“O landes, O forêts, pierres sombres et hautes,Bois qui couvrez nos champs, mers qui battez nos côtes,Villages où les morts errent avec les ventes,Bretagne! d’où te vient l’amour de tes enfants.”
“O landes, O forêts, pierres sombres et hautes,Bois qui couvrez nos champs, mers qui battez nos côtes,Villages où les morts errent avec les ventes,Bretagne! d’où te vient l’amour de tes enfants.”
Brittany in early days had a parliament the most important in France. Armorica was its more ancient name, which in old Breton signified “near to the sea,” or “on the sea.”
From the beginning of the fifth century, for a matter of perhaps a hundred years, the peninsula was known as Armorique, and its people as Armoricans. After this time the name disappeared from general use, and Brittany and Breton came. From the sixth century onward the change became permanent, and such chroniclers as Gregory of Tours, for instance, always referred to Britannia, Britanniœ, Britanni, and Britones, in writing of the peninsula and its people.
When first peopled from Britain across the Channel, Brittany was the most thinly populated part of all Gaul. Each wave of immigration, as the Britons from across the water fledfrom the invading Saxons, added to the population of the land, until ultimately it became as a hundred Britons against ten Armoricans. At least, this is the way the French historians and antiquaries put it, and so Armorique became Brittany, and such is the origin of French Brittany, quite independent of the etymology of the word Breton itself.
The inhabitants even to-day—more than in any other of the ancient provinces of France—have preserved the ancient nomenclature of the land and its people, and everywhere one finds only Bretons whose home is Brittany.
Mercator, the map-maker, was more of a success than Mercator, the historical chronicler. He said of the Bretons, in 1595, that they were “for the most part avaricious and largely given to making distinctions between glasses and tumblers.” As a matter of record, this is not so true of the Bretons as it is of the Normans, or of the Germans, or of the Spaniards. Up to the time of Cæsar the name Armorica seems to have been applied to all the coast of Northwestern France of to-day, with a little strip running as far south as the mouth of the Garonne, but more particularly it afterward designated the peninsula of Brittany as we know it to-day.
The region was early put under the guardianship of a chieftain, who invariably, here as elsewhere in those days, took advantage of every opportunity to advance his frontiers.
This attempted aggrandizement was not so successful here as in other parts, and by the fifth century Armorica had shrunk to the region lying entirely between the Seine and the Loire. In the life of St. Germain of Auxerre one reads:
“Gens inter geminos notissima clauditur amnesArmoricana prius veteri cognomine dicta est.”
Finally, at the close of the sixth century, Armorica merged itself in Brittany, but the “Concile de Tours” makes a remarkable distinction between the new settlers and those who had previously been known as Romans. This distinction was also clearly made by St. Samson, who wrote in the seventh century that Britannia was the name given to Armorica by the exiled Britons who had fled from the Saxons and the Angles and had there taken up their home.
Before the Roman conquest there were five tribes in the country, named by Cæsar as the Nannetes, the Veneti, the Osismii, the Curiosolitæ, and the Rhedones,—names which, with but slight evolution, exist even to-day. Things went on quietly under Roman control, but whenClovis became the master of a part of Gaul he was obliged to treat with the Armoricans. Finally the Britons from across the sea came “like a torrent,” and established themselves, changing the names of certain regions to Cornouaille, Léon, Bro-Waroch, etc. Conquered in 799 by a lieutenant of Charlemagne, the Bretons revolted again some little time after, and, at the death of the great emperor, successfully withstood the attacks of the formidable army which Louis the Amiable had sent against them. For a quarter of a century Brittany now suffered attack and pillage by the Normans, relieved only when Alain Barbe-Torte drove the invaders from his territory. Previous to the Norman inroad, the Bretons lived in petty tribes, of which each formed a “plou,” a prefix still often met with in Breton place-names. The chief of aplouwas known as amachtiern.
Up to this time no foreign customs had been introduced, but, after the victories of Alain Barbe-Torte, tribal organization was succeeded by that of the fief.
By the tenth century feudalism was thoroughly established throughout most of the ancient provinces of France, and the land was covered with seigniories, great and small, the one more or less dependent upon the other.Dukes, counts, and seigneurs, each in his own territory, played the hereditary sovereign in little, and above them was the suzerain power of which they were vassals.
After the expulsion of the Normans, the ancient Breton kingdoms of Domnonée, Cornouaille, and Bro-Waroch disappeared, and the sovereign of all Brittany bore the title of duke.
Historians write of the nine ancient barons of Brittany, among whom was divided the governmental control of the country, all of them being virtually subject to the reigning duke. They were:
These original baronies expanded into a round hundred by the fifteenth century, and the list of them contains the ancestral names of the Breton nobility.
Henry II. of England dealt severely withBrittany, but his son Geoffrey married Constance, the daughter of Duke Conan IV., and this made the condition of the province more tolerable.
