18

homecoming

The Dordogne, 1775–1807

It is hot on the day we visit Jeanne Barret’s grave. We can’t stay long. Christele and I have a tight schedule. It has been several hours’ drive from La Souterraine and we still have to get to Rochefort, 200 kilometres away, before nightfall. The countryside surrounding the township of Saint-Aulaye in the commune of Saint-Antoine-de-Breuilh of the Dordogne is unprepossessing – flat monotonous farmland broken only by motorways and powerlines. Small towns of close-shuttered houses resist prying eyes and deter visitors. We head for a cemetery at the church near the Dordogne River where Jeanne Barret is buried.

There is only so much that you can tell from an unmarked gravestone. You can tell if someone was wealthy enough to afford a fancy stone, or important enough for others to care for it. Not all explorers have the luxury of such memorials. Many lie in unmarked graves, like Baudin and Commerson somewhere in Mauritius, or Flinders who was unceremoniously paved over to make way for Euston train station, and only recently rediscovered and reinterred. Some never made it home at all, like Cook, du Fresne, Lapérouse and d’Entrecasteaux.

Jeanne Barret has done well for an impoverished peasant girl from Burgundy. She is remembered and commemorated, not just in the place she was born, but also on the other side of France in the place she died, where she lived out the last of her days as a prosperous landowner and merchant, in a large and comfortable home, surrounded by family and respected by friends.

I’m not really sure what I expect to find at her gravesite, or in the towns where she spent the last 30 years of her life. But I hope at least to find out how she came to live here, as a respectable and well-heeled citizen, in this small corner of France. And to gain some clue as to who she was, beyond the grand adventure of her youth.

Jeanne returned to France, but for many years no-one was quite sure when or how, or even exactly where. Perhaps somewhere in the Dordogne? I asked one of her biographers about her later years, but he admited his interest was mainly the circumnavigation and he didn’t know much about her life on Mauritius or after her return to France.

The voyage was one and a half years long. A blink of an eye in a 60-year lifespan. Surely the before and the after is also important. I have been wanting to find out what it was about Jeanne that sent her on this voyage. And now I want to know what impact it had on her life afterwards.

Voyages can be influential, no matter how brief. I spent my childhood, for as long as I can remember, preparing to live on a boat, watching our boat being built, living on the half-built construction in the middle of the country, on the slipway, in the harbour at Port Lincoln. I spent barely three years actually at sea – and most of that in lengthy stays in a handful of harbours. We circled less than a third of the continent, from the middle of the south coast to the edge of far north Queensland, and then later to Papua New Guinea. Weather permitting, you could make that trip in a couple of weeks.

And yet, it is to this voyage that I return over and over in my own writing, in my reflections. The memories of our early years, eventful or ordinary, are preternaturally vivid, laid down in rich detail on a blank page, unlike the crowded busy notes of later life, scrawled illegibly in the margins of our mental journals. That short time I spent at sea has shaped my habits and tastes. I still stubbornly resist the constraints of the clock, repeatedly rejecting regular employment for the life of an independent but impoverished freelancer, tripping over the inexplicable regulations of public holidays, shopping hours and daylight savings, preferring to follow the rhythm of the seasons and the weather. I spend windy nights sleepless and disturbed, listening for movements in a house that withstands gales with barely a creak or groan.

I am waiting for it to shift on its moorings, for stone to release from concrete foundations, to drift free across the baffled surface of a distant ocean.

It has taken me years to stop myself from leaping to my feet, heart pounding, hands itching to release the cold metal of brake on the anchor chain, sending fathoms of iron into the muddy seafloor. My parents worry that this is some kind of trauma, but it’s more like a childhood imprinting that might go unremarked if I still lived the life I was raised for.

Jeanne was only 35 when she returned to France. A youthful voyage, however remarkable and eventful, is hardly the end of a life. Take 53-year-old Susan Sibbald, for example, who left her ailing husband in Scotland to visit her sons in Canada in 1835, bought 600 acres and founded the community of St George in the Ontario wilderness. Or Edith Coleman, who began her career as a nature writer at 49 before rising to international acclaim. Women are often late bloomers.

