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an inauspicious beginning

La Comelle, 1740

Jeanne’s birthplace is the tiny village of La Comelle, in the southern region of Bourgogne or Burgundy, barely 300 kilometres south-west of Paris. My first challenge is to get there. It’s not on a major train or bus route and I’m nervous about driving on the opposite side of the road on my own in a country where I can barely read the road signs. Fortunately, some English friends with a house in the region have kindly offered to drive me around the area where Jeanne was born. I met Miles and Jocelyn at a book launch in Adelaide when they were visiting Miles’s daughter, who is also a writer. I think they understand how writers work. They have swiftly organised a perfect itinerary, with side visits to museums, meetings with locals and suitably atmospheric farmhouse accommodation.

My new friends suggest that I catch the train to Saint-Pierre station a day or two after I arrive in Paris, to meet them before we all drive east. Sounds simple enough, although getting a train ticket proves more difficult than I expect. The ticket machine will not sell me a ticket to Saint-Pierre and the man guarding the queue for the ticket office diligently declines assistance to anyone not travelling on the same day. I stoically return in the morning an hour early and this time the man at the ticket office has a friendly smile and swiftly answers my halting French in amused English.

‘Oh, that’s a Transilien train. You need an Île de France ticket machine, not one for Grandes Lignes. The white ones, not the blue ones.’

Within five minutes I have a ticket. The train trip itself only takes an hour – an easy weekend getaway from Paris, or even for a holiday home from England. The locals joke that English invasion forces nowadays come armed not with archers and infantry, but with real estate pages and a healthy bank balance.

Jocelyn drives us up into the Morvan, the heavily wooded ‘Black Mountain’, which rises like an island from the fertile farmlands of Burgundy below. We slide off motorways, onto ever-narrowing rural roads enclosed in lush spring forests. Cities give way to towns, to hamlets or even smaller lieu-dits – clusters of houses with barely even a church or shop to connect them. At the top of the mountains, grey clouds close in, and even on a fine spring day a brisk damp wind blows across rocky outcrops. The region was once home to the vast Bibracte oppidum, a Gaulish fortress town of 30,000 people, made famous by Caesar and interlinked with a network of fortified trading centres across the Mediterranean world.

We stop to visit the museum dedicated to the site – a triumph of minimalism celebrating an apex of ancient architectural achievement. It’s a strange location for a large settlement, on such poor mountain soil. The substantial fortifications suggest unsettled times before Pax Romana. Perhaps it is no wonder the stocky, well-fed ploughmen from the fertile plains below jibed that ‘nothing good comes from Morvan – neither good winds nor good people’. The only thing the Morvandeaux could do well, they said dismissively, was breed.

Such legacies of an ancient past linger even today, a source of pride and annoyance. The Bibracte oppidum overlooks the valley where Jeanne’s village lies, no more than a two-hour walk away. In the eighteenth century, the rural inhabitants of France were described as sedentary, rarely travelling more than a day’s walk from their birthplace, fiercely territorial, deeply suspicious of outsiders and knowing nothing of the broader world. And yet the oppidum, with its archaeology of trade goods from across Europe, suggests that such insularity was not always the case. Poverty and hardship made the people in this region strong and hardy, but necessity also made them more mobile. The Morvandeaux, unlike other rural inhabitants, were accustomed to leaving their mountains in search of work. And many a Morvandelle made a fine wet nurse for Parisian babies. Jeanne, it seems, was born at the nexus of ancient roads that connected pays, territories, principalities, kingdoms and empires: a heritage of resilience, mobility with a view that looked beyond the horizon.

The clouds lift as we head east down the other side of the range and the forests open to a vista of the valley below where the village of La Comelle nestles on the mountain slopes.

Jeanne was born in the summer of 1740. It should have been a time of plenty: a time of growth and rich harvests, vines hung low with grapes ripening ruby-red in the sun. The swelling ears of grain should have swayed in gentle winds as olives darkened on gnarled branches and feasting swallows skimmed over ponds. Summer in the heart of rural France, the mountains of Burgundy – surely the best of times, the best of places, for a baby girl to be born?

But the winter had been harsh. Even in Paris the frosts had lasted two and a half months and the Seine froze solid from left bank to right. Temperatures rarely rose above freezing. Winter stretched its icy tendrils into spring and starving swallows dropped dead from the sky. Snow fell in June and rain drummed a relentless tempo. By the middle of summer, the olive trees had died, and the feeble grains and grapes were barely worth the trouble of harvest.

