Célestine : voices from a French village / Gillian Tindall.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

One summer evening in central France, Gillian Tindall went on an errand into a deserted house. In the shuttered main room, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she found a cache of tightly folded letters. All in French, they were in different hands and styles, varying from the flowery to the barely literate, but all turned out to have been written to the same woman.

Thereafter, piecing together facts about this person's obscure and moving life, and the lives of her contemporaries and descendants, the author found herself summoning up not only a vanished village world but also an epic period in France's history.

Celestine Chaumette, the daughter of an innkeeper, was born in 1844 when villages such as this one were much as they had been in the Middle Ages, lost among the oak forests where wolves roamed. She lived on until 1933, by which time roads, railways, shops, schools and a World War had transformed the French countryside as dramatically as if several centuries had gone by. And yet the story is eventually about the cyclic nature of time and human lives and the persistence of the past rather than its loss.

Making use of multiple sources - official records, newspaper archives, the works of Sand and Balzac, the passed-down memories of the old - the author creates a many-layered record. It is a work combining scrupulous detection with the resonance of a novel: some facts are recovered from the void of time in bright detail, others remain a matter of hint and conjecture. Gillian Tindall knows this village intimately and has spent years talking to its people.

The essence of France, a country far more deeply and tenaciously rural than our own, permeates this original book.