always more prosperous families to be tempted. By the nineteenth century, in spite of Jacques Lafitte’s discouraged remark about half of France still being stuck in the fourteenth century, the demand for made goods was inconspicuously growing. A description of the contents of one pedlar’s pack at the time of Célestine’s birth lists thread, cotton, quantities of needles, pins and buttons, thimbles, scissors, hooks-and-eyes (a newfangled extravagance), ready-made braces (ditto), knives and combs. There were also more frivolous items such as snuffboxes and ‘Limoges ware’ (small, decorative china boxes given as keepsakes), and cakes of