Jeanne returned from her voyage to Les Graves just north of Saint-Aulaye in the Dordogne region. It was the home town of her husband, Jean Dubernat. I don’t have any more specific directions or locations than the name on the map and I’m not confident of finding anything here. But we have driven half a day across France to get here so we have to try.

The roads are so small we keep missing the turnoffs, mistaking them for driveways or footpaths barely large enough to take a bike, let alone a car. But, weaving and reversing, we finally find ourselves in a small patch of countryside between two busy roads that both lead anywhere but here.

A cluster of houses crowds between the open fields. Not a village, barely even a lieu-dit. This is Les Graves. It feels like part of a farm, a collection of houses and outbuildings that has, over time, been converted mainly into accommodation. On the edge of the cluster are some older buildings, down a short dead-end road that feels uncomfortably like driving into someone’s yard. But no-one shouts to see us off as we stop at the end of the lane.

It’s more than the assortment of buildings, barns, houses and outhouses that makes it feel like a farm. There are no fences between the buildings and the farmland beyond, no flower gardens, no obvious sign of domesticity or suburbia. Ivy grows over the walls of the low barns, their few shutters tightly closed. An apricot tree in the middle of the lawn is laden with orange-gold fruit. A handful of plants that might be ornamental, or might just be weeds, outcompete the grass that tangles around their base. There are few odd pots and timbers stacked to one side. It’s a tidy yard, but not one cultivated for appearances. This is a working property.

A single rose rises from a crack in the narrow concrete path at the base of an old house that is clearly under repair. Less decorative than simply indefatigable, as roses often are. The roses in my own garden are all but indestructible too, for all the frail and fragrant beauty of their luscious blooms. It reminds me of Diderot’s ‘strong soul in a frail machine’.

The French doors are open, the barnyard shutters downstairs are either ajar or askew, unhinged from the crumbling lintels and window frames that are being repaired and repointed. But the single shutters on the tiny upper-storey window just beneath the plain tiled roof remain firmly closed. I’m guessing an owner-builder is working here but I lack the courage to go and knock on the door. I have no way of knowing if this building has anything to do with Jeanne Barret at all, if anyone even remembers her, and it’s just too complicated to try to find out.

We quickly take some photos, back out, and continue on our way, unsure of whether we have found anything or not.

I had searched for shipping lists from Mauritius and France. I expected them to be easy to find. After all, shipping lists to and from Australia are well documented – one of my Jaunay cousins has compiled and maintained a large online database of the ones for my home state. But as I search the lists, I realise that nearly all the records have just four countries as their destination – the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Shipping lists, it seems, are the particular obsession of the English-speaking colonies. For everywhere else the search is manual – through papers and microfiche, ship by ship, port by port, year by year. Not for the first time, I am reminded of my colonial heritage.

‘Sieur Dubernat with his wife and his brother’ arrived in Bordeaux on 26 August 1775, via the colony of Saint-Domingue (now part of Haiti). If this is Jeanne, her husband and his brother François, they were three of only ten passengers on the merchant vessel La Sympathie.

If Jeanne and Dubernat left the island six months after their marriage, they would have left in November 1774. But they didn’t arrive in France until August 1775. It doesn’t usually take nine months to sail from Mauritius to Europe. What were they doing in Saint-Domingue?

It could simply be because of the weather, or because it was the only vessel they could find passage on, but it is more likely to have been for trade. There was still a significant trade between Mauritius, the Caribbean and France in 1775. I worry briefly that they might have been on a slave ship, that perhaps they were involved in this lucrative trade. It was one thing to be allocated slaves in Mauritius, to which every landholder was entitled, but quite another to actively trade in them. Le Morne Mountain in Mauritius, with its dark compelling history of the slave rebellion and tragedy, rises in my memory. I remember, too, the East India Company Museum in Lorient, Brittany, with endless rooms dedicated to the treasures and history of this vast company, and only one small display acknowledging the slave ships on which the vast bulk of its wealth was amassed.

But there is no record of a ship called the Sympathie in the extensive transatlantic slave trade database of voyages. It is unlikely that Jeanne and her husband traded in slaves – more likely that their business dealt with the more pragmatic needs of everyday men and women: food, drink and clothes.

