THE JOURNEY OF MARTIN NADAUD

A skillful, imaginative exploration of the life of a 19th-century French stonemason who, with ferocious determination, transformed himself into a potent political force.

Tindall (Célestine, 1996, etc.) begins this remarkable work on a spring morning in rural central France in 1830. Fourteen-year-old Martin Nadaud is leaving his home to accompany his father and uncle and, eventually, thousands of other masons who walk north to Paris each spring (“like migrant birds”) to work until fall. The author evokes an itinerant way of life now largely forgotten (though not gone. (As she points out, other cultures continue sending their men into the cities to establish themselves.) Tindall scoured archives and public records for the few facts they held and acknowledges that she felt at times as if she were assembling a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing; she worried that even “some of those that survive may not actually belong.” Using these slim records, she constructs a sturdy framework for Nadaud’s life. Martin’s father had insisted the boy learn to read (a rare skill in his day), and the young man helped pay off family debts by contributing not only his laborer’s wages but also the money he earned teaching other laborers to read in an informal night school he operated. In Paris, Martin met politicians interested in workers’ rights and, after one failure, he was elected to parliament in 1849. The rise of Louis-Napoleon, however, led to Martin’s 1851 arrest and 1852 exile. He ended up in England, where (after working once again as a mason) he began a 12-year career teaching French at a boys’ school in Wimbledon. In a “triumphant reversal of fortune,” he returned to France and became an important public official in his native Creuse.

A lovely and sometimes lyrical work of imagination that rests on a solid foundation of scholarship. (8 pages b&w photos)