The castle of Suscino—or more properly the ruin—is a wonderful thirteenth-century structure on the water’s edge, built by John the Red-haired. It follows the best Gothic traditions of its time, and its crenelated walls and towers, the latter now unroofed, are perfect of their kind. It was captured by Charles of Blois, and retaken by his Montfort rival in 1364. An English garrison occupied it in 1373. Finally it was given by Anne of Brittany to John of Chalons, Prince of Orange, from whom it was taken by Francis I., and he presented it to Frances of Foix, Lady of Châteaubriant, as she then was. The rest of its history is equally varied, and as important as becomes so magnificent a mediæval fortress.
In form the château is an irregular pentagon, perhaps modified from its original plan in 1420. Its orchid machicolations are remarkable both for their beauty and their utility. Seven towers, of which six remain, originally flanked its gates and walls. The new tower is a fine cylindrical keep of the fifteenth century. Over the entrance one still reads a tablet inscription as follows:
Ici est né
Le duc Arthur III.
le 24 Août, 1393
North of Vannes are Ploërmel and Josselin, two places which no one should leave out of the itinerary of Brittany. Neither is easily accessible by rail, but both are conveniently reached by road.
Ploërmel has a railway connection with the line to Brest by way of Rennes, and another with the line to Brest by way of Vannes, but Josselin is off the beaten track, and one makes his way from Ploërmel by omnibus or in a carriage.
Ploërmel and its “pardon” have inspired an opera, one of Meyerbeer’s most celebrated scores, known to English music lovers as “Dinorah,” but in French called “The Pardon of Ploërmel.” The town owes its name to an anchorite who, in the sixth century, retired here to a hermitage.
The history of Ploërmel during the middle ages was stormy. It was here that the edict expelling the Jews from Brittany was issued in 1240. In 1273 the Comte de Richemont—upon his return from the Crusades—founded at Ploërmel the first Carmelite convent known to France. This ancient convent, situated without the walls, escaped from the disasters which caused the city to be burned in 1347. The Calvinists came in time to have a temple here, in which they held two synods of their church.
To-day Ploërmel is a sleepy, old-world town, with two good inns, and not much except the fragmentary reminders of old walls and buildings to remind one of the parts played in other days.
The Church of St. Armel, a reconstruction of 1511-1602, is in parts highly decorated with stone sculptures and strange images, recalling, says an ingenious, but profane, Frenchman, the “pleasantries of Rabelais.” Of course he refers to the players on the bagpipes, the man sewing up the mouth of his wife, and the wife tearing off her husband’s cap. Certainly these quaint figures are not born of religious symbolism, unless, by chance, that the symbolism of the religious builders of Ploërmel differs greatly from that of others elsewhere.
There are still remains of Ploërmel’s old city walls dating from the fifteenth century, and also a fragment of a tower.
Near by, on the road to Josselin, is a simple granite shaft perpetuating the famous “Battle of the Thirty,” celebrated in history.
According to Froissart, Robert of Beaumanoir, chatelain of Josselin, one day provoked an English captain—Bromborough—who was encamped at Ploërmel, and challenged him to battle; thirty of his men against thirty Frenchmen. At the first attack four Frenchmen and two English fell. Then the combat began again with swords, battle-axes, and lances. Eight English only finally remained, including Bromborough himself; all the others were killed or taken prisoners and led away to the dungeons of the Château de Josselin.
Froissart writes elsewhere of this same engagement: “Twenty-two years after the battle of the thirty, I saw at the table of King Charles of France one of the combatants, a knight called Yvain Charnel. His face showed that the battle had been hot, for it was scarred all over.”
This wayside column or pyramid just off the route bears the following inscription:
À la Memoire Perpetuelle
de la Bataille des Trante
que Mgr le Maréchal de Beau Manoir
a Gaignée dans ce Lieu l’An 1530
Josselin is now chief town of a commune of 2,500 inhabitants; it has a fine mediæval château yet inhabitable, two ecclesiastical monuments of more than unusual excellence, and a rather shaky and ill-situated inn (Hôtel de France), which makes up in the abundance and excellence of its fare for what it lacks in the way of electric lights and modern sanitary arrangements.