On the eastern flank of Montagne de la Garde, in the shadow of the Morvan, the village of La Comelle suffered from successive poor seasons. It had no reserves to feed its few hundred souls. The fountain of Saint-Claire wept, overflowed, but offered no miracles.

The seigneur of Château de Jeu took his tithes and drank his wine, heedless of his starving serfs. No help came from Paris either. No-one believed that the harvest had failed, that the country was starving. The price of bread doubled; the Parisians rioted and blamed middlemen stockpiling supplies for their own profits. The villagers of La Comelle were abandoned to their fate.

And they were not alone. Half the residents of Poitou in northern Burgundy died that year. Half a world away, 300,000 Irish would die of cold, disease and starvation. It was an inauspicious year to start a life.

But babies take no mind of weather, arriving wanted or not, and this one was no different.

I cannot tell you if Jeanne was gently bathed, coated in pig fat and bound tight from top to toe in strips of cloth, in accordance with Morvan tradition. I cannot tell you if she was laid in a bed of straw and a bré worn smooth by the rocking of countless generations. But I do know that the morning after her birth she was hurried to the church to be baptised, while her mother rested. In all likelihood she was dressed in a cloth cut from her mother’s clothes and a white baptismal cap, and carried by her godmother, her godfather following close behind. For the priest of La Comelle, Father Pierre, duly noted her advent in an uncertain, poorly tutored hand in the parish registers:

On the twenty-seventh of July in the year seventeen hundred and forty was born, and on the twenty-eighth was baptised, Jeanne, the legitimate issue of the marriage of Jean Baret, a labourer from Lome and of Jeanne Pochard. Her godfather was Jean Coreau, a labourer from Poil, and godmother Lazare Tibaudin, who are not signing.

Baby Jeanne’s chances of survival were slim, but at least she was assured of her entry to heaven. For the next six months, she would lie in her bed of straw unable to move, stretch or explore, safe beneath the blessed cord strapped across her cradle to keep her from straying and safe from all the evils of this world and the next.

In all the books and articles written about her, Jeanne is typically portrayed as having been orphaned young, as having no family to support her, or sometimes even as having been in institutional care. She told Bougainville that she was an orphan and no-one seems to have questioned that.

The biographies about her do not report when her mother or father died, whether she had brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. I would have assumed that if others had found the record of her baptism in the La Comelle parish register, then they would also have looked for other family members there. It is hardly worth looking again – but I look anyway. The scanned pages of the parish registers are online and it does not take too long to check the records for a small village like La Comelle.

But Father Pierre’s scrawling handwriting is not easy to read. Sometimes he annotates the entries with baptême, mort and mariage. Sometimes he does not. Over time, I become accustomed to the structure of entries. It becomes easier to spot the recurring names. I wait for each page to load and magnify, then scan down with my finger, searching for Jeanne Barret and her parents. It takes days to work through the pages. But families matter and I want to know where Jeanne came from.

My mother’s family is French. When the Jaunay family sold their champagne mark to their brother-in-law Jacques Krug, my mother’s great-grandfather Frank Jaunay decided to take his winemaking expertise and young family to Australia. It was a long time ago. My grandfather remembered ancient aunts with French accents who pronounced their name with a soft ‘Show-nay’, but everyone today pronounces ‘Jaw-neigh’ with a long, front-loaded Australian drawl that sounds nothing at all like French.

It cannot have been easy to be a French immigrant in an English colony. Frank soon parted company with the Victorian winemakers at Great Western who supported his immigration. They had no interest in champagne apparently. He travelled west to work as cellar manager for Château Tanunda in the Barossa, before running the Scenic Hotel in the Adelaide Hills not far from where I now live. There are not many French migrants in Australia. By and large, France is a country of immigration, not one of mass emigration. French migrants have a low profile in an Anglophone world.

Yet France played a long and significant role in Australia’s European history. French footsteps are readily found in the place names around Australia’s coastline, particularly in the south and west. South Australian shores are scattered with French names – of explorers like d’Entrecasteaux, cartographers like d’Anville, naval ministers like Decrès and botanists like Jussieu and Tournefort. Some are even carved into the rocks.

My first encounter with this French history coincided with my earliest sea journeys across the gulfs of South Australia. My memories of our first sea voyages are vague and intermingled: of a thudding engine labouring through heavy seas; of crawling on all fours so as not to be flung off my feet; of worrying that we would not meet my grandparents at our agreed rendezvous; of watching the boat lurch uncomfortably at anchor from the shore. It was an early lesson that the weather waits for no-one’s timetable and that not turning up on time at the right place is often the best outcome.