The first step toward the union of Brittany with the kingdom of France came when—through the intrigues of Philip Augustus—the daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet married Pierre Mauclerc, Count of Dreux, and a prince of the blood royal of France. Joan of Penthièvre also married the Count of Blois, another lieutenant of the King of France.
enlarge-imageDevice of Anne of BrittanyDevice of Anne of Brittany
Device of Anne of Brittany
The war of succession in Brittany between the ducal houses of Blois and Montfort was, up to the fourteenth century, the principal event of the province’s early history. The Montforts achieved final victory at Auray in 1364. Upon the death of Francis II., his daughter Anne, the chief figure in all Breton history, so far asexisting memorials of her life are concerned, became duchess.
enlarge-imageAnne of BrittanyAnne of Brittany
Anne of Brittany
In 1491, she married Charles VIII. of France, and eight years later his successor, Louis XII. The daughter of this last marriage, the Princess Claude of France, married the Duke of Angoulême, afterward Francis the First, and the fortunes of Brittany and France were thenceforth indissolubly allied, for, upon becoming Queen Claude of France, the inheritor of Brittany ceded the province to her royal spouse and his descendants in perpetuity. Queen Claude died in 1524, which event for ever assured France of this province,—the most beautiful gem in the royal crown. The union of Brittany and France was celebrated with much pomp in 1532.
The ancient county or duchy of Bretagne was bordered on the east by Anjou and Maine, on the west by the Atlantic, on the north bythe British Channel and Normandy, and on the south by Poitou. The province had two territorial divisions, Upper and Lower, and Rennes was the parliamentary capital.
Upper Brittany comprised the five episcopal dioceses of Dol, Nantes, Rennes, Saint-Brieuc, and St. Malo, and Lower Brittany counted four similar divisions, Quimper, St. Pol de Léon, Tréguier, and Vannes. Thus the political divisions of a former day corresponded exactly with those of the Church.
To-day Brittany is divided into five departments: Côtes du Nord, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine, Loire-Inférieure, and the Morbihan.
The administrative government of Brittany, or rather of its present-day departments, like that of the rest of France, radiates from the capital of the department, which is the residence of the prefect, the tax-collector, the bishop, and, in general, of all heads of departments. The chief town is also the seat of the General Council and (with few exceptions) of the assize court.
The most ancient codified law of Brittany was known as the little book, but the manuscript copy has been lost. The most ancient work which recites the “customs” of this great province dates only from 1330. This curiousdocument is known as the “Very Ancient Law,” and contains 336 articles. “The Ancient Law” was compiled and published at Nantes in 1549, and contains 779 articles.
Brittany has been, and perhaps ever will be, considered by Frenchmen an alien land, where, in its great plains and mountainous regions, in the valleys of its bubbling rivers, and on its rock-bound shores, the people, one and all, “speak a tongue so ancient and so strange that he who hears it dreams of a vanished race.”
Yes, Brittany is a land of menhirs, of legends and superstitions, but all this but makes a roundabout journey the more enjoyable, and one must really cross and recross it to its uttermost confines in order to realize its great variation of manners and customs, to say nothing of speech, for, even though the Breton tongue is dying out as a universal language, one still buys his post-card with a queer legend on its face, which looks like Dutch at first glance, but really is Breton.
In Madame de Sévigné’s time the ladies of Lower Brittany were famous for their beauty. In “Letter XLIV.,” written to her daughter, Madame de Sévigné said: “Many beauties of Lower Brittany were present at the greatball, the brilliant Mademoiselle de L——, a fine girl who dances very well.”
enlarge-imageBreton Post-cardBreton Post-card
Breton Post-card
Things do not seem to have changed greatly to-day, and, although Madame de Sévigné wrote of court beauties only, in the Lower Province one frequently meets such beauty of face as one does not see everywhere in France. It must be owned that the figures, if not exactly found wanting, are often too ample. The sternness of the land, like the bleakness of Holland, has, apparently, added no end of grace to the features of the women, whatever may have been its hardening effect upon the men.
In Cornouaille, LatinCornu-Galliæ, one finds almost the same name and the same derivationas in English Cornwall, and the topographical aspect is much the same in both instances. “The people of Cornuaille are faithful to tradition, and above all others merit the name of Bretons,” says J. Guillon.
The Province of Léon forms the northern part of the Department of Finistère. The name was a development from Pagus Legionensis, a large military colony having been quartered there in Roman times.
In the south the ancient Breton Province of Bro-Waroch became the county of Vannes, the counts being in reality dependents of the Duke of Brittany; their people spoke, and retain even to-day, a distinct dialect, greatly varying from that of the rest of Brittany.
In the earliest times, both Nantes and Rennes were the seat of important administrative governments, but the Counts of Nantes ceded their fiefs to the Bretons in the eleventh century. Chief of these were the fiefs of the Baron of Retz, the Seigneur de Clisson, who defended the southern frontier against Poitou, and the Baron of Ancenis, who was the bulwark between Brittany and Anjou.
In the north, the ancient Breton kingdom of Domnonée was, in the twelfth century, dividedinto two counties, that of Penthièvre and Tréguier.