The first houses of Josselin were grouped around a miraculous effigy of the Virgin, known as Notre Dame du Roncier, because it was found beneath a blackberry-bush. To-day Notre Dame du Roncier, the church and the chapel and its statue of the Virgin, are venerated highly by the faithful who make the pilgrimage to the shrine on the Monday and Tuesday of Pentecost and on the eighth of September, the birthday of the Virgin, when the remains of her ancient statue are shown. This effigy was broken and burned in the Revolutionary fury of 1793, but a modern replica was crowned, in the Chapel Notre Dame du Roncier, in 1868. The settlement which grew up around the shrine was surrounded by a protecting wall by the Count of Guéthénoc in 1008, and in 1030 it was given the name of Josselin, after his son.
In the thirteenth century, the county of Porhoet, in which Josselin was situated, passed to the house of Fougères, and its affairs were varied and involved until Peter of Valois, Count of Alençon, sold it to the Constable Oliver of Clisson, whose daughter brought it in marriage to the Rohans, to whose descendants it still belongs.
In the Church of Our Lady of the Blackberry-bush is a remarkable tomb placed in the Chapel of St. Marguerite—the former oratory of the constable—to Oliver of Clisson and Marguerite of Rohan.
The castle rests on a rocky foundation beside the river Oust, and its front is most imposing. Three towers with conical roofs flank the riverside, and are an expression of the best fortress-château building of its era (twelfth century), severe and gaunt in every line, and yet beautifully planned. The interior court takes on quite a different aspect, that of the “architecture civile” of the third ogival period, when Renaissance forms and details had crept in, almost destroying Gothic lines.
The window openings of the two stories have an admirable decorative effect, as beautiful as those of Blois and very nearly equalling those of Chambord.
An open gallery above the windows is a charming additional interpolation, and between each window is carved “A Plus,” the device of the distinguished family of the Rohans, who built this part of the structure. A keep and some later walls and parapets were added by Clisson somewhere about the year 1400, but most of them disappeared in 1629, when the château ceased to be a stronghold of the League.
In the main it is a twelfth and thirteenth century structure which is so admirably preserved to-day. One may visit the interior, through the courtesy of the family in residence, and, though it may be somewhat disconcerting to walk through these historic apartments of another day and see such modern innovations as electric bells and other appurtenances of a late civilization, the experience is, after all, a peep behind the curtain, and this the up-to-date motor-car tourist always appreciates highly.
The great hall, the library, with its magnificent chimneypiece and its cipher, “A Plus,” carved in stone, and the dining-room ornamented with a modern equestrian statue of Clisson, by Fremiet, are the chief apartments shown.
In the court within the walls is an ancient well surrounded by an elaborate forged iron railing.
One takes the road again, by the way of Locminé and Baud, for Auray, the most dainty and charming of all Breton market-towns, passing through a delightfully picturesque country of rolling hills and deep valleys and fir forests, studded here and there with lakelets.
Locminé, which derives its name from Locmenec’h (monk’s cell), was the site of a monastery founded in the sixth century by St. Colomban. It was burned by the Normans in the ninth century, after the pleasant custom of these invaders, and reëstablished in 1006 by Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, as a priory attached to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuis.
In the present church of Locminé is a chapel dedicated to St. Colomban, containing a painting representing scenes from the life of the saint; others are carried out in the coloured glass of the windows.
One reads the following,—a supplication on behalf of the dangerous madmen who at one time occupied two cells beneath the pavement:
St. Colomban, help of idiots, pray for us!”
Behind the church is an elaborate ossuary dating from Renaissance times, when these adjuncts to burial-grounds were so plentifully scattered over Brittany.
Baud has an enormous parish church of the time of Louis XIV., with a fine Gothic arcade and a great crucifix standing beside the outer wall. Aside from this, there is not much else here to attract one, unless he be a pilgrim affected with disease of the eye. If he be, and if he bathe in the “Fontaine de la clarté,” and the fates be propitious, and he be not too far gone otherwise, and everything else be as it should, he will be cured forthwith—perhaps.
It is unkind to scoff at these miraculous fountains scattered here and there over the world, of course, but one has seen so many individual cases that were not benefited, and heard of so many that were, that one may be justified in a little skepticism.
To Auray is twenty kilometres by a road which gently rolls down a matter of 150 metres of elevation until it reaches sea-level at the little market-town seaport known in Breton as Alre.
CHAPTER IV.
AURAY AND THE MEGALITHIC MONUMENTS OF MORBIHAN
AURAY is the real centre from which to make the round of the vast collection of relics of the long lost civilization of Morbihan.
