Celestine by Gillian Tindall Page B

been exactly like. Being alone … From time to time an idea passes through your mind and you want to share it. But you can’t go knocking on someone else’s door just with an idea, so if there isn’t anyone on hand it just goes away again and is lost…’
    Ideas figure distinctly in Jeanne Pagnard’s mental landscape. She told me another time that she did well at school and was particularly good at maths: no doubt the account-keeping great-grandfather’s genes making their appearance. After completing the village school course and attaining her certificate by the age of twelve, she would have liked to go on to some further education and there was talk of her doing so, but ‘our father had had bad luck during the War. We owned a plantation, and he’d just cut down a lot of wood to sell when war broke out and he was called up. He was away four years and by the time he came back the wood had rotted where it lay and was unsaleable.’
    This, at any rate, was the story. The First World War is commonly credited with having ruined even more lives and institutions than it did in practice: it has become the new divide between the chronologically moving Now and the static Olden Days. Nevertheless it is literally true that conscription in France was implemented in 1914 in such a summary and dramatic way that the men who were carried off to war were forced to leave all manner of unfinished business behind them. Even the harvest had not been got in – a mistake that all parties concerned were careful not to repeat the second time round, in 1939.
    Baulked of the course in bookkeeping in La Châtre or Châteauroux which might have carried her, as it did Zénaïde, into a different way of life, Mademoiselle Pagnard settled for becoming a dressmaker – a couturière, in the rather grand French term that is employed even at village level. In this she was following her father’s mother, the daughter of the grocer and the person who became a model for her. Her own intimate knowledge of village events that had taken place well before her birth derives from a childhood spent largely in her grandmother’s workshop. ‘There were always several girls there sewing, employed by her. It was jolly.’ ( C’était gai. ) ‘More fun than my own home. And Grandmother loved to recount things.’
    This grandmother, Catherine Chartier, had also achieved an education ending in a school-leaving certificate, a rare thing for a girl born in the 1850s. ‘She could write a really good letter. And she could add up and subtract. But I don’t think anyone had ever shown her how to multiply. Because when she wanted to work out how many metres of cloth were needed for something, she used to put the price of each metre down in a column and add them up like that. When I got big I tried to tell her the proper way to do it, but she just laughed and did it her way.’
    The man Catherine married, Charles Pagnard, was a gardener who worked for several local notables, including the engineer who owned the stone quarries in the next Commune. These quarries employed thirty or more men from Chassignolles, according to the census, and were worked with the latest machinery. It did not take long for young Madame Pagnard to make herself indispensable to this family. ‘The lady of the house was a Creole, from Dominique, very beautiful, and she used to get my grandmother to make copies of the latest Paris fashions from magazines for herself and her two daughters. There was one muslin dress I always heard about, with silk and lace rosebuds all around the skirt. Pastoral style, it was called. Pastoral!’
    Madame Pagnard’s grandmother, who had not at that time acquired one of the new sewing-machines, stitched away at this fabled dress while clad herself in a genuine Berrichonne peasant’s cap. Her devotion paid off, for the family spent two to three months every year in