Celestine by Gillian Tindall Page A

soap. Other records mention pencils, penknives, quills and notebooks, for those whose skills now extended to the keeping of accounts, in pictures or otherwise.
    Reading matter and religious pictures were also staples of the early-nineteenth-century pedlar’s trade, along with religious medals and chaplets. The books were usually little ‘Almanachs’ bound in blue paper: they contained a mixture of religious and folk aphorisms, home remedies, hints on etiquette of the Don’t-belch-at-table variety, potted histories, descriptions of famous trials and fairy tales. It was from such books that people like Pirot the Mayor and François Chaumette became acquainted with the alphabet. (France being a Roman Catholic country, there was never the encouragement to Bible reading that characterized Protestant rural life in England.) Earlier, the Almanachs were called grimoires (grammars) and contained both prayers and spells: they seem to have been acquired as talismans even by households where there was no one who could decipher them.
    The construction of some new main routes in the later eighteenth century and under Napoleon was done for nationalistic reasons, not with the aim of benefiting the regions through which they passed. They did, however, make it possible for pedlars to go further afield more safely and to get their goods from more widespread sources. Troops of pedlars were organized by masters in the towns. By the 1840s it had even become possible for them to deposit their takings safely in savings banks in the main towns on their route, rather than running the perpetual risk of being robbed for the cash they carried.
    But that was the Indian summer of peddling. The same advances that made life easier for the solitary trader with his pack ended by making him obsolete. Country footpaths were widened into tracks for carts which could carry more goods more easily. Shops multiplied in the towns. In La Châtre, the Pissavy family, who had set up to sell cloth from the Auvergne after the Napoleonic wars, and who at first sent pedlars with bolts of it all over the Berry and the Touraine, found by the mid-century that they could deal more profitably by acting as wholesalers selling to traders in fixed premises. By the later part of the century the men on the country roads with packs or baskets were still selling their wares, but those from afar were now more marginal, gypsy-style figures – chair-caners, china-menders, illicit sellers of non-Government-manufactured matches done up to look like cheeses. The more regular and respectable sellers on the road were now, like Mademoiselle Pagnard’s great-grandfather, local tradesmen making deliveries: the village shop had been born.
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    Jeanne Pagnard was described to me by a contemporary as ‘the daughter of peasants – but rich peasants’. The family had been in the wheelwright and saddlery business. When I first got to know her I called her ‘Madame’, assuming that the elderly man I saw coming and going from her house, wearing clogs and accompanied by the last working horse in the village, was her husband. In fact he was her brother. Another brother had died before we came to the village, and this younger one was to drop dead of a heart attack in her kitchen a few years later. The three Pagnards had all been born between 1906 and 1910 and none had ever married. Perhaps they had seen enough of the financial and physical burdens of large families in their youth to be wary of marriage, or perhaps the three of them simply felt complete in themselves: they lived together all their lives. After her second brother’s death, Mademoiselle Pagnard (as I now knew her to be) became more confiding. She has always had the capacity to make friends, and now she missed her lifetime’s companion.
    â€˜People say, “After all, losing a brother isn’t quite like losing your husband,” but for me, at my age, it has