Many have attempted to explain the significance of these rude stone monuments. Some have said that the famous avenues of Carnac were the streets of one of Cæsar’s camps, its roofs having fallen and mouldered away, and that the famous “Merchants’ Table” at Locmariaquer was an ancient druidical altar, to which the helpless were led to be sacrificed.
All this and much more is for the antiquary alone, and a nodding acquaintance with the history of these curious stone formations or erections is about all for which most travellers will care.
He who arrives at Auray on a market-day will seem to himself to come into a region where every one speaks the Breton tongue. Not all, of course, for French is now compulsory with the school-children, but the frequency of it here in the booths and stalls in and around Auray’s lovely old timbered market-house is greatly to be remarked.
It is a question if this same market-house be not quite the most theatrical-looking thing of its kind in all France. It is for all the world like a successful piece of stage carpentry, with a great spectacular stairway running up into its garret above, quite in the manner that one has seen upon the stage over and over again, when the heroine or the villain—it does not much matter which—escapes from his, or her, pursuers. Low built, heavily raftered, and with a leaky roof allowing rays of sunlight to dribble through into the gloom within in a most entrancing manner, this old market-house is the centre of the life and activity of the place for fifty-two Mondays in each year.
Within and without the walls of the market-house is gathered the most varied conglomeration of wares imaginable. Beside the draper’s counter are baskets of vegetables, eggs, or fish. A poor little calf, tied by the legs and lying at full length on the ground, keeps company with his former farmyard neighbours, the ducks and geese, but on either side is a second-hand collection of ironmongery and old shoes, and it should be the envy of the provident, for two sous buy anything in the collection.
The country-side Breton peasant who comes to Auray on a market-day is the glass of fashion of his race, his jacket embroidered in braid of gay colours, and velvet bands on his sleeves and collar. His shirt is high and stiffly starched, and his felt hat or cap heavily hung with velvet ribbons. The womenfolk are clad in equally spectacular fashion, with high white caps and full-sleeved bodices, each with a black velvet band around the sleeve, and full gathered skirts, spoiling all symmetry of form as nature made it.
The history of Auray, from the days when it belonged to John of Auray, grand huntsman of Brittany, has left its mark in the annals of the country in no indefinite manner. John of Montfort, the Counts of Blois, Duguesclin, and many others stalk through its pages of history until finally, in the wars of religions, it was held by the Catholic army and the Spaniards in turn. Its old château, whose foundations now form the fine Promenade du Loc, dates from the eleventh century; and it was reconstructed and enlarged two centuries later, finally to disappear, as the result of an order for its demolition given by the castle destroyer, Henry II., in 1558.
The port of Auray is more daintily and charmingly environed than most seaports. As it lies between the wooded, deep-cut banks of the little river, its intermingling of ships and salt water, and country-side, and sailor lads and rustic maidens, and all the motley population of the little town, is a marvellous thing to see.
The smack of antiquity is about it all, and the historic legend of its shrine of St. Anne—which lives as vividly to-day as ever it lived—most touchingly connects the present with the past.
One of the most celebrated, and certainly the most largely attended, of all the “pardons” of Brittany is that held at St. Anne of Auray, though Auray itself is something more than a mere place of religious pilgrimage, and a good deal more than a wayside station on the railway line where one leaves the train and hires a carriage for Carnac and Quiberon, though apparently not many tourists know it. In the first place, it is one of the largest and most characteristic of all the little Breton market-towns, is a deep-water port of a considerable size, and has a hotel which supplies one with the most ample and delightful meals that the traveller will find westward of Nantes.
This may be a mundane standard by which to judge of an old-world town’s appeal to interest, but it is all-sufficient, and the most marvellous attractions the world may have to offer will hardly be appreciated by a travel-worn and hungry traveller, and such should plan to arrive in town for the Monday dinner at the Golden Lion; also he should not hurry through the town merely for the sake of visiting the shrine of St. Anne, which is tawdry enough in its general aspect, except when it is thronged on the great days of the “pardon,” March seventh and July twenty-fifth.
The great festival of the Pardon of St. Anne of Auray is held in July, on the birthday of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. Its origin dates back to 1623, when a peasant of the country-side, one Yves Nicolazic, was commanded by St. Anne, who appeared to him in a vision, to found a chapel in her honour in the fields of Bocenno, where, she said, an ancient shrine had existed nearly a thousand years earlier. Guided by explicit directions and a mysterious star, Yves found a precious image, which ultimately was transported and set up anew in the church built at Auray. This miraculous statue was lost during the Revolution, but a fragment was preserved and is included in the present shrine, which is surrounded by a modern edifice dating from the mid-nineteenth century.