It was Duke Geoffrey who introduced feudalism of the Anglo-Norman and French variety. In earlier times, when a nobleman died, his children divided his lands and goods in equal parts among them, but in Normandy and France the estate went to the eldest of the line.
It was only in the twelfth century that the Bretons went outside their own domain. Previously, they were decidedly an untravelled race, but under Philip the Fair Paris came to know Breton well, though chiefly through the poorer classes.
They went to the schools and seminaries of Orleans to become clerics; sold their cattle and horses in the markets of Paris, and their wheat in Maine and Anjou, and their feudal lords, it is perhaps needless to say, bought their dress in the capital of fashion, and their wines in Gascony. From this time, Brittany may be said to have been opened to the world.
Not always were the Bretons a peaceful, law-abiding race, at least they did not always appear in such a light to their contemporaries. According to Bouchart, Duke Francis II. received a letter wherein his brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, said: “Monseigneur, I declareto God, I would rather be the ruler of a million of wild boars than of such a people as are your Bretons.”
In 1460, Francis II. founded the University of Nantes, thus doing away with the necessity of the young Breton’s going to Paris, Orleans, or Angers for his education.
Printing was discovered in Germany, and all in good time it appeared in Brittany, at Lannion, and at Tréguier. There were establishments devoted to the art even before they existed in such important places as Lyons or Montpellier. One of the first books printed in Brittany was a French-Breton dictionary, published in 1499, and known as the Catholicon of Jean Lagadeuc.
By this time, a remarkable form of government, unique in all the world, was established in Brittany. In some respects it was modelled on the English Parliament, but in no way resembled that of the French legislative body.
The Estates met each year at Rennes, at Vannes, at Nantes, at Redon, at Vitré, or at Dinan, and at last, under Francis II., Parliament came to be a fixture at Rennes.
Even after the union of Brittany with France, the ancient rights, privileges, and liberties were assured to the old province until the Revolution.These sittings of the Estates at Rennes were sumptuous affairs, accompanied by a round of feasting and dancing at which appeared all the aristocracy who could.
Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter of one of the grand affairs as follows:
“The good cheer is excessive; the roasts are brought on entire, and the pyramids of fruit are so huge as to make it necessary to take down the doors for their entrance.... After dinner, MM. de Locmaria and Coëtlegon danced with two Breton girls, taking some amazing steps.... Play is continuous, balls endless, and thrice a week there are comedies.”
The relations between the nobility and peasantry in seventeenth-century Brittany were perhaps closer and more affectionate than in any other part of France. The noblemen frequently visited the peasants on their farms, and on Sunday the peasants danced in the courts of the castles and manor-houses.
“Virtually, under the old system, Brittany was peopled by rural nobility,” says Cambry, and indeed this must have been so, for within a small radius of Plougasnou were more than two hundred noblemen’s houses, “so poor,” says the chronicler, “that their inhabitantsmight well be classed with the labourers themselves.”
Brittany’s part in the Revolution was equivocal. The Republicans really had beaten the Royalists, but they had also aided the Girondins, and at Paris the Girondins were as much hated as the Royalists themselves. The Convention sent its representatives into the province, not to thank the Bretons for their help in the great struggle, but with the idea of still further arousing the passions of the people.
Among these representatives were Geurmer, Prieur de la Marne, Jean-Bon-St.-Andre, and the rascally and heartless Carrier, who drowned his hundreds at Nantes, and guillotined twenty-six Bretons in one day at Brest.
The Breton feeling and sympathy was in the main with the Republicans, though manifestly the majority had no sympathy with the rule of the Terrorists. It is curious to note, however, the change in the nomenclature of places in the endeavour to eliminate the religious and aristocratic prefixes and suffixes with which many of the Breton place-names were endowed.
St. Cast became Havre-Cast.
St. Fiacre became Fiacre-les-Bois.
St. Gildas became Gildas du Chaneau.
St. Gilles-les-Bois became Bellevue.
St. Jacut-de-la-Mer became Isle Jacut and Port Jacut.
Chateaulin became Cité sur Aôn.
Pont l’Abbé became Pont Marat.
Quimper became Montagne sur Odet.
St. Martin des Champs became Unité des Champs.
St. Pol de Léon became Port Pol.
Belle Ile en Mer became Ile de l’Unité.
Château Fouquet became Maison-des-Sans-Culottes.
Isle aux Moins became Isle du Morbihan.
Roche-Bernard became La Roche Sauveur.
Rochefort en Terre became Roche des Trois.
St. Gildas de Rhuis became Abélard.
St. Briac became Port Briac.
St. Lunaire became Port Lunaire.
St. Malo became Port Malo.
St. Servan became Port Solidor.
With the incoming of the Empire, most of these names reverted to their early form.
In our day, while many of the old provinces of France have suffered—if they really do “suffer”—from a decreasing population, Brittany has augmented her numbers continually. It is a well-worn saying among the political economists of France that the “fine and healthy race of Bretons is one of the greatestreserves and hopes of the republic.” Three-quarters of all those who man French ships come from the Breton peninsula.