Entering the Gironde estuary and docking at Bordeaux, they would have returned to France close to where Jeanne’s journey had started, nine years earlier, just north in Rochefort. The return was much warmer than the departure. The summer had been uncharacteristically hot and dry – enough to make the sheep pant, the puddles parch and the mud crack into shards. But surely not hot enough to trouble those from tropical climes.

The hollyhocks – fellow travellers from eastern lands – would have welcomed them home, sprouting in bright vigorous profusion from every roadside crevice. As Jeanne travelled inland, towards the hometown of the Dubernat brothers, the fields were filled with the crops, trees, birds and animals familiar to her from her childhood. It would have smelt like home, for the first time in years.

Within two months, in October 1775, Dubernat had bought a stone and timber-framed house in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, a busy little town with narrow crowded streets. It was not a large house – two rooms on the ground floor above a cellar and two rooms on the upper floor with an attic under the tiled roof. It looked west, onto the garden with a well that they shared with their neighbour. The house was located in a retail area, on what is now known as Rue Victor Hugo, which stretches from the Quai de Quebec on the banks of the Dordogne about 500 metres up to the main road. In 1790 the residents of this street were listed as merchants, tailors, locksmiths, shoemakers, hatters, coopers, hairdressers, bakers, nailers, and cutlers.

Today, Rue Victor Hugo is still a busy shopping precinct, at least a few blocks up from the river, away from the warehouses. Jeanne’s home is probably still here somewhere, remodelled and repurposed, perhaps with an added third floor, a resurfaced façade, new ironwork and windows. It is impossible for me to know the ages of these buildings, aside from a few conspicuous half-timbered upper floors characteristic of the Middle Ages or some early nineteenth-century towers, both Romanesque and Romantic. Maybe the garden and the well are still there, tucked behind the shopfronts, or perhaps they are covered over with a haphazard patchwork of tiled roofs built every which way in the spaces between the older buildings.

In any case, it is enough to know that this is the street Jeanne walked on, these are the buildings Jeanne passed and this is the town she called home with her husband. Here, she and Dubernat paid their taxes, went to François’ wedding, attended a baptism and became godparents to the son of Jean Dumas, a local merchant and tanner. Ordinary citizens living an unremarkable life.

I had not expected to find this level of detail about Jeanne’s return to France. Before I arrived in France for this research trip, I had come across a bibliography of all the known material about Jeanne’s life in Dordogne compiled by members of the Société Botanique du Périgord. I had tried to contact them before I left, but the phone numbers were no longer connected and the email addresses didn’t seem to work. Christèle sent an enquiry to an unpromisingly generic ‘jeannebaret’ email address, but we did not have much hope of hearing anything back.

The bibliography did at least identify where Jeanne had lived and where she was buried. It also hinted, intriguingly, at the existence of a will.

‘Everyone had to write a will then,’ Carol had assured me when we were in Paris. ‘It will be somewhere in the archives.’

But I cannot find any wills in the online archives for Dordogne, only the parish registers and the cadastral plans. I expect the wills are among the notarial archives, catalogued by lawyer and year. These are not digitised or online; searching them is a task that needs to be done locally. Not for the first time, I rue my decision to research a topic where the resources are located half a world away in a language of which I have only the most rudimentary grasp. Even when I was in France, I had a limited time for archival work, which, by its nature relies on the almost serendipitous discovery of treasures when and where you are least looking for them.

It was some time after I had returned to Australia that we received an email response from Sophie Miquel. She was working elsewhere at the time Christèle emailed but wonders if we have seen her latest paper on Jeanne Barret, published in the Cahier des Amis de Sainte Foy, kindly attached? I had not.

The papers are a goldmine. The archival research is painstaking and detailed. Here are the traces of Jeanne’s later life that I had long suspected could be found. Fragments of maps, notarial notices, parish registers and testaments weave together a forgotten life. Unknown for centuries, not because it was hidden, but because no-one had put the effort into looking. I am reminded that, in science, it is very often the local birdwatchers, home astronomers and fossickers who notice the re-emergence of a long vanished species, or photograph a new star or comet, or locate a new fossil. Professional research is not so much about ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ as being swept along in a great collective collaborative effort generated by the actions of countless and sometimes nameless individuals. This chapter is largely based on the work of Sophie Miquel and Nicolle Maguet from the Société Botanique du Périgord, and genealogists like Alain Morel. Without their work, we would still know next to nothing about the later life of Jeanne Barret.

