The Church of St. Eloi was very ancient, and adorned with strange old statues of clumsily carved stone painted in garish colors. One was of a Christ waiting for the cross, His hands tied before Him. It was a hideous figure, the feet and hands huge and distorted, the eyes staring like those of a doll; yet it had an impressive look of suffering. There were no benches in the church except for our family, near the choir. The peasants, the men on one side, the women on the other, knelt on the bare earth during the office. They had used, always, when they entered the church, to pass round before les maîtres, bowing before them; but even my mother objected to this, and the curé was told to give out from the pulpit that les maîtres were no longer to be bowed to in church, where there was only one master. Maman, however, did not at all like it that my father should insist on us children kneeling with the peasants, and it was the one subject on which I remember a difference of opinion between my grandfather Rosval and papa. But the latter was firm, and Ernest on the side of the men, Eliane and I on the side of the women, we knelt through mass. This was no hardship to us, for the kind peasants spread their skirts for our little knees and regaled us all through the service with crêpes.

Crêpes seem to be present in nearly all my Breton memories. The peasants made them for us when we went to visit them in their cottages, and it would have hurt their feelings deeply had we refused them. We children delighted in these visits not only on account of the crêpes, but on account of the picturesque interest of these peasant interiors. The one living-room had an earthen floor and a huge chimney-place of stone, often quaintly carved, and so large that chairs could be set within it about the blazing logs. The room was paneled, as it were, with beds that looked, when their sliding wooden doors were closed, like tall wardrobes ranged along the walls. They were usually of dark old wood and often beautifully carved. A narrow space between the tops of these beds and the ceiling allowed some air (but what air!) to reach the sleepers, and, within, the straw was piled high, and the mattress and feather bed were laid upon it. It was quite customary for father, mother, and three or four children to sleep in one bed, several generations often occupying a room, as well as the servants, who were of the same class as their masters. The beds were climbed into by means of a carved chest that stood beside them. These were called huches, and contained the heirloom costumes, a store of bread, and the Sunday shoes! Potatoes were kept under the bed. In the window stood the table where the family and servants all ate together, and above it hung, suspended by a pulley and string from the ceiling, a curious contrivance for holding spoons. It was a sort of wooden disk, and the spoons were held in notches cut round the edge; it was lowered when needed, and each person took a spoon. A great earthenware bowl of creamy milk stood in the center of the table, and with each mouthful of porridge, or fare, the spoons were dipped, in community, into the milk. Fare was a sort of thick porridge made of maize, allowed to cool in a large round cake, and cut in slices when cold. It was one of the peasants' staple dishes, and another was the porridge made of oatmeal, rye, or buckwheat, served hot, with a lump of butter. For breakfast they all drank café au lait, strong coffee boiled with the milk; fortunately milk and butter were plentiful. Of the hygienic habits of the peasants at this time the less said the better; a very minor detail was that the long hair of the men and the closely coiffed tresses of the women swarmed with vermin, and after every visit we paid, our heads were always carefully examined. One peasant, I remember, a good fellow, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mask of dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen, with singular bad taste, began to make fun of poor Paul, who sat much abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed afterward to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father afterward with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and gazing at him:

"Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!"

"And why don't you ever wash your face, Paul?" papa asked him then, and Paul explained that he had never been taught to wash and was afraid it would seriously hurt him to begin. Papa undertook to teach him. He got soap and soda and hot water and lathered Paul, gently and firmly, until at last his very agreeable features were disinterred. Paul was perfectly delighted, and his face shone with cleanliness ever after.

A special friend of mine among the peasants was dear old Keransiflan, the lodge-keeper. I was fond of joining him while he tended the road in front of the lodge-gates and sitting on his wheelbarrow with him to talk to him while he ate his midday meal. This consisted of a huge slice of black bread thickly spread with butter, and it seemed to me that no bread and butter had ever looked so good.

One day he must have seen how much I longed for it, for he said, holding out the slice, "Demoiselle, en veux-tu?" I did not need to be asked twice, and can still see the great semicircle that I bit into the slice, and I was happily munching when maman appeared at the lodge-gates. She was very much displeased, and mainly that I should be devouring poor Keransiflan's luncheon, and she rated me so soundly that the kind old man interceded for me, saying, "Notre maîtresse, c'est moi qui lui l'ai donné." I think that maman must have seen that it gave him great pleasure to share his bread with me; at all events, Keransiflan and I, sitting on our wheelbarrow, were allowed to go on eating in peace.

