Free Celestine by Gillian Tindall Page A

But the real concerns of La Châtre were much the same as those of the surrounding villages: the state of the roads, visionary schemes for railway lines which more often than not failed to materialize, the weather, the harvest, the floods, the drought, the insatiable needs of the poor and the disgraceful misbehaviour of young males – and occasionally young females too, how shocking – after the local fairs.
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    Because of the extensive and unique record available to me in the cupboard of our own Mairie, it was some time before I sought out the official Archives in Châteauroux. With a car, forty kilometres is nothing. Without one, however, as I have often been in France, the journey abruptly expands to the dimensions it must have had at the turn of the century. It begins with seven kilometres into La Châtre on foot or by bicycle to catch one of the infrequent buses that run to Châteauroux today from the moribund railway station. The bus does not take the direct route but, impersonating the branch-line train that it has replaced, it makes its way circuitously for an hour or so through half a dozen villages in the valley of the Indre before finally surfacing on to the modernity of the main road into Châteauroux. There it gets up a sudden speed, past the new sheet-metal hangars called Mammouth and Bricomarché and Jardiland, graceless as pink elephants, before its triumphant arrival at the station with minutes to spare to catch a train to Paris or Toulouse. The same gathering crescendo has to be executed in reverse for the return journey, driving back into the past with diminuendo effects as the sun goes down over the pastures of the Black Valley and the mist begins to rise.
    But even in Châteauroux, when I finally began to go there to absorb the census records, the Écho de l’Indre and other sources of urgent news from another time, I found that no modern techniques stood between me and this material. The grandly named Salle des Archives behind the enormous, classical Prefecture turned out to be domestic in scale: it must have been the dining-room of a middle-class family house of the last century. I would sit there in company with a maximum of a dozen other readers, most of whom seemed to be rustling the papers of the Services de Cadastres (land registry), no doubt checking up as ever on Great Aunt Marthe’s legacy. Huge, battered volumes of bound broadsheets or census returns were brought to me after only a brief wait. Obsolete dust escaped in little puffs as I opened them.
    The sheer wealth of cumulative minor facts available in these pages seemed immeasurable, vertiginous. The nineteenth century was the first period in history when, all over Europe, the lives of all individuals began to be recorded in a systematic way at regular intervals: thus the potential of the census returns is almost limitless, or limited only by the time and intentions of the researcher. An entire present existence could be spent summoning people from the lists and tracing their interlocking destinies. But this vast information bank remains schematic and confined to certain circumstances: only by interpretation, conjecture and additional knowledge is life breathed into it. Whereas the pages of old newspapers, some of them yellowed and flaking, others as white as if they had hardly been glanced at since the day they were printed, rich in discursive detail, sometimes maddeningly inconsequential, always full of more submerged content than could ever be systematically tabulated – these are the very breath of vanished lives.
    The Salle des Archives seems in itself to belong with those lives. The pattern of the floor tiles evokes all the large, traditionally patterned meals that must once have been consumed there, with vegetables following the meat rather than accompanying it and table-napkins the size of sheets. The façade of the building is in neat grey stucco with Second Empire