Near by is the miraculous fountain, which, like others of its kind elsewhere, is exceedingly erratic as to the miracles it performs. It was beside this fountain, then but a humble little rock-gushing spring, but now neatly set about with a concrete basin, that St. Anne first appeared to Yves.
Each year, by train, by boat, by country cart, and on foot, pilgrims come from miles around, many of them camping out the night by the roadside, all, in spite of the solemn purport of their pilgrimage, in the gayest spirits. There is always a certain amount of discord to be encountered at all these great festivals,—beggars, deformed or ill with incurable disease, crippled or what not, all expectant of reaping a thriving harvest from the simple-minded frequenters of the shrine. Whether deserving or not, all of them appear to receive liberal alms, for the custom of giving alms is as much a component part of the event as any of the other observances, nor is it ever frowned upon or curtailed by the religious or civic authorities.
The order of the day includes the massing of the pilgrims at open-air services, the placing of candles before the shrine, the inspection of the relics of the saint, the drinking of, or bathing in, the miraculous fountain, and sermons and admonitions uncounted, all in the Breton tongue, incomprehensible to outsiders, but to be taken as salutary. The great feature is the procession of priests and pilgrims, the former in their brilliant vestments, many of the latter bearing tall, gaudily coloured candles and gay silken banners. Grouped around each banner will be found the Breton men and women from a particular section, each group differently clad from those of other sections, but all gay with brilliant colouring.
“Saint Anne, pray for us!” is the cry one would hear were it in English, or “Sainte Anne, priez pour nous” in French; in Breton, its sadness is indescribable, more like the wail of a banshee than anything else.
Usually the Bishop of Vannes delivers an exhortation, in the Breton tongue, of course, from the top of the Holy Steps, after which the throng—or, at least, such as are truly and sincerely devout—climb to the top on their knees. According to the printed notice at the foot, each step mounted on the bended knee, accompanied of course by a prayer, is good for a nine years’ absolution of a soul in purgatory. In the cloister behind the church is a great crucifix, in which the peasant pilgrims stick pins, each recording a prayer said or a vow made.
On the night of July twenty-sixth, St. Anne’s Day, a grand torchlight procession marches. The “Marche aux Flambeaux,” a celebrated painting by Jules Breton, now owned in America, well shows the effect of one of these great demonstrations, except that it lacks the weirdness of the sombre background of night itself.
This ends the great days of the pardon, but throughout the year pilgrims make their way to the shrine to say a prayer, or to drink or bathe in the waters of the fountain, or perhaps to carry a jugful home to some bedridden member of their families.
Among the offerings in fulfilment of vows made at the shrine of Ste. Anne d’Auray are a number of very ancient inscriptions, such as the following best illustrate:
“William Genin, bitten by a mad dog, vowed himself to St. Anne and obtained a perfect cure in 1631.”
“Helen Sausse, abandoned by her mother, vomited a two-headed snake and recovered her health.”
On the way from Auray to Plouharnel, Carnac, Quiberon, and Locmariaquer are worth one day or three, accordingly as one may feel inclined. The distance is not great; a dozen kilometres will cover the journey out, and a little more circuitous return route will take in a half-dozen or more old centres of a civilization of which all knowledge is lost in the night of time.
Whatsoever the great megalithic monuments of Carnac may mean, certain it is that they tell—or could tell if one could feel sure he understood it correctly—a story quite out of keeping with the manners and customs of to-day. Like the tall, gaunt windmills plentifully besprinkled hereabouts, these great stones rear their heads skyward in fashion most strange. Long rows of them, like files of soldiers, or like the trees of the forest, stand to-day for the curious to marvel at, as they stood so long ago that their origin is not to be definitely traced.
Of the Lines of Carnac, as the strange population of tombstone-looking monoliths is known, much has been written by antiquaries, archæologists, and geologists ever since the tide of travel set this way. What these stones actually mean—some thousands of them in all, set out in regular rows—only a vain, presumptuous person could answer. They offer a prospect of a strange grandeur, for they really are grand, if not stupendous, and, as they stretch away in long, silent lines almost to the horizon, they are as phantoms looming to-day out of the mysterious past to which they belong.
