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you could walk in a given time or how much of a field a man could plough in a day. She was born into a France in which the inhabitants of each region and sub-region considered themselves essentially people of that pays, with their own dialects and customs, and French citizens only in a theoretical, remote way that did not affect their daily lives. In the 1840s the great mass of the people had no formal education at all and, more fundamentally, had no notion as yet that progress and change were elsewhere becoming regarded as part of the natural order of existence.
    Wolves still roamed the woods and forests, seized lambs on the misty edges of fields and were even seen in hard winters to enter farmyards. But wolves were not the only dangers at large. In the imagination of the people, especially in the Berry, which was a country famed for the supernatural, the hills and valleys were crowded with spirits. The dead and the fairies (often mingled) hung around at crossroads. In the moonlight, Midnight Washerwomen washed the souls of unbaptized babies, while on windy nights in the racing clouds whole trains of unearthly huntsmen crossed the sky. Round La Châtre, a being resembling a man but larger, known as Le Grand Bissetre, was sighted hovering over pools in certain years. He was a bad omen – but then so was the familiar screech owl, whose mournful cry, when heard at a distance, sounds like heavy breathing and whose feet on the roof overhead are like human steps. Marsh gas, a light in the wood, a beast snuffling in a dark field, the buzzing of insects – any of these could be a portent of some alarming event.
    As for an unfamiliar face encountered on a path, a pedlar with books of printed words in his pack – one never knew what such meetings might signify. Even the known might turn out to be sinister: who could tell but that the woodcutters and the charcoal-burners, who passed their time in the forests, might not be meneurs de loups, secretly in league with wolves? The peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, writing in 1904 of the world his grandparents had known, evokes the horror of the little swineherd on a heathland when he is accosted by one of these strangers, even though the man is only an itinerant tree-feller looking for a spring to fill his flask. ‘When I saw the big, dark person who was not from any of the three neighbouring farms, I was so terror-struck I could not move.’ Elsewhere Guillaumin writes: ‘The peasants were always afraid. They didn’t know just what they were afraid of, but they were always afraid of something.’
    â€˜That ‘something’, conceived of as the visitation of a spirit or a neighbour’s evil spell, was in reality famine, sickness, absolute want, recurrent realities still for those who worked the soil. Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, most of those who dwelt in the countryside were on the perpetual edge of poverty, entirely vulnerable to a bad harvest, an extra-cold winter, a chance stroke of personal misfortune. The awareness of this is enshrined in songs:
    Dansons la capucine, i’a ’pas de pain chez nous,
    â€˜Y en a chez la voisine, mais ce n’est pas pour nous –
    Ahr-rr …
    (We dance the beggars’ dance, there’s nay bread in our house,
    There’s plenty at our neighbours’ but it’s not for us)
    Many people still, in the time of Célestine’s birth, fed and clothed themselves entirely on what they produced or made or could barter locally. Nothing was bought for money but iron and salt, solemn purchases made once a year in November, on St Martin’s Day. (It is perhaps significant that iron and salt, coming by way of the alien towns, were the two things that malevolent country fairies were thought to fear.) Till the late 1840s salt was expensive on account of the notorious Salt Tax which also made its purchase obligatory, but it was nevertheless essential to every