Hamerton has said that no race, more than the English, had so strong a tendency to form attachments for places outside their native land. There may be many reasons for this, and assuredly the subject is too vast and varied to be more than hinted at here. Brittany, at any rate, has proved, in and out of season, a haven, as safe as a home-port, for the Briton and his family, when they would not wander too far. Possibly it comes after Switzerland, though France as a whole, “the most architectural country in Europe,” has been sadly neglected, for, as has been said before, no Englishman ever loved France as Browning loved Italy.
The native love of the Frenchman for the land of his birth is, to him, above all else. It is almost incomprehensible to an outsider; it is something more than mere patriotism; it is the love of an artist for his picture, as Balzac said of his love of Touraine. This sentiment goes deep. After the province comes the immediate environment of his village, and then the village. “Rien n’est plus beau que mon village, en verité je vous le dis.” Thus has written and spoken many a great Frenchman.
Nowhere in the known world is provincialism so deep and profound a trait as in France; and the Breton is always a Breton, contemptuous of the Norman, God-fearing, and peaceful toward all. There is throughout France always an intense provincial rivalry, though it seldom rises to hatred or even to jealousy.
Probably there is no great amount of truth in the following quatrain, evidently composed by a resident of Finistère, and there first heard by the writer of this book, but it reflects those little rivalries and ambitions which have appeared in the daily life-struggle among the inhabitants of other nations since the world began:
“Voleur comme un Léonard,Traitre comme un Trégarrais,Sot comme un Vannetais,Brutal comme un Cornouaillais.”
“Voleur comme un Léonard,Traitre comme un Trégarrais,Sot comme un Vannetais,Brutal comme un Cornouaillais.”
Sometimes the love of one’s own country may be carried to an extreme. We read that for long years, and until recently, the inhabitants of Trélaze positively refused to assimilate with outside conditions of life to the least degree, and finding a Breton of this little zone or islet who spoke French was as improbable as to find one who spoke English. At St. Brieuc there is a special quarter where the Breton-speakingfolk live to the number of two thousand, and this out of a population of only twenty-two thousand, while at Nantes the Bretons number ten thousand. At Angers there is a large and apparently growing Breton colony; likewise at Havre, in Normandy, where they have a special chapel in which the priest preaches in the Breton tongue. At Paris, too, there are various Breton colonies, and the Church of St. Paul and St. Louis, in St. Anthony’s Street, has a Breton priest. It is the same with the church of Vaugirard. At Havre there are something over three thousand Breton-speaking persons, and in Paris seven thousand.
Perhaps Brittany has produced fewer great painters and sculptors than any other section of France, but all Bretons are artists in no very small way, as witness their wonderfully picturesque dress and their charmingly stage-managed fêtes and ceremonies.
The pioneer painter of Breton subjects was doubtless Adolph Leleux, who, as one of the romantic school in Paris, found in this province what many another of his contemporaries was seeking for elsewhere, and discovered Brittany, as far as making it a popular artists’ sketching-ground is concerned. His first paintings ofthis region were exhibited in the Salons of 1838-39-40, and Paris raved over them. His peasant folk, with their embroidered waistcoats and broad-brimmed hats, had the very atmosphere of Brittany.
enlarge-imageSt. BrieucSt. Brieuc
St. Brieuc
Leleux’s success was the signal for a throng of artists to follow in his footsteps, and to-day their number is countless, and the very names of even the most famous would form too long a list to catalogue here.
Among Leleux’s most celebrated canvases were “La Karolle, Danse Bretonne” 1843; “Les Faneuses,” 1846; “Le Retour du Marché,” 1847; “Cour de Cabaret,” 1857; “Jour de Fête en Basse Bretagne,” 1865; and successively the “Foire Bretonne,” “Les Braconniers,” “Le Pêcheur de Homards,” “Pèlerinage Breton,” and “Le Cri du Chouan.”
In all these works one finds the true Brittany of Rosporden and Penmarc’h.
Fortin’s “Cahute de Mendicant dans le Finistère” (1857), “La Bénédicité,” and “La Chaumière du Morbihan” follow Leleux as a good second, then Trayers with “Marché Breton and “Marchande de Crepes à Quimperlé.”
Among other noted pictures are Darjours’s “Palaudiers du Bourg de Batz” and the“Fagotiers Bretons”; Guerard’s “Jour de Fête” and “Messe du Matin, Ille-et-Vilaine”; Fischer’s “Chemin du Pardon” and “Auberge à Scaër,” and Roussin’s “Famille Bretonne.”
Gustave Brion, with his “Bretons à la Porte d’une Eglise”; Yan Dargent, with his “Sauvetage à Guisseny,” and Jules Noel, with his “Danse Bretonne,” and various landscapes of Brest, Quimper, Auray, and Douarnenez, are on the list of names of those who made the Breton region famous in the mid-nineteenth century.
Since then, the followers in their footsteps have been almost too many to number.
Most folk call to mind with very slight appreciable effort such masterpieces as Jules Breton’s “Retraite aux Flambeaux” and “Plantation d’un Calvaire,” now in the museum at Lille, and Charles Cottet’s “Bateaux de Pêche à Camaret” in the Luxembourg gallery.