There are three great companies of these menhirs here. Those of Ménec, composed of 1,169 members in eleven ranks; of Kermario, 1,120 members in ten rows; and of Kerlescan, thirteen rows made up of 579 individual stones.
Carnac has another ancient monument in the tumulus of Mont St. Michel, which, like other elevations bearing the same name, is a sky-nearing little peak of land which supposedly formed a firm earthly foothold for the archangel.
The parish church of Carnac is dedicated to St. Cornély, who, according to legend, lived in the neighbourhood and was many times saved from an untimely death by the oxen of the region. Just how this was accomplished no one seems to know, but enough of the tradition still lives to inspire a grand celebration on the saint’s day, the thirteenth of September, when many animals are offered up to him, as one learns from the kindly, tall-coifed guardian of the church.
The painted ceilings of the Church of St. Cornély are remarkable works of art, if not for their excellence, at least for their ingenuity. The north porch is an astonishing Renaissance addition, which, from its curves and curls, would seem to be the precursor of “l’art nouveau.”
To the westward of Carnac, at the shore-end of the peninsula of Quiberon, is Plouharnel, another centre around which are grouped many curious stone monuments.
The Chapel of Our Lady of the Flowers is a singularly beautiful small church built of the granite of the country. It contains a notable bas-relief in alabaster in the form of what is known in ecclesiastical art as a “Jesse Tree.”
Just why the promoters of a railway had the temerity to push it to the very end of the snake-like peninsula of Quiberon is a problem which will ever remain unsolved so far as the general public is concerned. Stendhal has written some gloomy views of scenes enacted at Fort Penthièvre, half-way down the peninsula, and Victor Hugo wrote of the same times (now a hundred years ago):
“Mourir plus d’un soldat à son prince fidèle, un prêtre fidèle à son Dieu.”
The aspect of this long, narrow peninsula is everywhere the same, from its juncture with the mainland to the sandy point fifteen kilometres away, from which one sees the flash of the twinkling light on Belle Ile.
Quiberon has what may almost be called an ideal hotel, except that it is unworldly and not the least new. A travelling salesman, whom we met at Auray, told us that it was kept by an old cook, one of the Vatels of the stove. Simple and modest, but clean withal as the proverbial door-step of Holland, it is one of those inns that the traveller loves out of sheer inability to find fault with it.
Quiberon has two ports, Port Haliguen and Port Maria, both in danger of becoming popular seaside resorts, for the guide-books are already describing them as places where the sojourn will be agreeable for persons of simple habits.
The fish-market of Quiberon is one, if not the chief, of its sights for the student of manners and customs. “Cinq lubines pour douze francs et deux cent quarante maquereaux pour trente-un francs” was the way the market ran on the occasion of the visit of the author, all of which argues that Quiberon is a good place for the fish to come.
The lobsters, too, are a great feature of the trade here, and are sold by their length, measuring from the eye up to the first scale of their tails. An average price is rather over four sous, and Paris takes the best of the lot. They travel first-class and by express, the lobsters of Quiberon, when they take their first and last voyage to the “shining city,” and there are plenty of friends awaiting them at the station. They invariably arrive at the fish-market for the earliest sales, and at noon the epicure may eat them at Marguery’s, which sounds like a French version of the “Alice in Wonderland” tale.
One hour from Quiberon, by a tiny steamboat, and one finds himself skirting the cliff walls surrounding and sheltering the little port and town of Palais on Belle Ile, overlooked by the powerful citadel built by Vauban, who, as the fortress-builder of France, stood in his profession where Napoleon did in his.
This “plus belle île de l’ocean” has forty-eight kilometres of coast-line, and every one of them has been so cut and serrated by the action of the waves that the island would form a veritable ocean graveyard were it situated on the direct line of travel by sea.
For the most part, visitors content themselves with making an excursion to the northerly end of the island, a visit to the apothecary’s grotto, and another to the lantern of the great lighthouse, which at night sends its electric rays far out to sea.
What tourists may not do is to roam over the old citadel now occupied as a national fort, and this is a pity, for there they might conjure up a reminder of other days that would be like a chapter out of Dumas.