But the peasants were a hard, harsh race and pitiless in their dealings toward one another. Their treatment of their old people was terrible. If an old mother, past work, had no money, she was ruthlessly turned out to beg. One sometimes saw such an old woman sitting on a talus, her pitiful bundle of rags beside her, helpless and stupefied. I remember a story that was told me by one of my servants about such an old woman that she had known. She had four hundred francs, and was cared for in the family of one son until it was spent, when she was turned out. Another son more kindly took her in; but his wife was a hard woman, and though she finally consented to accept the useless old mother into the household, she grudged every sou spent upon her. Thus, though the only two joys remaining her in life were snuff and coffee, only two sous a week was allowed her for tobacco, and as for coffee, she was given never a drop. When she was dying she told the servant from whom I had the story that what made her suffer most had been to sit by in the morning and smell the delicious odor of the coffee as the others drank it. This has always seemed to me a heart-piercing story. All the Breton women smoked, by the way, and pipes, and in a curious fashion; for the bowl was turned downward, though why, I do not know.

CHAPTER X

THE PARDON AT FOLGOAT

I was taken while I was a child at Loch-ar-Brugg to the famous Pardon de Folgoat, to which people came from all Brittany. In Folgoat was the summer residence of Anne de Bretagne, and in the vast hall of the château she had held her audiences. The château is now the presbytery, and is opposite the church, of which there is a legend. A poor child, Yann Salacin, who was devoid of reason, spent hours every day before the altar of the Virgin, which he decorated with the wild flowers that he gathered in the fields, and wandered in the forest, swinging on the branches of the trees, always singing Ave Maria, the only words he was ever heard to pronounce. He begged for food from door to door and slept in the barns. The peasants became impatient with him and began to whisper that he was possessed of an evil spirit, and at last they drove him out of the village. The curé, who was a good man, missed him in the church, sought vainly for him, and at last heard what had happened. He was filled with indignation, and told the peasants that they had committed a crime. Then he set out to look for poor Yann, and found him at last in a distant forest, dead with hunger. He brought the body back to Folgoat and buried it near the church, and one day he saw that a tall white lily had grown up from the grave; when he opened the grave he found that the lily sprang from the lips of the little innocent, and on the petals of the flower one could read in letters of gold Ave Maria. This legend is believed in all Brittany, and a stained-glass window in the church tells the story.

Behind the church is the Well of Love, so called because not a day passes that lovers do not come to test their fate by trying to float pins upon the surface of the water. If the pins float, all promises well, and they go away happy. Astute ones slightly grease the pins, and thus aid destiny.

But to return to the pardon. I remember that on this occasion an old cook in the family had permission to start two or three days before the pardon, so that she might go all the way on her knees, and during those days one met many such devout pilgrims making their way on their knees along the dusty roads. Some of them came from far distances. We children were called before dawn on the August morning, and it was a sleepy, half-bewildered dressing by candle-light. As a closed carriage made me sick, I was put into the coupé with papa and maman. Eliane, Ernest, their nurses, and all the other servants, followed in a sort of omnibus, and behind them came all the horses, trotting gaily along the road to share in the blessings of this great day of the Assumption of the Virgin. The horses of Brittany, it will be conceded, are a specially favored race. Although I was in the coupé and had all the freshness of the early air to invigorate me, I remember of the journey from Loch-ar-Brugg to Folgoat only that I was deplorably sick, and the greatest inconvenience to my parents. Fortunately, I was restored the moment I set my feet upon the ground.