The house in Sainte-Foy was not the only property Jeanne and her husband purchased. Just a few months after they bought their first house for 2000 livres, in January of 1776, they bought land in Les Graves near Saint-Aulaye. This was a much larger property, with a house, barn and outbuildings, gardens, farmland, uncultivated land and a hemp field. The land covered 16 hectares and cost the significant sum of 21,000 livres. They paid for it in cash – in gold louis and silver crowns.

That is a lot of money. In the records, Dubernat is sometimes described as a merchant or trader, and a successful one it seems. But it was not through Dubernat’s efforts that this wealth had been generated, it was from Jeanne’s. Under French law, a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s unless the husband stipulated otherwise. Although it was Dubernat’s name on the purchase of the Les Graves property, he made it clear, in a declaration, that these properties had been purchased jointly by him and his wife. Jeanne was ever careful to protect her assets and her wealth.

‘The goods are from common funds to one and the other,’ recorded the notary. ‘In as much as, Dame Barret provided half of the cash to make the acquisition and the Sieur Dubernat said that he will be guided by his sense of honour in wishing to pay tribute to the truth and agreed that his wife owned an equal share of the property.’

I had almost given up hope of receiving the inventory of goods from Commerson’s Paris apartment from the National Archives. But it duly appears in my inbox, one page at a time, ready to download. The notary Regnault has kept all the records in the matter of Commerson’s estate, from the moment they open the apartment in August 1774 until Jeanne and her husband arrive in Paris on 3 April 1776. Jeanne had come to Paris to claim her share of Commerson’s estate.

Immediately after Commerson’s death in Mauritius Jeanne had written to Vachier, who replied to assure her that that he would keep the money owed to her (including from the sale of the furniture) until she returned. And so in April she met with Vachier and the notary to claim her share of her inheritance from Commerson’s will. His property had long been sold, but she duly received some 465 livres. On the document her signature is bold and confident, with a large sweeping B. Jeanne was no longer a penniless peasant at the mercy of the rich and well educated. She knew what she was due and how to claim what was rightfully hers.

Vachier’s inventory does not just document the furniture, but also Jeanne’s clothes. I lay out the items I can decipher from the handwritten text: six blouses, a pair of faux stone earrings, petticoats (one of brown crepe), skirts, a pair of white silk stockings, chiffon lace cuffs, two round bonnets, various red-chequered aprons of various sizes and wear, and a plaid waist apron for special occasions.

This list brings to mind memories of the cut-out paper dolls I had as a child, with various paper costumes and outfits to dress them in. It reminds me too, of the images of seamstresses in Diderot’s Encyclopédia. Below the engravings of the women in the shop there are often outlines of the clothes they made, laid out flat as if providing patterns for reproduction.

I can imagine Jeanne in a dark skirt and white shirt with lace cuffs, a neat red-chequered apron and round bonnet. I like the idea that I can finally dress her in her own clothes, not those of my imagination. It is a minor detail but it feels oddly important.

I wonder if Jeanne also travelled to her home town of La Comelle, or to see her sister in Toulon-sur-Arroux when she went to Paris. I wonder, too, if Jeanne’s sister had been ill and if this played any part in her decision to return to France. Whatever the connection, Jeanne’s sister died on 12 March 1777 in Toulon-sur-Arroux, seventeen months after Jeanne’s return. I hope they saw each other before she died. Jeanne was obviously close to her sister’s family.

Jeanne’s sister’s son – one of her surviving nephews, Romain Gigon – was 22 years old when his mother died. His half-sister, Françoise Lanoiselée, was about sixteen years old. I don’t know when they moved, but they were both living near their aunt in the Dordogne by 1784. They stayed for the rest of their lives – marrying, having children and being included in Jeanne’s will as her heirs.