The citadel was built by Marshal de Retz in 1572, and was the refuge of the cardinal of the same name when he fled from Nantes in 1653. Not far away is the Château Fouquet. Nicholas Fouquet, Marquis of Belle Ile, was Superintendent of Finance under the regency of Anne of Austria, and continued the important office after the accession of Louis XIV. The consensus of opinion is that Fouquet was insinuating, specious, hypocritical, and sensual. It was at the great fête given by Fouquet at Vaux that the king planned his arrest, “fearing he would escape to Belle Ile,” then thought to be an impregnable fortress. Both in the pages of the historians and in the romances of Dumas one may read the story.
Belle-Ile-en-Mer, also, was made the home of Aramis after Dumas had given him episcopal rank. The minute details given in “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” would form an admirable supplement to any guide-book.
The great Sara Bernhardt has of recent years made her home on this barren and desolate isle. It is not altogether desolate, however, for there are hotels at Palais and Sauzon, and tourists, solitary and in droves, are continually making excursions thither in the season from the neighbouring Breton coast, from Vannes, Quiberon, or Lorient.
Although Belle Ile is only a pin-head on most maps of France, it has a considerable population. Palais is a town of five thousand souls, and Sauzon counts something over sixteen hundred, and so Belle Ile, being only about 21,000 acres in extent, is a very thickly populated part of the globe.
Returning to the mainland, a call at Locmariaquer is inevitable, if one be a true and genuine traveller, even if it be “out of the world,” which virtually it is, being at the tip end of another peninsula like that of Quiberon.
The town itself owns to fifteen hundred or more souls, and all of them look prosperous and contented. Where all of them get their livelihood, it is difficult to see, for there is not much intercourse with the outside world.
Locmariaquer has not even a railway, as Quiberon has, but lies twenty kilometres or so south of Auray, almost at the mouth of Morbihan Bay. The church of Locmariaquer is a fine twelfth-century work, but the foundation of the little town lies much farther back in antiquity than this. It was the ancient Doriorigum of the Romans.
The Chapel of St. Michel is built up from the Roman remains of a structure known as er c’hastel.
The great celebrities of Locmariaquer are, however, those members of the great family of menhirs, dolmens, and cromlechs with which this part of Morbihan is so thickly strewn. The chief of these are the dolmen known as Mané-Lud, Mountain of Ashes, of vast dimensions and having a grotto beneath it. Not far off is a tumulus and another dolmen known as Dol-er-Groh, an enormous stone table or altar. Another is known as Mané-er-H’roeck, the stone of the fairies; it is quite seventy feet long, or was, for it now lies full length on the ground broken into four pieces. The finest and best preserved of all is the Dol-ar-Marc’hadouiren, the Merchants’ Table. It is hard to see just the significance of the name given to these three huge stones, but they form a wonderfully impressive monument of days gone by, nevertheless.
The most beautiful dolmen known, whatever that description may really mean (the local renter of boats calls it such: “le plus beau dolmen connu”), can be visited only by boat. It is on an island in the gulf, and is known as the Gavr’inis.
La Trinité, “a little village on the very edge of the sea”! This is a description which exactly fits what the natives and the railway powers like to think is a watering-place. It is something like one, to be sure, but the influx of strangers during the summer months has never been so great as to obliterate or even to deaden the local colour. Its little harbour is lively with fishing-boats, and occasionally gay, when the boats are “dressed” for some great festival, but nothing of blatant bands and riotous crowds mars the quietness and sweetness of La Trinité, and accordingly it is a place to be remembered.
Sometimes the sterility of the soil round about causes real distress among the small farming peasants; “one cannot live on fish alone,” they say.
There is a local benefactress who, when crops are poor and meagre, gives the whole of her own harvest gathered from an unusually ample holding to her more distressed neighbours. This is a true and practical charity that does not smack of smugness or pretence as do many acts questionably classed under that head. It is a singularly expressive exemplification of what the French know as “good socialism,” and one hears much of it at La Trinité and in its neighbourhood.
Taking to the road again, on the way to Auray, one passes another of those curious granitic formations. This time it comes down more near our own day, and is called the “St. Tiviro’s hat.” It does not look the least like the saint’s hat, any more than the “devil’s seats” and the “old men of the mountains,” scattered about the world, look like what they are called—but let that pass. Legend connects this rock with a certain St. Tiviro, who one day lost his hat, which ultimately turned to stone. It does not seem plausible, and it is a pointless story indeed, but it gives a small child the opportunity to point it out for a penny, which most folk will not grudge.
CHAPTER V.