We were to be entertained for the day at Folgoat by the curé, and to lunch with him and with the bishops at the presbytery; but we were already ravenously hungry, so, although papa and maman must continue to fast until after taking communion at the early service, we children had a splendid picnic breakfast in the presbytery garden, and a jellied breast of lamb is my first recollection of the day at Folgoat! Then we went out to see the great festival. Seventy-five years or more have passed since that day, and it still lives in my mind with a beauty more than splendid, a divine beauty. In the vast plain, under the vast, blue sky, six bishops, glittering with gold and precious stones, celebrated mass simultaneously at six great altars among thousands of worshipers. It was a sea of color under the August sun, and the white coiffes of the women were like flocks of snowy doves. There was an early mass, and the high mass at eleven. When this was over, we assembled at the presbytery to lunch with the bishops. The table was laid in Anne de Bretagne's council-chamber, its stone walls covered with archaic figures, and it must have been a picturesque sight to see the bishops sitting in all their splendor against that ancient background; but what I most remember are the stories they told of Louis XI and his misdeeds, which seemed to me more interesting and more cruel than the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba and his forty thieves. In the church itself was shown a superbly carved bench where, it was said, while praying, he ordered with a nod the death of a Breton noble who had refused to do him homage. When we went into the church after lunch to see this bench, I sat down on it, and my long golden curls were caught in the claws of the interlaced monsters on the back, and I hurt myself so much in wrenching myself free that I hated still more fiercely the wicked king who condemned men to death while he prayed. O the horrid monster!

Then at three came the great procession. First went the six bishops, mitered and carrying their croziers; then followed the children of the noblesse, we among them, all in white, with white wreaths on our heads; then all the vast multitude, twenty or thirty abreast, singing canticles, a stupendous sight and sound, all marching round the plain, from altar to altar, under the burning sun. I remember little after that. The Marquis de Ploeuc was there, his hair tied in the catogan, and wearing his black silk suit: I think he must have lunched with us at the curé's. It was arranged that he and his two eldest daughters were to drive back to Loch-ar-Brugg with maman and spend some days with us, and so, though I must have been very tired, I was to ride back beside papa on my pony, which had been duly blessed. It was already night when we started, and what a wonderful ride it was! I remember no fatigue. I still wore my white dress, and maman swathed my head and shoulders in a white lace shawl, and all the way back to Loch-ar-Brugg papa told me stories of hunts, of fairies, of saints, and of escaped convicts. Every group of trees, every rock, every turning in the road, had its legend or its adventure.

CHAPTER XI

BONNE MAMAN'S DEATH

We were at Quimper when bonne maman died. She had been failing for some time, and her character, until then so gentle, had altered. Mere trifles disquieted her, and she became fretful, alarmed, and even impatient. She seemed so little in her big bed, and, when I wanted to climb up beside her, after my wont, she signed to Jeannie to take me away and said that it tired her too much to see children and that the air of a sick-room was not good for them. "Tell my daughter—tell her. They must not come!" she repeated several times in a strange, shrill voice. I slid down from the bed, I remember, abashed and disconcerted, and while I longed to see my dear bonne maman as I had known her, I was afraid of this changed bonne maman; and it hurt me more for her than for myself that she should be so changed.

But one day when maman was in the room, she caught sight of me hanging about furtively in the passage, and called out gently to me to go away, that bonne maman was tired and was going to sleep. Then a poor little voice, no longer shrill, very trembling, came from the bed, saying: "Let her come, Eliane. It will not hurt me. I want to see her for a moment."

I approached the bed, walking on tiptoe; the curtains were drawn to shade bonne maman from the sunlight, and I softly came and stood within them. O my poor bonne maman! I could hardly recognize her. She seemed old—old and shrunken, and her eyes no longer smiled. She looked at me so fixedly that I was frightened, and she said to maman:

"Lift her up on the bed. I want to kiss her." She took my hand then, and looked at my little finger as she always used to do, and said: "I see that you have been very good with your mother, but that you don't obey your nurse. You must always be obedient. You understand me, don't you, Sophie? Do you say your prayers?"

"Yes, bonne maman," I answered.

"Have you said them this morning?"

"No, bonne maman."

"Say them now."

I made the sign of the cross and said the following prayer, which I repeated morning and evening every day, and with slightly altered nomenclature, my children and grandchildren have repeated, as I did, until the age of reason: "Mon Dieu, bless me and bless and preserve grand-père, bonne maman, maman, papa, my sisters, my brother, Tiny" [this was my little dog], "Ghislaine, France, Kerandraon, all my family, and make me very good. Amen." When I had finished, bonne maman drew me gently to her, pressed me in her arms, and kissed me on my eyes.