Dubernat’s family too, benefited from the traveller’s return. His siblings lived on the farm at Les Graves while he and Jeanne stayed in the house in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande. Within a few years a new ‘mansion or the great house’ was built on the property. It seems likely that after Jeanne and Dubernat sold their house in Sainte-Foy in 1784 (for a tidy profit of 3300 livres), they moved to the great house in Les Graves, where they lived with various nieces from both sides of the family. Their extended family stretched around them in a small radius, just as Jeanne’s had in La Comelle. None of them lived more than a few miles from each other, and their signatures adorn the various births, marriages and official records of each other over the decades.

I am relieved to find that the property we visited in Les Graves was, indeed, the cluster of farmhouses where Jeanne lived. The local researchers found the cadastral maps of Les Graves, and have pinpointed the exact boundaries of each parcel of land and its use. I can’t be sure if the buildings were exactly the same ones, or if they were new, or simply like the metaphorical age-old axe whose shaft and blade have each been replaced on multiple occasions over a regenerating life. Architectural fashions don’t change much in the country. It would take a more experienced and knowledgeable eye than mine to distinguish the traces of the different centuries – but they are clearly still there, written into the fabric and foundations of the buildings as much as into the furrows and fields of the land. You can still see the outline of the Barret-Dubernat lands on an aerial photograph of Les Graves, the turn of a creek line, the route of a new road, the long thin ploughing of a field following ancient lines, unmarked by fence or visible boundary but held in place by the habits of centuries.

Inside Jeanne’s house, it seems, there were no mementos of her voyage. Among an inventory of her chattels, her movable goods, there was no collection of shells, no polished coco-de-mer on the mantelpiece, no books about plants or voyages. No books at all, in fact, not a single one. Which makes me wonder whether she could read and write after all.

Several large timber cupboards lined her bedroom. One was lockable, suggesting goods of value, like the two yellow copper basins, each valued at over 30 francs. But the room was dominated by the large cherrywood armoire stacked with linens, new and used: 52 women’s shirts, 24 bedsheets, 52 towels, 30 tablecloths, twelve aprons, nearly 100 handkerchiefs, 40 bonnets, eleven pairs of pockets, six pairs of woollen stockings and two bodices. A striking difference from the six shirts and two bonnets she had left in Paris all those years ago.

A cherrywood bed, hung with curtains and a burnt-wood ‘sky’, was laden with comfortable mattresses, heavy quilts stuffed with goose feathers and patchwork-quilted bedspreads. One of these was made from several different Indian fabrics bordered with fine ‘partridge eye’ embroidery. I wonder if the Indian fabrics were a relic of her time in Mauritius, on the trade route from India. But India was a powerhouse of textile production and the biggest exporter to the world before England looted its wealth and independence, so even this was nothing unexpected for the times.

Elsewhere in the house was an abundance of food and wine. It seems they probably ran a wine business, judging from the number of vats in the cellar. In the attic were sacks of wheat, rye, beans and gesse or chickling vetch. There was a profusion of bacon and ham too, from the pigs in the stables. All the staples of good traditional peasant food, with nothing exotic in sight. Jeanne was living a affluent, well-off life – never short of food, clothes or a comfortable bed, all things in short supply on a ship, or in a peasant’s home. I don’t think she missed her life at sea or her childhood.

‘The voyages of the seas,’ Commerson once wrote, ‘always hard and weary, which so quickly wear away the fabric of life, carry with them an indefinable charm. This mixture of privation and abundance, of idleness and activity, of calm and tempest, this immensity of the seas and these so pompous regions of the torrid zone, leave only deep impressions; after them, domestic happiness is monotonous; and this is what causes so many travellers to break the promise they have given a hundred times to no longer venture on the waves.’

I think about living on a boat, sometimes: the particular lightness of air, sounds floating over water, the sense of drift, the minimalism and smallness, self-contained, unburdened, untethered and free. A tiny kingdom of one’s own. Unlike Jeanne, my bookshelves, paintings and shells continue to betray my maritime fascinations. But I remind myself of a promise I made when I returned from New Guinea, that if I ever considered returning to sea, I would first go, one after the other, on the most hair-raising showground rides. My stomach turns of its own accord just thinking about it. It has its own visceral memories.