On one trip to Kangaroo Island we visited Frenchman’s Rock – a legacy of the voyage commanded by Nicolas Baudin, who circumnavigated and charted the island in 1803. Baudin stayed on Kangaroo Island for three weeks, collecting plants and soon-to-be extinct animals. The account of his expedition included the first complete published map of Australia, the coastline replete with even more French names now replaced with English ones.

I love the idea that my home town has an alternative shadow history, that it might perhaps have been French, and that I might have grown up in Port Champagny instead of Port Lincoln, overlooking the waters of Golfe Bonaparte instead of Spencer Gulf. It feels like some tangible connection with an inheritance stretched thinly across generations and the world’s oceans to a distant inland winemaking region in western France, centuries in the past.

A third of all French babies born in the summer of 1740 would not survive their first year. Perhaps if Jeanne had been born to a well-off family, her prospects would have been better. But she was born into the very bottom of French society, the most marginal of all the peasants, in one of the poorest and most oppressed regions of France.

Her father was a manoeuvre, a manual labourer, quite literally one who uses only his hands (man) for work (oeuvre). Manoeuvres owned nothing but the strength of their limbs, and they survived only by the health of their bodies. They leased the poorest of hovels, tumbling stone topped with rat-infested thatch, fortunate if they might have a fire at one end and a pig at the other. They slept on such straw as was not eaten by animals. They carved themselves crude wooden clogs and covered themselves as best they could in tattered rags that barely protected them from the weather.

For the main they lived on unhusked barley and oats made into a crude bread, baked once or twice a year in the communal village oven, hardening into bricks that could only be softened in watery soups. Meat, salt and wine were rare luxuries. They harvested wild foods from the countryside to supplement their poor meals. The ancient Morvan forests that spread up the hill behind the village concealed gnarled trees hung with small tart pears and apples, olives, blackthorns and hazelnuts. The dark soils yielded turnips and celery, dill and coriander, scrambled through with wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, dewberries and elderberries.

If the peasants were fortunate, they might be permitted to till a small plot of land, grow a few vegetables, raise chickens or perhaps even a goat or pig. Both men and women worked the fields ‘mowing, harvesting, threshing, woodcutting, working the soil and the vineyards, clearing land, ditching, labouring’. If the harvest was good, if the seasons were fair, they might earn good pay harvesting grains, picking grapes or making hay. In addition, if the women could spin or sew or take in other work, they might survive from one year to the next. But few lived long. Half of the people in France died before their 25th birthday.

A recent book on Jeanne suggested that her mother was a literate Huguenot from Brittany who taught Jeanne to read and write. But this is unlikely. There is not much reason to think Jeanne Pochard came from Brittany. ‘Pochard’ is certainly more common in Brittany than Burgundy, but the name can also be spelt ‘Pauchard’, and this version is more common in Saône-et-Loire, the region in which Morvan lies, than anywhere else.

There is no evidence that Jeanne’s family could write and the parish records strongly suggest that they couldn’t. Parish records were always signed by witnesses if they could write, no matter how poorly. If they could not write, the entry usually refers to witnesses who ‘did not sign’. Few entries in the La Comelle parish registers were signed by anyone other than the priest. The few who did showed varying levels of literacy – some wrote in neat cursive, others printed, while a few laboured over thick large letters like a child’s first efforts at writing. Since none of the entries for Jeanne’s family were signed, it seems certain that her family was illiterate.

And in any case, Jeanne’s mother did not live long enough to teach her daughter to read. Just a few pages on, fifteen months from Jeanne’s birth, I find another entry in the parish register.

On the fourth of November 1741 did die and on the fifth was buried in the cemetery, Jeanne Pauchard, wife of Jean Baret, manoeuvre from La Pome, aged forty-five years.

I did not expect Jeanne’s mother to be so old. But I am oddly relieved to find that Jeanne had her mother at least for that first vital year of nurture that is seared into every mother’s memory and missing from every child’s – the emotional foundation on which to build a resilient future.

The Church of Assumption in which Jeanne was baptised, and the old cemetery in which her mother was buried, no longer stands at the crossroads of La Comelle. It was demolished in the early years of the twentieth century, deemed too low, damp and small for the growing population. It may well have stood for over 800 years but, having lived with the discomforts of ancient monuments for so long, it is unlikely that many in La Comelle mourned its passing. The new church was built over the top of the old graveyard, eternally consecrating the anonymous generations beneath.