In addition, there have been innumerable “great pictures” painted by English and American artists whose very names form too long a list to catalogue here.
ONEreason for the diversified interests of France and the varying methods of life is the vastly diversified topographical features. “Great plains as large as three Irelands,” said Hamerton, “and yet mountainous districts quite as large as the whole of the British Isles.” This should have served to disabuse British travellers of some false notions regarding France, but many of them still hold to the views which are to be gained by railway journeys across the lowlands of Gaul, forgetting for a moment that well within the confines of France there are fifty mountain peaks above eleven thousand feet high, and that majestic Mont Blanc itself rises on French soil.
Then there are the two thousand miles of seacoast which introduce another element of the population, from the dark-skinned sailor of the Mediterranean to his brother of Finistère, who is brought into the world chiefly torecruit the French navy. The Norman sailorman is a hardy, intrepid navigator even to-day, but he is to a great extent of the longshore and fishing-boat variety, whereas the true Breton is a sailor through and through.
Before now, Brittany has been compared, disparagingly, with Provence, and with some justness perhaps. Provence, however, does not persistently broil under a “fierce, dry heat,” and Brittany is not by any means “a wind and wave swept land, where nothing nourishes itself or grows fat.” Potatoes are even fattening, and Brittany, in all conscience, grows enough of that useful commodity to feed all France. In three things Brittany and Provence more than a little resemble one another. Both preserve, to a very remarkable extent, their ancient language and their old-time manners and customs, though in all three they are quite different one from the other.
The general topographical aspect of the coast of the whole Breton peninsula is stern and wild, whether one encounters the dreary waste of sand, in the midst of which sit Mont St. Michel and Tombelaine, or the cliffs away to the westward, or the bleak and barren Belle Ile en Mer, where Fouquet built his famous stronghold.
On the “Emerald Coast” the sea and sky are often of a true Neapolitan clearness, and, indeed, the climate of the whole peninsula is, even in winter, as mild as many a popularly fashionable Mediterranean resort; but it is not always so bright and sunny; there is a deal of rain in winter, and often a penetrating dampness, whose only brother is the genuine Scotch mist.
Still, in all but four months of the year, there is a brilliancy and softness about the climate of the coast of Brittany which encourages violets, roses, onions, and potatoes to come to maturity at so early a date that the Londoner has ceased to raise the question as to whether or not they may be “best English,” when he sees these products laid out of an early morning in his beloved Covent Garden.
To know a country or its people at its best, one should really take one of its great men for a guide. Hear then what Chateaubriand says of “La Terre Bretonne”:
“This long peninsula, of a wild and savage aspect, has much of singularity about it: its narrow valleys, its non-navigable rivers bathing the feet of its ruined castle-keeps and châteaux, its old abbeys, its thatch-covered houses, and its cattle herded together in its arid pastures.One valley is separated from another by forests of oak, with holly bushes as large as beech-trees, and druidical stones around which sea-birds are for ever circling.
“Of an imagination lively, but nevertheless melancholic, of a humour as flexible as their character is obstinate, the Bretons are distinguished for their piety, and none the less for their bravery, their fidelity, their spirit of independence, and their patriotism. Proud and susceptible, but without ambition and little suited to the affairs of court or state, they care nothing for honours or for rank.”
The picture is not very vivid, but it is wonderfully true, and of this one meets continual evidence in a journey around the coast, from the Bay of St. Michel in the north to Belle Ile or Nantes in the south.
No part of France has a physiognomy more original than Bretagne; none has been marked by nature in a more emphatic manner than this ancient home of the Celts.
“...la terre du granitEt de l’immense et morne lande.”
“...la terre du granitEt de l’immense et morne lande.”
It is indeed a land of contrasts, where ancient, mystical, and weird menhirs and dolmens, relics of prehistoric times, are mingled withmediæval monuments and modern forts, arsenals, and viaducts.
The country is by no means unlovely, but it partakes of none of the conventional beauties of other parts. It is not sterile, though it is stern; it is not very fertile, but its product is ample; and it stands as the most westerly point of the mainland of Northern Europe, open to all the wild buffetings of the tempestuous Atlantic which has sculptured its coast-line into such fantastic forms that a shipwrecked mariner must think himself fallen upon the most stern and rock-bound of coasts.
The general aspect of Brittany is green and gray. It is, as the Breton himself says, an austere heath,—the country-side half-effaced in demi-tints, and the sea boisterous and wicked.
This, however, is only one of its moods; to-morrow it may be as brilliantly sunlit as the Bay of Naples, and may have a sea and sky of gold and turquoise. But this mood passes quickly, and again it settles down to a misty softness and mildness of climate that has given its name to one of the five great climatic divisions of France, the Armorican.
The sunsets of Brittany are always glorious. Nowhere on the rim of great ocean’s mirror are there more splendid and grandly sceniceffects to be observed. An exceedingly realistic Frenchman once described a sunset in the Bay of Douarnenez as a “bloody apotheosis,” the real aspect of which is readily inferred. Of this Breton Cornouaille, Béranger sang:
“Faisons honte aux hirondelles.Tu croiras, sur nos essieux,Que la terre a pris des ailesPour passer devant les yeux.”