MORBIHAN—LORIENT AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
THREE towns of Morbihan little known, still less visited by travellers in Brittany, lie within a comparatively small area just north of the coast, and their names are Lorient, Hennebont, and Pont Scorff.
The very name Lorient will appeal to many. It suggests the great trade with the East, in full swing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the town grew up as a necessary part of a vast commerce. Some of the old-time romantic picturesqueness of the shipping has disappeared, and the Hotels “Royal Sword” and “White Horse” have given way to the Hotels “Modern” and “of France,” with electric lights and sheds for motor-cars, but there is still a distinguishing excellence to be remarked which makes Lorient a place well worth visiting.
It was in the seventeenth century that an association of Breton merchants, who were carrying on the trade with the East Indies, first built their warehouses here. The traffic grew to proportions so considerable that Louis XIV. ultimately gave letters patent for the foundation of a new and grander East India Company.
The company erected ship-houses here, and the name Lorient was given to the settlement, which was fast growing to a prime importance among the ports of France. An English fleet, under Admiral Lestock, landed some six or seven thousand men in the bay of Poldu, at twelve kilometres west of Lorient, and marched upon the town as a revenge for certain attacks upon British interests in the East.
The English met with no great triumph here, but Louis XV. was indifferent enough to allow many of the French settlements in the Indies to be taken, and this led to the rapid decadence of the great East India Company and its port. Napoleon resuscitated it, as he did many another decaying institution in France, and developed the industry of the port to such an extent that Lorient became one of the principal maritime towns of France. Its past history sounds romantic enough, but there is little of romance about the life of its streets and wharves to-day; instead, there is activity not admitting even the thought of romance. Jangling gongs of tram-cars, the puffing of locomotives, and the shrieks of the sirens, to say nothing of the accompaniment of belching chimney-stacks and the sound of the riveting hammers in the great shipyards, all testify that Lorient is living in the age of progress.
Local sights, outside this marvellous exposition of modern spirit, are few. There is a municipal museum, containing some good modern pictures, many of them of Breton subjects, but there are no ecclesiastical or architectural monuments worthy of remark. The commercial harbour and the dockyard are decidedly the most interesting features. Within the walls of the latter is the parade-ground, which serves as a fine promenade for the population of Lorient when the military band plays on summer evenings.
The roadstead of Lorient is a great deep-water harbour, which can shelter the largest ships afloat. It is guarded by six great lights, one of them in the cupola of the Church of St. Louis. This is one of the very few instances where a great city church is a mariner’s beacon, besides performing its other functions on behalf of lost souls.
Opposite Lorient is Port Louis, founded a century before its bigger sister. Anciently it was known as Blavet, but took its present name in honour of Louis XIII. Its walls were begun in 1652.
In the immediate neighbourhood of Lorient and Port Louis are many delightful little seaside places, hardly popular resorts in any sense of the word, but all the better for that, where one may get such views of sea and shore and shipping of all ranks as is hardly to be found elsewhere on the Breton coast.
Up the little river Blavet, at the head of deep-sea navigation, is Hennebont, a most delightfully disposed little place, which has been called the pearl of the Blavet. Like most of the tidal rivers of France, the Blavet, on its lower reaches, offers about the most paintable of all landscapes imaginable. This, with the Auray, the Aven, the Scorff, and the Elle, would prove a sketching-ground quite inexhaustible, in the variety of its moods, to the artist of an average length of life.
Hennebont, which has eight thousand or more inhabitants and a delightful inn, electric-lighted though it be, is divided into the new town and the fortified town. It sits beside the river’s bank, and crosses on a bridge of three arches. Above, the river dwindles to a mere rivulet, but below the incoming tides will bring craft of a tonnage of three hundred or more straight to the heart of the town. A tonnage of three hundred does not mean much to the travellers by twenty-thousand-ton steamships, but assuredly when one sees one of these little craft, with their three slender square-rigged masts, by the soft light of the full moon, in the little Breton port of Hennebont, it looks like the phantom ship, whose masts and spars “cross the moon like prison bars.”
Hennebont derives its name from the Breton words for old bridge. The first lord of the place, Huelin of Hennebont, lived in 1037. The fortified town was, of course, the earlier foundation, the new town only coming into existence in the sixteenth century, when the great Church of Our Lady of Paradise was still in the open country.
