Célina by Catherine Axelrad
French fiction
Original title – L’enfant d’Aurigny (L’un et l’autre)
Translator – Philip Terry
Source – Subscription book
Next stop on this month’s Women in Translation month is another of the books I recently got from my subscription to the publisher Les Fugitives. I picked this as I loved the thought of the life of a servant, one of those unknown people remembered. Catherine Axelrad has written a number of autofiction novels. also YA novels. Also a pastiche of Proust. She has studied Protestant theology after she had been a teacher. And is now a minister. The book came from a few notes in Victor Hugo’s diaries when he was in Guernsey. The pieces mentioned a name, Célina; this is her story.
I don’t remember my father’s face, and yet I was already six years old the day he went missing, along with the father of Philomène Grut, who lived in the house at the bottom of the lane and who went to live in France with her mother the following year. They had set out before dawn, as usual, and then when he’d got back the previous day I was already asleep with all the others, apart from the little one who my mother still kept by her side. But the Sunday before that he was at home and after dinner the weather was fine, he’d settled down outside to smoke his pipe and I’d come along to snuggle round his legs so that he would lift me onto his knees. My mother had said to let him be for once so that he could get a little rest the poor man, but he’d said that children didn’t bother him, otherwise I wouldn’t have made six for you, he’d added laughing, seven with the little lad upstairs. Is it you who made us, daddy?’ Id asked, pulling his beard, and he’d laughed more than ever, but I remember that mother scolded me, she said that I always had to go and blurt
The opening lines of Célina shows her life ?
A young girl with a life that, when she is fifteen, is not long after her first period and first sexual encounter. Having lost a number of family members to suicide and the sea . She is then offered a way out of what seems a bad life. That is how to be a maid in a writer’s house. The writer is Victor Hugo. She has a job as a maid in Hauteville House, as Hugo is both in exile and writing and bringing his unique Gothic vibe to the house. Over the course of the book, you see Hugo and Célina embark on a sexual relationship; this is taken from his diaries. It is a time of class and social rules, and this relationship is breaking them, but Célina is liked by the household.But this isn’t Hugo’s story; this is the story of her, the hard journey that a girl like Célina faces in her life. How the loss of certain family members can bring you to the verge of oblivion. How a job a relationship can change a narritve if only slightly.
Monsieur was very upset by this news; he made me take forty-eight francs in pounds sterling for the fund for the widows and orphans of shipwreck, and he asked me to tell him how my father was lost. What affected him most was to learn that the body had never been recovered. The bodies of the Pengalley crew were only found three months later, in mid-June. It’s said they were so disfigured that they could only be identified by their shoes.
Hugo and her
I liked this book; it is one of those books where it isn’t about action, but about big ideas. No, it is about one girl, her struggle, her life, a life of someone if hadn’t been for a few crumbs in Hugo’s diaries about his sexual relationship with this one maid and later on, when her death at a young age is mentioned, it is a short period of time, the five years he was on the Channel Islands. Her view of the relationship is with a sort of distance about what is happening between them, a woman damaged by her first sexual encounter . A life on the edge, a working-class life, when we never hear about the lives of those under the stairs. A glimpse into a world we never see from Célina’s point of view. I think of well-observed French novellas like The Silence of the Sea by Vercors or A Sunday in Ville d’Avray, mixed with Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, one of the maids in the background of those shows or even the love affair in Gosford Park. Hugo is like Gambon’s character having sex with a servant. Do you have a favourite quiet novel or about a minor character from history?