“Faisons honte aux hirondelles.Tu croiras, sur nos essieux,Que la terre a pris des ailesPour passer devant les yeux.”
The country inland is as original as the coast, and both the peasant on shore and the sailor on the sea are Breton to the core. Never has Brittany been called charming or gracious, never lovely or sweet, but always cold, though not so in climate, which is always terrible and austere.
But, for all that, it is delightful, and when one has tired of the stupid gaieties of Switzerland or the Rhine, let him rough it a bit among the low hills and valleys of the Côtes du Nord, or the rocky promontories and inlets of Finistère, or, on the south coast between Quimper and Nantes, on one of those little tidal rivers such as the Aven, and let him learn for himself that there is something new under the sun, even on well-trodden ground.
Truth to tell, Brittany is not nearly so well known to English-speaking folk as it should be. There is a fringe of semi-invalid, semi-society loiterers centred around St. Malo, and enlivened in the summer months by the advent of a little world of literary and artistic folk from Paris. Then there is an artist colony or two in Lower Brittany, where the visitors work hard, dress uncouthly, and live cheaply for four or five months of the year. At Nantes there is the overflow of tourists of convention from the châteaux district of Touraine, and up and down the length and breadth of Brittany, from Mont St. Michel to St. Nazaire, and from Dol to Brest, are to be found occasional wanderers on bicycles or in motor-cars.
The great mass, however, is herded around the conventionally “gay” five o’clock resorts of Dinard, Paramé, and St. Malo, and in by far the greater area of the province the seeker for pleasure and true edification is far more rare than is popularly supposed. The occasional rather wretched hotel has hitherto kept the fastidious away, and the terrific hobnails of the Breton wooden shoe have all but driven travellers in motor-cars and bicycle riders to despair. Both these deterrents, real and fancied, are disappearing, however. The hygienic bedrooms of the Touring Club are found here and there, and the peasants, or, at least, some of them, now wear a sort of cast-iron sole apparently clamped or riveted to the wooden shoe; at least there are no big, pointed, mushroom-headed tacks to drop out, point uppermost, in dry weather.
The topographical aspect of Brittany is largely due to the two great zones of granite formation which come together at their western extremities,—the mountains of Alençon and the jutting rocks that come to the surface from Poitou northward.
In general, the whole aspect of Brittany echoes the words of Brizeaux, the Lorient poet:
“O terre de granit, recouverte de chênes.”
One would hardly call Brittany mountainous, but its elevations are notable, nevertheless, in that they rise, for the most part, abruptly from the dead level of the ocean. Inland, the topography takes on more of the nature of a rolling moorland, with granite cropping out here and there in the elevations. The following quatrain describes it exactly:
“À MON PAYS“O ma chère Bretagne,Que j’aime tes halliers,Tes verdoyants graniers,Et ta noire montagne.”—Corbinais.
“À MON PAYS
“O ma chère Bretagne,Que j’aime tes halliers,Tes verdoyants graniers,Et ta noire montagne.”—Corbinais.
The greatest altitudes in Brittany are: The Sillon de Bretagne (near Savenay), eighty-nine metres; La Motte (Montagnes Noires between Quimper and Brest), 289 metres; Menez Hom (Montagnes Noires), 330 metres; Mont St. Michel (Montagne d’Arrée), 391 metres.
The Breton rivers are not great rivers as the waterways of the world go, although they are important indeed to the country which they irrigate. Chief among them are the Vilaine, navigable to Rennes, the Rance, the Odet, the Aulne, and of course the Loire, which flanks the southern boundary of the old province nearly up to its juncture with the Mayenne, and continues its navigable length in Brittany up to, and a trifle beyond, the town of the same name. The Couesnon, flowing northward into the vast Bay of Mont St. Michel, forms the northeastern boundary separating Brittany from Normandy.
The great length of irregular coast-line accounts for the continuation of the generally severe and stern aspect of the interior, the sombre granite cliffs jutting far out into the open, half-enclosing great bays and forming promontories and headlands which are characteristically Breton and nothing else. They might resemble those of the Greek mainlandand archipelago were they but environed with the life and languor of the South, but, as it is, they are Breton through and through, and their people have all their hopes and sympathies wrapped up in the occupations of a colder clime.
The old territorial limits of the Province of Brittany embraced a small tract south of the Loire, known asLe Rais, or the Retz country.
Here is Clisson, the feudal castle and estate so constantly recurring in French history. Pornic, Paimbœuf, and the Lac de Grande Lieu also lie southward of the Loire in this old appanage, but, in the main, Breton history was played on the Armorican peninsula north of the Loire.
The height of the tides on the Breton coast varies considerably. All this is caused by the flow of the North Sea and the Straits of Calais meeting the current coming directly from the Atlantic, so that in some instances the flood-tide rises to a height of from fifty to sixty feet above “dead water,” as the French call it.