Trade follows the flag, but habitations follow the church, and so, when this great Gothic edifice was built in 1513-30, it began to draw the houses of the city dwellers around it, and now the fortified town is practically non-existent except as a quarter.
This church is a wonder-work of its kind, considering its great size, its graceful lines, and its ornamental Gothic spire, rising to a height which must approximate three hundred feet.
The ancient ramparts of the old fortified town appear here and there along the river-bank, in the well-preserved gateway which one passes on the left after leaving the river on the way to the church, and in yet another fragment—a great circular tower—in the courtyard of the aforesaid excellent Hôtel de France.
The old castle of Hennebont, of which something more than fragments still remain, saw the death of Comte Charles of Blois, who, escaping from his dungeon in one of the towers of the old Louvre at Paris, came here in 1345. One may read in Froissart of the defence of Hennebont by Jeanne of Montfort in 1342.
There are many old gabled houses at Hennebont, most fantastic in form, one of which, bearing the inscription, “Le Levic, 1600,” is perhaps the most ancient of any built without the walls of the fortified town.
The great fortified gateway, which gives access to the old citadel, is a fine ogival work flanked by two massive machicolated towers. This old district is quite the most curious and unworldly feature of this little city by the Blavet.
It is a veritable town of the middle ages, yet unspoiled and quite as it was in the olden days, when its sturdy walls gave protection against the invader, and its great gates opened only upon the orders of the governor.
In suburban Hennebont, scarce a kilometre away, on the left bank of the Blavet, are to be seen the remains of the old Abbaye de la Joie, a famous establishment of the monks of the Cistercian order. It was founded in the thirteenth century by Blanche of Champagne, wife of John the Red-haired. One still sees her statue in wood and bronze, but the conventual buildings themselves have come to base uses, and are now a horse-breeding establishment.
Pont Scorff, so far as its situation is concerned, resembles Hennebont. It spans the tiny river Scorff, and the views along the banks are in every way equally delightful with those on the Blavet. Pont Scorff, however, has not the magnitude or the antiquity of Hennebont, and its two parts are known as the upper town and the lower town.
The most ancient building here is the Chapel of St. John of the old commandery of St. John du Faouët; it dates at least from the thirteenth century. There is a fine Renaissance house in the little public square, called the House of the Princes. It is richly decorated and has a fine series of dormer windows and a row of pilasters bearing the symbols of the Rohan family. There is another ancient house, formerly belonging, it is believed, to the Templars. The parish Church of St. Albin dates only from 1610, and is in no way a remarkable work.
The Chapel of Notre Dame de Kergornet, a fifteenth-century edifice near by, is a place of pilgrimage for the Breton nurses, that great race of foster-mothers who care for the thousands of Parisian children in the Bois, or the gardens of the Tuileries, or the Luxembourg.
From this point, as one journeys westward, he leaves pretty much all France behind him. The modern Department of Finistère, the “Land’s End” of the French, is all that lies between him and the vast heaving Atlantic.
CHAPTER VI.
FINISTÈRE—SOUTH
AT Quimperlé one makes his first acquaintance with that part of the Armorican peninsula known to-day on the maps of France as the Department of Finistère. This charming little town is of itself of great importance, as marking the dividing-line between the dialect of Vannes and that of the western peninsula. There is no great difference to be noted by the casual traveller, since all of the younger population speak the French tongue,—sometimes exclusively,—but there is an unmistakable modification of manners and customs toward the more theatrical aspect which one best sees at Pont Aven, Pont l’Abbé, and the little fishing villages around the Bay of Douarnenez.
Of the women of Quimperlé much has been remarked by all who have ever lingered within its walls. They are “superb in type, elegant and gracious,” we were told by a French artist who had set up his easel on the quay. But there is no need to tell anybody; even a woman-hater would remark it. Certainly this is as good an entrance to a new and strange land as heart could desire.
Quimperlé lies on both sides of the little river Elle, which, like the other streams of the South Breton coast, is a special variety of waterway quite unlike their more pretentious brothers and sisters elsewhere. The country round about has been called the “Arcadia of Lower Brittany,” and so it will strike even the least observant of travellers—after he has recovered from the effects of the glances of those elegant and gracious females.
The most ancient part of the little city is that known as the walled town, grouped around the ancient Abbey of Holy Cross, on that tongue of land which separates the Isole and the Elle. The escarpment is badly built up, but withal it is ruggedly picturesque, abounding in old houses, some of which have stood since the thirteenth century.