It’s unlikely that Jeanne’s mother’s grave would have been marked by a tombstone anyway. The poor could not afford to mark their graves. The only people who cared already knew where their loved ones were buried. Their testaments were transient and left no trace – wood and flowers, prayers and vigils.

The moment of transition from old church to the new was captured in a postcard from 1901, showing the old church with its simple square Romanesque spire in half-demolished rubble before the rising new church with stained-glass and classical bell-tower elegance. The black-and-white photo gives a wartime bleakness to the scene. My modern eye is incapable of seeing the triumph of progress, imagining only a destruction yet to come: battlefields of future wars across Europe, sprawling urbanisation and environmental degradation.

The view from La Comelle today still looks like a nineteenth-century painting of Morvan peasant life by Camille Corot. Violet-tinted skies frame cream-stone buildings under steep brown roofs. In the pastures of gold and green, it’s not hard to imagine bonneted peasants working the fields, chopping the wood or walking the pig.

Jocelyn parks the car in the church carpark and the three of us step out into the warm sun to admire the view down the valley where rambling creeks trace uneven paths across the neat green fields.

To my surprise, there is little sign of modern life here. There are no motorways, few powerlines, no industrial complexes, no cities or suburbs within eye or earshot. The houses are either old or traditional. Herds of beefy brown Limousin and white Charolais cattle dominate the landscape, their fields guarded by long-standing hedgerows that provide food and shelter for a rich array of wildlife.

This bocage – a mix of small fields, hedgerows and woods – clearly supports a healthier ecology than other European farmland that has been converted to large-scale cultivation. Wildflowers bloom thick along the roadsides as forests lush with new spring growth spread down the slopes. Even through the car window I can hear vibrant spring birdsong. Black hawks hang ever vigilant overhead. A large goshawk swivels on its fence post as we pass, keeping us fixed in a sharp yellow eye.

I often struggle to appreciate European landscapes – so many of the plants and animals are weeds and pests in Australia that it’s hard to view them with an unjaundiced eye. But this landscape feels intact – not from an absence of humans, as Australians and Americans are wont to conceptualise wilderness, but in some kind of balance. It is a landscape that has evolved and changed radically with humans but, at least on the surface, does not appear over-exploited or disturbed.

The silence stretches broad and deep across the valley. Small voices drift from a distant field, discussing this season’s vegetables. On a whim, we investigate a small well-trodden path leading up between two houses to the woods beyond. It leads to a small shrine surrounded by a stone wall. The overflowing dampness at its hollow base suggests that this must be the fountain of Saint-Claire I have read about in the historical records but never imagined finding. Plastic votive offerings verify that the shrine is still used today, just as it must have been in Jeanne’s time. It feels like a tangible connection across the centuries.

The water from the fountain spills down a narrow stone drain through a garden on the roadside. Herbs, flowering both colourful and aromatic, tumble down the hill around it. Miles chats to a lady working in the garden, who offers us sprigs of fragrant thyme. I am grateful for his easy sociability, which seems to attract additional information about Jeanne Barret with enviable ease. Jocelyn thoughtfully translates for me when she sees I have lost track of the fast-paced French conversations. We learn that there are still Barrets living in nearby villages. A road across the way leads up to the village hall, both of which have been named in honour of their famous resident.

As we breathe in the herbal aromas of thyme crushed between our fingers, it is impossible to reconcile this charming village with the grinding poverty described in the history books – the elderly begging for alms or the children forced to eat grass, the deaths and disease, the starvation and hardship. I cannot imagine farm workers so poor that they were forced into a kind of hibernation through winter to save on fuel and food. Come autumn and the labourers of the fields would ‘spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.’

What I experience today as calm, peaceful and idyllic might, in Jeanne’s day, have been simply the limits of a life so close to death as to be almost unimaginable.

I think we always love the landscape of our childhood. In Paris, a friend takes me to visit the apartment he grew up in in the 1950s. He is meeting a builder to arrange renovations to the tiny two-room home, which is still in original condition with a toilet in the kitchen cupboard and a shower in the wardrobe. The rooms are so narrow that the large bright windows on the fourth floor give me an uneasy sense of vertigo as we look out over the tiny park below.

‘What a perfect place for a child,’ my friend enthuses, sweeping his hand over the view, ‘with all this to play in.’