The immense Bay of Mont St. Michel, at low water, is a stretch of bare sand more than three hundred square kilometres in extent, but it is completely covered and converted into a great tranquil gulf by the rising tide.
enlarge-imageCroisicCroisic
Croisic
At Croisic, at the mouth of the Loire, thereis a 5.16 metre rise of the tide, which around the Breton coast-line varies as follows:
The aspect of the region round about Dol, in the north, is that of a little Holland, with its flats and windmills and its cultivated ground protected from the sea by a rim of downs and dikes. It is not so very great an expanse that follows these outlines, but the likeness is one to be remarked. To the westward lie the jutting rocks and capes, beyond which are the isolated islands of Ouessant and its fellows, and all around the coast extend landlocked bays and harbours sheltering the great fishing ports of Douarnenez and Concarneau and the commercial ports of St. Malo, Morlaix, Brest, Lorient, and Vannes.
From a military and strategic point of view the whole northwest coast of France, from themouth of the Loire through Brittany and Normandy, is exceedingly well protected, with a great port and base of supplies both at Brest in Brittany and at Cherbourg in Normandy.
Forts Minden, Ville Martin, and Penthièvre, Port Louis, Lorient, and Brest, and the Forts du Pilier, Le Palais, Lacroix, Cezon, and Château du Taureau, with St. Malo and Fort des Rimains, protect the whole Breton seashore in practically unassailable fashion, though there are still the sea fights at Ouessant, in 1778 and 1794, and The Hogue in 1692, to say nothing of the land engagements at Quiberon in 1795, to remember.
enlarge-imageMap of Bretagne
TOURISTSare commonly supposed to belong to the pleasure-seeking or invalid class, and so they mostly do, still one may travel for instruction (which is pleasure, also) and be mindful of the conditions of life around him, and profit accordingly, unless he absolutely demands the life of the boulevards of Paris or the homœopathic excitements of the little horses in some popular watering-place.
It is undoubtedly true that most tourists are of limited interests, which may be pleasure, or art, or architecture, or worshipping at historical shrines. All this is well enough in its way, but if one could combine a modicum of each he would profit much more largely, to say nothing of being amused and instructed, too.
The time has long since passed when travellers reviled Brittany as a province where “husbandry was no further advanced than among the Hurons,” as a writer of the eighteenthcentury said within twenty-four hours after he had crossed the boundary between Normandy and Brittany, at Pontorson, where the causeway road branches off to Mont St. Michel. Evidences of husbandry are still very much to the fore, but it is more advanced in the interior, at least; on the coast the harvest of the sea takes its place.
Brittany, in husbandry, may not be so advanced as some other parts. There are no such elaborate operations going on here as in the regions where high farming is practised—in Beauce, or Normandy, or Anjou. Neither are such numbers of mechanical farming-tools in operation, but in spite of all this there is a very considerable and prosperous industry born of the soil of which most strangers to Brittany, and some who have travelled there, are entirely ignorant. All along the great highways crossing and recrossing Brittany one sees the little roadside farms with their attendant small flocks of live stock, sheep, cattle, geese, ducks, and fowls, which point, at any rate, to the fact that the peasant need not be as ill-nourished as he is generally supposed to be; and really he is not.
The charm of journeying by road in France is indescribable, perhaps, to its fullest degree.Natural beauties count for much, but in a land peopled with historic castles, churches, and abbeys, as Normandy and Brittany are, it is found doubly enjoyable even though one professes no expert architectural knowledge, or no profound aptitude for historical research. These, however, are but side-lights, which make the actual pilgrimage among such shrines greatly to be cherished among one’s personal experiences.
It is the whole which pleases, and not fragmentary and piecemeal beauties and charms; and never was this more true than of a well-beloved land, be it one’s own or an alien shore.
Brittany and its travel routes, whether by road or rail, offer as full a measure of all these attractions as it is possible for one to conceive.
The great highways of Brittany have not the same favour with travellers by road as those of other parts of France. They are equally important and equally well cared for by a paternal government, but their inclines are steeper—sometimes suicidal—and certainly more frequent than elsewhere in France, and distances stretch out interminably.
enlarge-imageThe Main Roads of BrittanyThe Main Roads of Brittany
The Main Roads of Brittany
The great national road which stretches from Paris to Brest covers a distance nearly equal tothat from Paris to Turin, or from Paris to Amsterdam.
There are, however, in Brittany no long stretches of unrolled road surface, and for the most part the roadways are as smooth as can anywhere be found. Were it not for the eternal switchbacks, and the aforementioned hobnail, with its pointed end usually upmost, Brittany would be a far more popular touring-ground for the automobile than it is. The hooded cart of Normandy and Brittany, such as one meets going to and from the market-towns, is another real dread to the man in the motor-car.
It is not that the occupant is unwilling to hear one’s horn, but it is almost impossible that he should against a head-wind, until you are close upon him. It is useless to point to your ear as you whisk by and ask him—in a shout—if he is deaf, or to say: “Well, now, you sleep well.” He will pay little or no attention to you, and anyway, most likely, he wasnotasleep, as are so many of his fellows that one meets on English roads.