Commerson may well have been right about the irrational attraction of adventures at sea. But his place in history would have been more assured if he had travelled less and finished his books, completed his work. Perhaps a more mundane domestic happiness would have secured his legacy, served our knowledge and the protection of Mascarene biology better. But even if I have no real interest in returning to a life at sea, even if Jeanne seems to have retained not a single memento, it does not mean such voyages were not significant. They made me a biologist and a writer. They shaped my beliefs and my habits even though, like Jeanne, I have no great need to return there and have happily returned to more terrestrial occupations.

Jeanne had not forgotten her journey, and she did not expect others to have forgotten her contribution to it either. In 1785, she was awarded a naval pension for her services.

Jeanne Barré, by means of a disguise, circumnavigated the globe on one of the vessels commanded by M. de Bougainville. She devoted herself in particular to assisting M. de Commerson, doctor and botanist, and shared with great courage the labours and dangers of this savant. Her behaviour was exemplary and M. de Bougainville refers to it with all due credit. When M. de Commerson died, this person, whose sex had been recognised, married one Dubernat, formerly a non-commissioned officer in the Royal-Comtois Regiment.

Today, she (née Barré) and her husband, having reached an age that brings infirmities with it and no longer able to earn their living, His Lordship has been gracious enough to grant to this extraordinary woman a pension of two hundred livres a year to be drawn from the fund for invalid servicemen, and this pension shall be payable from 1 January 1785.

When the payments from Paris were not forthcoming, Jeanne assigned power of attorney to Parisian colleagues to secure the back payments due to her.

The image of Jeanne Barret in her later life refines and remodels my image of her on the voyage. For much of this story, she has been elusive and difficult to characterise. The sheer brevity of the records, refracted and distorted through a male gaze and the absence of her own voice, have made it challenging to build a picture of her. But the actions of the mature Jeanne consolidate all the hints and possibilities of her youth.

She comes into focus, solid and unwavering, a woman who knew her rights, and claimed and defended them. A strong soul in a far from frail machine. She was a quiet, unassuming woman who did not blow her own trumpet but who also stood her ground. She was strong, agile, courageous, determined, hardworking, tireless and determined – indefatigable, in fact. She was a serious woman with an intense curiosity about the world. A compassionate, caring woman – immensely loyal, honest and generous. She behaved decorously, with scrupulous correctness, and yet unabashedly broke convention to attain her goals. She was clever, a quick learner, a good and thrifty manager. I imagine her as Colette once described her own mother Sido: curious, eclectic, independent, self-contained, staunch, devoted to those she cared for and the provincial community she lived in.

We need to stop thinking of Jeanne as a figure eternally standing in Commerson’s shadow. In her later life, as in her early years, she was not alone, but belonged to a close and caring family. She was an independent woman who determined the course of her own life, before and after, and was surrounded by a family she took care of, and who cared for her – nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

For many years, biographers claimed that on her death, Jeanne Barret bequeathed all her worldly goods to Commerson’s son, Archambaud, and his family. It’s a touching story, and one that fits well with the model devoted servant. The story originates from Commerson’s great-nephew, J. B. Jauffred, of Châtillon-les-Dombes, who said that she ‘finished her days at Châtillon and, by way of remembrance and veneration for her former master, she left all she possessed to the natural heirs of the famous botanist’.

But Jeanne did not return to live in Commerson’s birth town, did not outlive her husband and did not leave all she possessed to Archambaud. Perhaps there is a grain of truth to the story. Perhaps she sent some items belonging to Commerson to Archambaud after she returned to France and this kind act has magnified in family history over time. But in the three wills signed by Jeanne Barret in the Dordogne archives, there is no mention of Commerson or his heirs. There is no mention of their son, Aimé Bonnefoy, either. She left her estate to husband Jean Dubernat and to her various nieces and nephews, the children and grandchildren of her brother Pierre and sister Jeanne, as well as a bequest to the poor.

Her signature had become increasingly shaky and uncertain on these wills, as if she had forgotten how to shape the letters or how to spell her own name. Perhaps the trials of her youth were catching up to her. But she lived longer than either of her parents, her siblings, most of her nieces and nephews and probably both of her own children, and seen more than any of them could ever have imagined.

Jeanne died in her home on 5 August 1807 on the stroke of midnight at the age of 67.