Read Celestine for Free Online Page B

household for pickling and preserving food for the winter. Iron was also expensive, and might be thought of as equally essential for farm implements, but even in regions like the Berry, where there were forges, it was something of a rare, special commodity to the ordinary smallholder. Still, in the mid-nineteenth century, the wooden plough on the medieval model, made for and by the hands that would drive it, was in common use, with the addition only of an iron tip. The odd cooking pot, knife blade and needle was bought at long intervals. But sugar, coffee, lamp oil, wax candles, bought furniture or cloth – in the country, even to the relatively prosperous family, these things were exotic luxuries and would be for another twenty years. The long winter nights, sometimes passed in the stables along with the animals for warmth, were lit, at best, by spluttering smelly, home-made tallow candles, more often by scraps of wick floating in pans of nut oil or by the even more primitive pétrelles – slivers of wood dipped in resin to emit a tiny sparkle. Matches were unknown. Fires were laboriously struck with tinder and flint, or reignited with a borrowed clog-full of smouldering cinders:
    Va chez la voisine,
    Je crois qu’elle y est
    Car dans sa cuisine
    On bat le briquet
    (Go to the neighbour,
    I think she’s there all right,
    For I hear in her kitchen
    Someone striking a light)
    England, on a different timetable with different historical milestones, had evolved considerably in the seventeenth century and still more in the eighteenth. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), pointed out that the English agricultural worker commonly had in his lowly cottage all sorts of products from distant countries that had been through many hands. Not so in France, where distances were so much greater and local cultures much more distinct. There the industrial revolution began to transform life for most people much later and in a much more piecemeal way; the difference is still apparent today. Even when it had wrought its transformation in parts of France in the early nineteenth century, the banker Jacques Lafitte complained that these areas were trying to sell their products to consumers who were stuck in the fourteenth century and seemed content there. Moreover, these non-consumers, the rural masses of France, were then the great majority of the population.
    But George Sand had glimpsed the future and spoken presciently, even though the railways took longer to arrive in the Lower Berry than she predicted. When Célestine made her inconspicuous entry into the world, stealthy changes were just beginning to be felt which, over her lifetime, would sweep the fourteenth century away – and the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and even the nineteenth. She and her contemporaries would experience the quiet, irresistible revolution brought about by what a senior French civil servant called ‘the two great motors of civilization’, the spread of roads and railway lines and the coming of education for all. But beyond this, she herself lived on to see the telegraph, the bicycle, the camera, the telephone, the internal-combustion engine, even the cinema and the aeroplane. She saw the occasional car vibrating in the village square and the mechanical reaper clattering in the fields. She heard wireless sets burbling in the cafés. She lived to see her grandchildren’s generation dancing in short skirts to the alien music of a wind-up gramophone. Before this, she had seen that generation forcibly involved in a war of hitherto unthinkable proportions from which many never returned.
    Much of France changed more in the years between 1840 and 1930, or even 1914, than it did during the five centuries before. In our own late-twentieth-century world it has become commonplace to emphasize the speed of social and technological development and to speak as if this were in itself a unique and stressful experience. We