In Brittany the traveller by road often meets an obstruction in the shape of a flock of sheep slowly making its way toward one, or in the opposite direction, or even a flock of ducks orgeese, which are even more dreadful. Sheep are stupid, hens and chickens are silly, but geese are arrogant and obstinate.
It is very disconcerting, of course, for the motor-car driver at full speed to have to draw in his ten, or twenty, or thirty horses in order to avoid decapitating a whole goose and gosling family, but it lends a charm to the travel, which a badly paved stretch of roadway—in Picardy, for instance—wholly lacks.
Here when one does actually run into a flock of geese, such as one sees on the high-coloured posters advertising a certain make of car, and in the comic journals, it is one of the real humours of life. The amount of curiosity an old goose or gander can show in a death-dealing motor-car as it rushes by, and the chances they take of sudden death, are enough to give an ordinarily careful driver innumerable heart-leaps.
This is about all the trouble one is likely to meet on Breton roads, except, of course, the always present grazing cows, which here, though they are always attended,—generally by a small boy or girl, who often is not able to keep them in line as one would wish,—are allowed to stray freely, and are not tethered as they are throughout Normandy.
It is not for the aforesaid reasons alone that motor-cars are scarce in Brittany, for, after all, they form but minor troubles as compared with the eccentricities of the machinery itself, and the tourist in a motor-car is usually prepared for most things which are likely to happen to himen route. So really if one likes a hilly country—and it is not without its charms—Brittany offers much in the way of varied and natural beauties that certain other provinces lack. Touraine, for instance, delightful as it is as a touring-ground, is as proverbially flat as a billiard-table.
There are, in the first place, not nearly so many motor-cars owned in Brittany, and accordingly there are astonishingly few shelters and repairers. Apparently, the Breton does not care for the new-fangled means of locomotion, not recognizing, perhaps, that it has come to stay. Still less does the Breton peasant’s brother, the Breton sailor or fisherman, care for the motor-boat, which ought to have a great vogue in such great inland seas as Morbihan, the Bay of Douarnenez, or the Goulet or the roadstead of Brest.
The sailor of Brest or Lorient and the little fishing villages of the west will tell you: “Ilike my boat better, with my sail and my arms for motors.”
Often these great stretches of Breton roadway show an aspect of human nature that is probably the same the world over; a peasant man or woman is leading a cow,—always on the wrong side of the road, of course,—or a sleepy farm-hand is drawing his cart to or from market,—still on the wrong side of the road,—when the whirr and snort of a motor-car does something more than awaken echoes.
The cows entangle themselves in their leading ropes, and the usually placid horses bolt with the cart into the ditch. The native, of course, reviles the car and its occupants, not because he hates them,—for they are one of the mainstays of the inns of the countryside,—but merely to display that untamable spirit of independence, which every mother’s son of a French peasant has developed to a high degree.
In Brittany, as in most other lands,—in summer,—the traveller by road gathers in a fine crop of wingy, stingy things, which project themselves into one’s eyes with a formidable force when one goes at them with a swift-moving car.
Occasionally one thinks he has come upon avast convention of them, so many are they in numbers and variety—flies, wasps, bees, and what not, with a peculiar Gallic species of fly so infinitesimal that one only stops to clear them out when he feels that his eyes are so full of them that they may be uncomfortably crowded. The real or fabled Jersey mosquito would go out of business with his Breton brother as a competitor. Truly this is a new terror, and one that certainly was not apparent, to anything like the present extent, before the advent of the motor-car.
One comes upon a dull week in Brittany often, even in summer, when the sky remains overcast, and great clouds roll up from out of the western ocean. Often it is not cold, but it is bitterly damp and sticky, even though it does not rain, but the native does not seem to mind it, at least, he never complains.
The only objector ever met with by the writer was a Gascon who kept a pharmacy at Quimper. He discussed it as follows: “Hideous country! The wind blows here every day in the year, and the rest of the time it rains,” he continued, enigmatically. “Yes, that abominable wind always plays the same trick on me! What a country!” He was probably thinking of his own bright and sunny homein the South, where seldom, if ever, are conditions other than brilliantly tranquil.
There are three great highroads which cross Brittany from east to west, the main road of Brittany from Alençon in Normandy, through Mayenne, Fougères, Dol, Dinan, Guingamp, and Morlaix to Brest; the southern road from Paris via Le Mans, or even following the Loire valley down from Orleans to Nantes, and thence westward via Vannes, Lorient, and Quimper to Brest, thus making the complete circuit of the Breton coast. A midway course lies in almost a direct line east and west through Laval, Vitré, Rennes, Ploërmel, Pontivy, and Carhaix.
These three highroads cover completely the itinerary of Brittany, in so far as they follow the north and south coast and the country-side lying between.
Cross country, from the Bay of Mont St. Michel to the mouth of the Loire, one “route nationale” lies directly through Rennes, and another ends at Vannes, in Morbihan.
These cover practically all the regular lines of traffic, and include all the chief points of historical and topographical instances.