An Infinite History

Etienne Ferrand

Of the principal figures in An Infinite History, Etienne Ferrand is the only one whose destiny was a blank in the family tree. He was the first in the family to be ordained, in 1789, and he was the only one of Marie Aymard's children and grandchildren of whose life there was for a time a substantial record. He signed the parish register of the small parish of Jauldes on multiple occasions in 1790-1791; he was then promoted, as a priest who had sworn allegiance to the revolution, to become curé of the large parish of St Martial in Angoulême. In 1794, he was married to a former parishioner, Marie Chausse Lunesse. In 1795, he completed a complex transaction to become the owner of a large estate in Marsac, near Angoulême, which had been seized as a "bien national" after his two brothers-in-law were determined to have emigrated.

At some point after 1795, he disappeared from the public record, or so it seemed. This was not even entirely surprising, in that the life of constitutional, married former priests (of whom there were many thousands) became increasingly uncomfortable in post-revolutionary France. There are 456 entries in the Geneanet database for individuals named Etienne Ferrand who died between 1795 and 1866 (when our Etienne, the former priest, would have been a hundred.) An Etienne Ferrand died in a military hospital in Hrvatska, Croatia in 1808, and another died of illness in Zamora, Spain in 1809; none of them are our Etienne.

My suspicion, when I left the blank in the family tree, was that Etienne had changed his name, or had travelled far away. It turns out that both were true. The red thread in the archives was the name, or an approximation to a name, and the archives (as so often) were the records of transactions in immobile property. In the register of mortgages for Angoulême, dated 1950-1955, there is an entry for Etienne Ferrand, referring to a different entry for "Chausse Lunesse (Wailly)". This led in turn to another register, for "De Lunesse, Marie, femme Ferrant Wally," and another, for "Ferrand Wailli Etienne." So there was a new name, for our Etienne. He called himself, in his new life, by his mother's name at birth, or her name, at least, on the occasion of her marriage, which was Devuailly.

"Ferrand Wailly" has been much less difficult to find than "Etienne Ferrand." In 1805, Etienne was living in Paris, Rue neuve des Mathurins no. 844. He took out a power of attorney to his wife, "Marie de Lunesse," that gave her extensive discretion over all his affairs, on the grounds that he was going away on a journey. The document was given the title "Procuration M. Wailly," and Etienne signed his name "ferrand Dewailly." Rue neuve des Mathurins no. 844, at the corner of the Rue de l'Arcade in the modern 8th arrondissement, was the former property of the Mathurin order, acquired as a "bien national" by an architect named Desarnod. It was occupied in 1805 by a factory employing a hundred workers, in the production of equipment for the "economical" heating and lighting of apartments.

Etienne returned from his journey, and he settled a little distance away in the modern 8th arrondissement. Marie de Lunesse, identified as "Marie Adelaide Chausse de Gunesse," died in July 1814 in the village of Clichy, the scene four months earlier of the celebrated defense of the Barrière de Clichy that preceded the abdication of Napoleon. She was described as the wife of Etienne Ferrand Devailly, an "employé" living at the Rue neuve du Luxembourg no. 8 (the modern Rue Cambon.) She was according to the register 48 years old, and had been born in Angoulême, although she was in fact 50, and was born in Marsac, near the estate which Etienne had once owned so fleetingly; it was Etienne himself who was 48 and born in Angoulême, and Etienne's mother whose names were "Marie Adelaide."

Etienne lived for thirty more years. He died on September 14, 1844, at the age of 78, in the Ternes district of Neuilly, Vieille Rue no. 60bis. He was described as "Ferrand dit Dewailly," a pensioner retired from the administration of the douanes, and a former receiver of declarations. I have found no record, so far, of his employment. (He does not appear, under any of his names, in the published lists of receivers available online, or in the database of agents of the Musée des Douanes.) But there was a certificate of his pension as a former receiver of declarations, of 1,397 francs per year, in the inventory prepared after his death. There was also the residue of official life: one black silk tie, and two waistcoats in black casimir.

