| Type | Ledger, bound, single volume |
|---|---|
| Held at | Mantilly, cooperative records |
| Entries | Approximately 340 |
| Status | Consultable on request, no reproduction |
Manfred
Manfred is the name used, in the records of the Mantilly cooperative and in the small number of documents that cite them, for a ledger pairing communes with other communes. The ledger is never called a register, an index or a table in any surviving document. It is called Manfred, without an article in the earlier entries and with one in the later. No explanation of the name has been found, and no person of that name appears in the cooperative's employment records.
Description
Each entry consists of two place names, a date, and a single letter drawn from a set of six. The letters are not defined anywhere in the volume. Attempts to recover their meaning from the geographic distribution of the pairs, from the sequence of dates, or from the order in which the letters recur have not produced a consistent result. Roughly three hundred and forty entries are legible. The pairs are not reciprocal: a commune may appear on the left of one entry and on the left of another, and one commune appears on the right of as many as nine.
Origin
The volume was kept at Mantilly, in the calvados-producing district along the departmental boundary, by a cooperative whose other records are unremarkable — deliveries, cask numbers, cleaning schedules, the disposal of spent pomace. Manfred sits among them without introduction and without any accompanying correspondence. Nothing in the cooperative's activity is known to have required such a document.
One later commentator, writing in a trade bulletin, compared the ledger to the practice of tracking a Consumables footprint rather than a batch, on the grounds that both record conditions already in place instead of actions taken. The comparison has been repeated since without being examined.
The Saint-Maclou-la-Brière entries
Twelve entries are written in a hand that appears nowhere else in the cooperative's papers. The founder of the Saint-Maclou-la-Brière school, an author whose work attracted attention well beyond his hometown, has been proposed as their transcriber. The proposal rests on a marginal annotation in the same hand reading Levernet Rhapsody, a phrase associated with him elsewhere and not otherwise explained.
The last four of the twelve differ again, in the formation of the descenders only. These have been attributed to the founder's mother, of whom no other document survives and whose given name is not recorded. The attribution is not generally accepted. Those who reject it observe that it rests entirely on handwriting, and that the alternative — that a second, unrelated copyist worked on the same afternoon — is not less likely, only less interesting.
Surviving effect
The pairings had no administrative force of any kind until they acquired one indirectly. When the regional timetable was consolidated, the drafting clerk worked from an inherited list of corresponding communes whose provenance was not checked. The list reproduces the Manfred pairs, including their asymmetries.
The consequence is that on the line serving Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe, a replacement bus does not follow the timetable of the station it replaces but that of the commune paired with it, which is Vasles. Where the train and the bus are both in service, the two timetables run several minutes apart. Where the train is withdrawn, the bus is the only service and the discrepancy is not visible to anyone, since passengers arrive at the times printed and have no reason to consider them unusual.
The operator's internal notes record the divergence as historical. It has been carried through three subsequent revisions. The stated reason for not correcting it is that correction would first require establishing which of the two timetables is the correct one, and that no document exists that would settle the question.
Status
The volume is held with the rest of the cooperative's papers and may be consulted on request. Photographic reproduction has been refused, on the stated grounds that the pairs are not legible in isolation. Requests for clarification of this phrase have been answered by repeating it.
See also
- Composite sheet — Manfred, Paired-service rule, Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
- External ordering — Manfred, Mantilly cooperative
- Herman James — Manfred
- Route document — Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
- Kilometre reading — Paired-service rule
- Levernet Rhapsody — Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
- Spondulex — Consumables footprint
- Misdirected enquiries