Free Celestine by Gillian Tindall Page B

ironwork on the door and windows like hundreds of other unremarkable houses that arrived in Châteauroux along with the railway after the middle of the last century. But the street where it stands is the Rue Vieille du Prison, the Old Street of the Prison, and runs down to a tower and portcullis and the huddle of narrow lanes that once made up the entire town. Châteauroux, which today numbers some twenty thousand people, is, like La Châtre, a medieval walled city; it has merely been more drastically transformed.
    From the front windows of the Salle des Archives, across the street, is visible a house with a sun dial on its pointed gable bearing the words Il est toujours temps de bien faire – ‘It is always time to do good.’ That cannot have been much consolation to the prisoner brought in chains that way towards the tower. The back windows of the Salle, however, offer a gentler view. Grass and municipal dahlias disguise a one-time farmyard, but behind them is an unmistakable barn. The house’s urban façade and nineteenth-century interior are camouflaging a building that is actually far older and originally sheltered a very different way of life. Even here in Châteauroux France’s essential rurality is not far below the skin.

Chapter 6
    But what of Célestine and her family?
    I am particularly fond of the early Registers of Birth in Chassignolles. Well thumbed over the years to provide evidence for all the other documents French citizens have traditionally been required to carry, some of the pages are edged with real thumb-marks, the insignia of people whose hands were permanently impregnated with wood ash and cow dung because opportunities for effective washing were so few. In these pages the birth of Célestine Chaumette was listed in 1844. But there were a great many other Chaumettes born at that period. In the same decade came a Silvain Chaumette, an Ursin, a Félix, a Françoise, a Marie, a Maurice and an Auguste. In 1850 came a Solange, while in the 1830s there had been a Gilbert, a Louis and another Félix, this one with ‘nt’ noted after his name – ‘naturel’, illegitimate.
    When I checked this list against their full birth entries, they did seem to be all the same family: the same paternal Christian name kept reappearing. By and by, however, I established that there was a Silvain-Germain and a Silvain-Bazille, classic Berrichon names, and that each of these men sometimes dropped the second part of their name in statutory declarations, which made them indistinguishable. Célestine was the daughter of Silvain-Germain, born in 1816 (or 1817, if you prefer the mention of him on his daughter’s grave). But most of the others of her generation were the progeny of one or other of Silvain-Germain’s first cousins: Silvain-Bazille (born 1811), his younger brothers Maurice and Louis and his sister Marie, who was the person unlucky enough to produce the natural-born Félix twenty years later.
    Silvain-Germain was the son of a François Chaumette. Silvain-Bazille and the others were the children of a Pierre Chaumette. François and Pierre were brothers. They were born in the years immediately after the Revolution, when time ran differently. François’ birth was declared on the twenty-first day of Germinal in Year III of the French Republic (early April 1794) before Aussourd, who described himself in the new politically correct style simply as ‘citizen of Chassignolles’ – ‘élu le trente Floréal l’an Second aussi de la république françoise pour dresser les actes de naissance, Mariage et décès des citoyins’. The declaration was made at the maison commune, which till four years earlier had been known as the church, by the father of the baby, a male friend and the baby’s maternal grandmother, Jeanne Merlin. The baby, who had been born at five o’clock the previous afternoon, was produced