After this, for how many days I do not remember, everything became very still in the house. The servants whispered when they had to speak, and the older people, when they met us, told us gently to go into the garden and to be very quiet. We did not see maman or papa at all. My tante de Laisieu was with us, and dear France. Bon papa arrived from Paris. One morning was very sunny and beautiful, and as I played with Eliane in the garden I forgot the oppression that weighed upon us and began to sing to her a Breton song which Jeannie had taught me. These were the words:

While I sang I looked up at bonne maman's window, for I knew how fond she was of hearing me. The window was shut, and this was unusual; so I sang the louder, that she should hear me, of Fleurette and le Roy. Then France and one of the servants came running out of the house, and I saw that both had been crying, and France put his arm about me while the servant said, "Mademoiselle must not sing." And France whispered: "You will wake bonne maman. Go into the orchard, dear Sophie. There you will not be heard." In the evening papa came for us in the nursery, and I saw that he, too, had been crying. I had never before seen tears in his dear eyes. He took us up to maman's room. All the blinds were drawn down, but I could see her lying on her bed, in her white woolen peignoir, her arms crossed behind her head, her black jet rosary lying along the sheet beside her. We kissed her, one after the other, and I saw the great tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Maman—is bonne maman very ill?" I whispered. I felt that something terrible had happened to us all.

"My little girl," said maman, "your poor bonne maman does not suffer any more. She is very happy now with the angels and le bon Dieu," but maman was sobbing as she spoke.

I knew death only as it had come to one of my little birds that lived in the round cage hung in the nursery-window, and I was very much frightened when papa said: "I am going to take Sophie to your mother's room, Eliane. She is old enough to understand." But I went with him obediently, holding his hand. Outside bonne maman's door he paused and stooped to kiss me and said: "I know how much you loved your bonne maman, Sophie, and I want you to say good-by to her, for you will never see her again. She loved you so much, my little darling, and you shall be the last one to kiss her." The room was all black, and in the middle stood the bed. Beside it, on a table, a little chapelle had been made with a great silver cross and candelabra with lighted tapers. A bunch of fresh box stood in a goblet of holy water. Bonne maman lay with her arms stretched out before her, the hands clasped on her black wooden crucifix with a silver Christ that had always hung upon her wall. Her hair was not dressed, but drawn up from her forehead and covered with a mantilla of white silk Spanish lace, which fell down over her shoulders on each side. I stood beside her holding papa's hand. Her profile was sharply cut against the blackness, and I had never before seen how beautiful it was. Her eyes were closed, and she smiled tranquilly. I felt no longer any fear; but when papa lifted me in his arms so that I might kiss bonne maman and my lips touched her forehead, a great shock went through me. How cold her forehead was! O my poor bonne maman! Even now, after all the lusters that have passed over me, I feel the cold of that last kiss.

CHAPTER XII

THE JOURNEY FROM BRITTANY

It was not long after bonne maman's death that we left Brittany and went to Paris to live with bon papa. I remember every detail of this my first long journey. The day began with a very early breakfast, which we all had together in the dining-room and at which we had the great treat of drinking chocolate. Then came the complicated business of stowing us all away in our capacious traveling-carriage. It was divided into three compartments. First came what was called the coupé, with windows at the sides and a large window in front from which we looked out past the coachman's red-stockinged legs and along the horses' backs to where the postilion jounced merrily against the sky in a red Breton costume like the coachman's, his long hair tied behind with black ribbon, a red jockey's cap on his head, and black shoulder-knots with jet aiguillettes. After the coupé, and communicating with it by a tiny passage, though it had doors of its own, was another compartment for maids, nurses, and children, and behind that another and larger division for all the other servants. On the top were seats beside the coachman, and papa spent most of the day up there smoking. The luggage, carried on the top, was covered by a great leather covering, buckled down all over it, called a bache. The horses were post-horses, renewed at every post. It was decided that I was to go in the coupé with maman, papa, and little Maraquita, as I should get more fresh air there. I wore, I remember, a red cashmere dress made out of a dress of maman's. The material had been brought from India and was bordered with a design of palm-leaves. Indeed, this red cashmere must have provided me with a succession of dresses, for I remember that when I made my entrée at the Sacré Cœur years afterwards, the bishop, visiting the convent, stopped, smiling, at my bench, and said, "Why, this is a little Republican, is it not?" Eliane and I both wore capulets on our heads. These were squares of white cloth that fell to the shoulders and that folded back from the forehead and fastened under the chin with bands of black velvet, a Spanish head-dress. Our cloaks were the full cloaks, gathered finely around the neck and shoulders, that maman had made for us, copied from the peasants' cloaks, of foulard for summer and wool for winter. Little Maraquita, who spent most of the three days' journey on maman's knees, wore, as always until she was seven or eight, white and pale blue, the Virgin's colors, as she had been vouée au bleu et au blanc after a terrible accident that had befallen her in infancy. She had fallen into the fire at Landerneau, and her head and forehead had been badly burned, and maman had thus dedicated her to the Virgin with prayers that she might not be disfigured—prayers that were more than answered, for Maraquita became exquisitely beautiful. Papa, I may add here, had many friends and connections in Spain; hence my little sister's name, and hence our capulets.