Etienne's existence, after all his adventures, was enclosed in one room on the third floor of the house in Ternes, "illuminated by the street." He had a desk, a bed, and six chairs, with two flower vases, nine coffee cups and 34 glasses. There was a kitchen, with pots and two shirts. By the entrance, there was a "cabinet de toilette," with five more shirts, a dressing gown in Indian cotton, and 89 books of various sizes, "works of literature and travel." In the cellar, there were 60 empty bottles and "a pile of debris."

A woman called Opportune Duchoiselle, described as a rentière who lived in the same house, was the guardian of Etienne's possessions, and the inventory is garlanded with her signatures and her initials, "OD." She told the notaries that at the time of Etienne's death "there was no money at all" in his residence. He received his pension every month, she said, and when he died in September he had already collected the payments for July and August. There were multiple unpaid invoices, including a bill for 323 francs from a wine merchant in Burgundy, and a bill of 64 francs for the cost of Etienne's funeral, paid for "on behalf of the estate" by a M. Dubois living in the Faubourg Poissonnière in Paris. Opportune Duchoiselle also knew of three other debts, to a wine merchant, a tobacconist, and to "M. de Bourgon," colonel of the "72nd, garrisoned in Paris," for a note of 550 francs signed by Etienne. (This was Etienne's nephew by marriage, the son of Marie's younger sister, who after years of service in North Africa had become colonel of the 70th infantry regiment, stationed in Paris.) The value of Etienne's estate was 505 francs, and his debts amounted to 1,343 francs.

Even Etienne's family was reduced. His father, Gabriel Ferrand, the archivist of the department of the Charente, was the oldest son of Marie Aymard, the matriarch of An Infinite History. He and his wife, Marie Adelaide Devuailly, had six sons, of whose lives there is almost no public record. But all Etienne's brothers were dead by 1844. His two heirs were his niece, the daughter of his oldest brother, described as the wife of a vinegar-maker in the Loire (who was later the proprietress of a literary wine shop on the Rue Bréda in Paris) and his great-nephew, described as a "draper's clerk," living in the Rue Saint Denis, no. 123.

These are the records of the end of a life. They are the archives, as so often, of the closing in of material and social life. They belong to a history that is not very often written, or the history of solitude and growing old. But Etienne's existence is also part of the history of post-revolutionary lives in France, and of what it was like to be have cast been hither and thither by the events of the revolution. Etienne changed his name and went on a long journey (somewhere); he was an owner and then not the owner of a bien national; at least three of his five brothers were soldiers in the revolutionary armies; two of them vanished even more effectively than he succeeded in doing. The private memory of the revolution is at the centre of Balzac's La comédie humaine, with its missing identities, old soldiers' stories and reminiscences of long-lost transactions. But the long life of the revolution was also something more lonely, or the debris of disruption and loss.

Opportune Duchoiselle, the impresario of the inventory of Etienne's estate, was herself a child of the revolution. She was born in the Somme in 1783, and when she died in 1847, she was living in Paris in the Rue de Ponthieu, no. 19, in the modern 8th arrondissement. She was described as a dressmaker, a couturière. Her father, who had been a "brigadier ambulant" in the service of the royal tax farms, reinvented himself as a school teacher, and the family moved to Paris. Opportune's brother became a corporal in the infantry in 1806, and in 1807 she had a son, Augustin Claude. The obscure M. Dubois, who paid for Etienne's funeral expenses, and signed the record of his death, was her brother-in-law, the husband of her older sister. Opportune's mother lived on the Rue Neuve des Mathurins, where Etienne had lived before his long journey, and so did her brother. There was a new family, of sorts, in Etienne's life, and a familiar milieu, in the old industrial streets of the 8th arrondissement.

© Emma Rothschild 2025