Celestine by Gillian Tindall Page A

cupboard there. And we’ve got the records of Council meetings too.’
    â€˜Not back to the Revolution as well?’
    â€˜Well, back a long way. As long as they had Council meetings, I suppose. They’re very old books.’
    â€˜That’s wonderful. May I consult them?’
    â€˜Of course,’ he said, surprised that I should even ask. ‘Anyone can. But’ – he added quickly – ‘it’s Silvie the Secretary you want to see. That’s her department. I don’t know much about them. Yes, Silvie my niece. She’s a Pirot too.’
    Silvie, young and pretty and soon to be the mother of a baby girl, was already showing signs of being one of those linchpins on which village life has always depended: the person of some education and energy who is nevertheless happy to remain in a deeply rural society and help it to function. There are not enough Silvies in rural France today: this lament is heard on every side. And yet there are rather more now in Chassignolles than there were in the previous generation. They, in the 1960s, were tempted away to the towns, to the shops and businesses of La Châtre or the factories of Châteauroux or yet to the more visionary possibilities of Tours, Orléans or Paris itself. Today unemployment in the towns is perhaps making the remote countryside seem more attractive again – even with omnipresent fears about the future of the traditional French agriculture on which this part of the Berry has always depended.
    Silvie was used to a trickle of enquiries about distant births, deaths and marriages. For people intent of proving that Great Aunt Marthe had been born an Aladenise and that her mother had been an Ageorges and that therefore a certain orchard should still be in the family, Silvie would copy out declarations of ancient life-events in her own French school handwriting. It was rare, however, that anyone came asking for the Minute books of the Municipal meetings, which were stacked on top of each other in the far recesses of the cupboard. She got the books out for me, blowing dust from hand-sewn covers, and seemed happy that someone should be interested enough to turn the long-unread pages. We were a long way here from microfiche readers and bar codes. By and by, when she saw that my interest in the books was not going to be assuaged in a mere hour or two’s work, she let me look at them whenever I wanted, whether the Mairie was officially open or not. She also, with patience and good humour, helped me to reconstruct several family-trees by reference to the Birth and Marriage registers. I was lucky to find Silvie, though just how lucky I only realized when I tried to consult similar documents in a much larger urban Mairie and was met by a bland refusal even to let me have the books in my own hands. Only specifically requested entries, I was told, could be delivered in photocopy form.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because otherwise you might see something relating to someone else.’
    â€˜But there are no rules about what I may specifically request, are there?’
    â€˜No, no.’
    â€˜Well, then…?’
    But evidently rules, however illogical, were rules. The cause of disinterested historical research was not going to be furthered in that town hall.
    *   *   *
    In Chassignolles, the very early ‘Deliberations of the Municipal Council’, as they are collectively called, consist of disparate sheets of hand-made paper roughly sewn together and put between covers at a later date. The pages start in the year 1810, by which point the immediate traumas of the Revolution had passed. The calendar had reverted from the single figures of the New Era to its traditional form; the Napoleonic Code was attempting to spread a homogenizing blanket over the enormously varied territories that made up France. The entries for these early years tend to be brief, the records of men with a respect both for the