Eliane and Ernest traveled in the second compartment with their nurses, Eliane carrying Tiny and her huge doll, and Ernest, unfortunately for our peace of mind, a drum of mine that I had given him and upon which he beat the drumsticks hour after hour. Maman, in the coupé, cried out at intervals that it was intolerable to hear such an incessant noise and that the child must really, now, be made to stop; but papa always mildly soothed her, saying: "Let him play. It keeps him distracted; he would probably be crying otherwise." So Ernest continued to roll his drum. In the coupé I was fully occupied in playing at horses. Real leather reins had been fixed at each side of the front window, passing under it so that, looking out over the horses' haunches, I had the delightful illusion, as I wielded the reins, of really driving them. I do not remember that I was sick at all on the first day. The country was mountainous, and at every steep hill we all got out and walked down, and this also, probably helped to preserve me. One feature of the Brittany landscape of those days stands out clearly in my memory, the tall, sinister-looking telegraph-poles that stood, each one just visible to the last, on the heights of the country. When I say telegraph it must not be imagined that they were our modern electric installations, although so they were called. These were of a very primitive and very ingenious construction. At the top of each pole, by means of the projecting arm that gave it the look of a gallows, immense wooden letters were hung out, one after the other; these letters were worked by means of wires that passed down the poles into the little hut at its foot. Each wire at the bottom had a label with its corresponding letter, and the operator in the hut, by pulling the wire, pulled the letter into its place at the top of the pole, and was thus able laboriously to spell out the message he had to convey and to make it visible to the operator at the next post, who passed it on to the next. These clumsy telegrams could be sent, as far as I remember, only at certain hours of the day, and I think that it must have been during a wayside halt on this journey that I visited a hut with papa and had the system explained to me and saw a message being sent, for I remember the clatter and shaking as the big letters overhead were pulled into place. I do not know whether this method of communication was used all over France, but one or two of the old poles still survive in Brittany.

Our first stop that day was at Quimperlé. The postilion, as we approached a town or village, sounded his horn, and what excitement it caused in these quiet little places when we came driving up, and how all the people crowded round us!

The inn at Quimperlé was called the Hôtel du Trèfle Noir, and though very primitive, the thatch showing through the rafters in the roof of the immense kitchen-dining-room, it was scrupulously clean. We all sat down together at the long table, servants, coachman, postilion, and all, and the déjeuner served to us by the good landlady was fit to put before a king. I remember maman laughing and asking her why she served the salmon and, afterward, a heaping golden mound of fried potatoes, on a great plank, and the landlady saying that she had no dishes large enough. There was a turkey, too, stuffed with chestnuts and of course crêpes and cream. Next door to us, in a smaller room, a band of commercial travelers were also lunching, and as we finished each course it was carried in to those cheerful young fellows, whose hurrahs of joy added zest to our own appetites. That night we slept at Rennes, where I remember only that I was very tired and that a horrid man who came to make a fire in our bedrooms spat upon the floor, to our disgust and indignation. I remember, too, a very pleasant crisp cake, or roll, that maman gave me to eat before I went to bed.

It was on the third day that we drove at last into Paris, a fairy-land to my gazing, stupefied eyes. What struck me most were the fountains of the Place de la Concorde, the bronze mermaids holding the spouting fish, and the little sunken gardens, four of them, that at that time surrounded the obelisk. Bon papa lived in the rue St. Dominique, St. Germain, and as we drove up to the door I remember that it was under blossoming acacia-trees and that the postilion blew a great blast upon his horn to announce our arrival. The house, which was, indeed, a very pleasing specimen of Louis XV architecture, looked palatial to my childish eyes. Bon papa was standing, very portly, on the terrace to welcome us, and we ran into a park behind the house, with an avenue of horse-chestnuts and a high fountain. But Brittany was left far behind, and many, many years were to pass before I again saw my Loch-ar-Brugg.

THE END