I grew up with the wheatfields of South Australia stretching to the north and the vast expanses of the Southern Ocean to the west and south. My parents raised the grey steel frames of our boat in these hinterland paddocks. We lived in a caravan on a friend’s bush block, with a portable toilet and a bucket full of holes for a shower. In summer the mice invaded the caravan, soon followed by a 1.5-metre long brown snake that slipped down the back of the cutlery drawer as we prepared to set the table. Tiny ants launched endless campaigns against our supplies, trekking long marauding lines across the ceiling. And in winter, the ice in the rainwater tank froze the tap solid. It cannot have been a comfortable place to live, but for the most part my memories are dominated by the spring wildflowers, the abundance of lizards, birds, possums and kangaroos, the rope playground under the spreading shade of two vast gums, and the magic fairylands of moss and mushrooms under the paperbarks. It was a wild wonderland filled with dangers and adventure, and I had it all to myself.

Not everyone loves the landscape of Eyre Peninsula – wide bare grasslands, salt flats and coastal heather, the stunted mallee vegetation blackened with traces of last season’s fires, or rugged coast pounded constantly by vast thundering swells. It is a landscape that can also feel empty, exposed and isolated. The summer sun shrivels everything with oven-like ferocity, while winter gales roll in from Antarctica with monotonous violence.

‘Only a South Australian could love this,’ my father enthused on a trip home after years living in the wet lushness of northern New Zealand.

I wonder if Jeanne thought the same thing of her childhood home – if she remembered it fondly and with happiness, or if she only remembered the hunger and hardship.

The winters continued cold and punishing through Jeanne’s youth, but ever so gradually the weather began to turn. The frosts were less severe, the snows less frequent. Winter returned to its regular schedule.

Someone looked after Jeanne through those early years. If not her father then perhaps her godmother or a stepmother. Jeanne’s father soon had a new wife, Antoinette Mangematin, but she, and their son Simon, both died in 1745.

In Jeanne’s sixth year, the grapes were still late and the grain harvest low, but the vegetables flourished and filled many hungry bellies with an unexpected abundance. At six, peasant children were expected to work: looking after animals, helping in the fields or at home. They cast off the simple smocks of childhood and put on cut-down versions of adult clothing – jackets and pants for boys, a short skirt and bodice with a white cap and apron for girls. They could earn money, food or clothes by working on local farms, or winding bobbins for weaving, or as domestic servants, advertising their availability at the annual hiring fair.

By the age of seven, Jeanne had lost another stepmother. Jeanne Teuvenot, aged 40, died in November of 1747.

It is some time before I find anything more of interest in the parish records. I’ve nearly given up, but feel that I should, at least, finish the volume. Near the end, I find another entry:

On the 16th of December 1755 did die and on the 17th was buried in the cemetery, Jean Baret, manoeuvre aged about sixty years . . . in the presence of his son Pierre Baret, his son-in-law Antoine Gigon and others who do not sign

So it is true, what Jeanne told Bougainville on the ship in the Pacific, that she was an orphan. But she was not alone. She did have family. She had a brother Pierre and a married sister.

I keep searching back through the registers before Jeanne’s birth, hoping to find the marriage of her parents or the birth of her siblings, but I find nothing. Perhaps they moved from another village, perhaps I missed the entries, or perhaps the pages were damaged by damp and the passing years. There are entries that might be related, but a name is wrong, even allowing for phonetic spelling, or the date doesn’t add up. I can’t be certain they refer to the same family.

Finally, in 1734, I find a record that seems convincing.

The 12th Feb 1734 is baptised Pierre Barret, son of Jean Barret and Jeanne Pauchare the mother, the godfather is Pierre Petit Jean, sharecropper of Poil, and godmother Anne Dularet

This must be Jeanne’s brother, Pierre, who would have been 21 when their father died. And then there was the sister whose husband was present at Jean Barret’s death. Jeanne was not alone in the world – I am sure these siblings must have been important to her.

By 1764, Jeanne had left her home village. She was not like the childhood village friends of the famed French author Colette who also grew up in Burgundy. Colette described the children of the village as being ‘chained to their parent’s shops’, victims of the ‘resigned wisdom, the peasant terror of adventure and distant travel’. Colette herself dreamt of being a sailor.

In a world where few travelled far beyond the confines of their own village, and fewer still trusted those who did, Jeanne picked up whatever meagre possessions she had and struck out to follow the Arroux River south towards the long flat plains below.