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Title: Over Strand and Field
Author: Gustave Flaubert
Release Date: December 2, 2004 [eBook #14233]
Language: English
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OVER STRAND AND FIELD
A Record of Travel through Brittany
by
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Simon P. Magee
Publisher
Chicago, Ill.
1904
OVER STRAND AND FIELD[1]
A Trip through Brittany
CHAPTER I.
CHÂTEAU DE CHAMBORD.
We walked through the empty galleries and deserted rooms where spiders
spin their cobwebs over the salamanders of Francis the First. One is
overcome by a feeling of distress at the sight of this poverty which has
no grandeur. It is not absolute ruin, with the luxury of blackened and
mouldy débris, the delicate embroidery of flowers, and the drapery of
waving vines undulating in the breeze, like pieces of damask. It is a
conscious poverty, for it brushes its threadbare coat and endeavours to
appear respectable. The floor has been repaired in one room, while in
the next it has been allowed to rot. It shows the futile effort to
preserve that which is dying and to bring back that which has fled.
Strange to say, it is all very melancholy, but not at all imposing.
And then it seems as if everything had contributed to injure poor
Chambord, designed by Le Primatice and chiselled and sculptured by
Germain Pilon and Jean Cousin. Upreared by Francis the First, on his
return from Spain, after the humiliating treaty of Madrid (1526), it is
the monument of a pride that sought to dazzle itself in order to forget
defeat. It first harbours Gaston d'Orléans, a crushed pretender, who is
exiled within its walls; then it is Louis XIV, who, out of one floor,
builds three, thus ruining the beautiful double staircase which extended
without interruption from the top to the bottom. Then one day, on the
second floor, facing the front, under the magnificent ceiling covered
with salamanders and painted ornaments which are now crumbling away,
Molière produced for the first time _Le Bourgeois gentilhomme_. Then it
was given to the Maréchal de Saxe; then to the Polignacs, and finally to
a plain soldier, Berthier. It was afterwards bought back by subscription
and presented to the Duc de Bordeaux. It has been given to everybody, as
if nobody cared to have it or desired to keep it. It looks as if it had
hardly ever been used, and as if it had always been too spacious. It is
like a deserted hostelry where transient guests have not left even their
names on the walls.
When we walked through an outside gallery to the Orléans staircase, in
order to examine the caryatids which are supposed to represent Francis
the First, M. de Chateaubriand, and Madame d'Étampes, and turned around
the celebrated lantern that terminates the big staircase, we stuck our
heads several times through the railing to look down. In the courtyard
was a little donkey nursing its mother, rubbing up against her, shaking
its long ears and playfully jumping around. This is what we found in the
court of honour of the Château de Chambord; these are its present hosts:
a dog rolling in the grass, and a nursing, braying donkey frolicking on
the threshold of kings!
CHÂTEAU D'AMBOISE.
The Château d'Amboise, which dominates the whole city that appears to be
thrown at its feet like a mass of pebbles at the foot of a rock, looks
like an imposing fortress, with its large towers pierced by long, narrow
windows; its arched gallery that extends from the one to the other, and
the brownish tint of its walls, darkened by the contrast of the flowers,
which droop over them like a nodding plume on the bronzed forehead of an
old soldier. We spent fully a quarter of an hour admiring the tower on
the left; it is superb, imbrowned and yellowish in some places and
coated with soot in others; it has charming charlocks hanging from its
battlements, and is, in a word, one of those speaking monuments that
seem to breathe and hold one spellbound and pensive under their gaze,
like those paintings, the originals of which are unknown to us, but whom
we love without knowing why.
The Château is reached by a slight incline which leads to a garden
elevated like a terrace, from which the view extends on the whole
surrounding country. It was of a delicate green; poplar trees lined the
banks of the river; the meadows advanced to its edge, mingling their
grey border with the bluish and vapourous horizon, vaguely enclosed by
indistinct hills. The Loire flowed in the middle, bathing its islands,
wetting the edge of the meadows, turning the wheels of the mills and
letting the big boats glide peacefully, two by two, over its silvery
surface, lulled to sleep by the creaking of the heavy rudders; and in
the distance two big white sails gleamed in the sun.
Birds flew from the tops of the towers and the edge of the
machicolations to some other spot, described circles in the air,
chirped, and soon passed out of sight. About a hundred feet below us
were the pointed roofs of the city, the empty courtyards of the old
mansions, and the black holes of the smoky chimneys. Leaning in the
niche of a battlement, we gazed and listened, and breathed it all in,
enjoying the beautiful sunshine and balmy air impregnated with the
pungent odour of the ruins. And there, without thinking of anything in
particular, without even phrasing inwardly about something, I dreamed of
coats of mail as pliable as gloves, of shields of buffalo hide soaked
with sweat, of closed visors through which shot bloodthirsty glances, of
wild and desperate night attacks with torches that set fire to the
walls, and hatchets that mutilated the bodies; and of Louis XI, of the
lover's war, of D'Aubigné and of the charlocks, the birds, the polished
ivy, the denuded brambles, tasting in my pensive and idle occupation--what
is greatest in men, their memory;--and what is most beautiful in nature,
her ironical encroachments and eternal youth.
In the garden, among the lilac-bushes and the shrubs that droop over the
alleys, rises the chapel, a work of the sixteenth century, chiselled at
every angle, a perfect jewel, even more intricately decorated inside
than out, cut out like the paper covering of a _bonbonnière_, and
cunningly sculptured like the handle of a Chinese parasol. On the door
is a _bas-relief_ which is very amusing and ingenuous. It represents the
meeting of Saint Hubert with the mystic stag, which bears a cross
between its antlers. The saint is on his knees; above him hovers an
angel who is about to place a crown on his cap; near them stands the
saint's horse, watching the scene with a surprised expression; the dogs
are barking and on the mountain, the sides and facets of which are cut
to represent crystals, creeps the serpent. You can see its flat head
advancing toward some leafless trees that look like cauliflowers. They
are the sort of trees one comes upon in old Bibles, spare of foliage,
thick and clumsy, bearing blossoms and fruit but no leaves; the
symbolical, theological, and devout trees that are almost fantastical on
account of their impossible ugliness. A little further, Saint
Christopher is carrying Jesus on his shoulders; Saint Antony is in his
cell, which is built on a rock; a pig is retiring into its hole and
shows only its hind-quarters and its corkscrew tail, while a rabbit is
sticking its head out of its house.
Of course, it is all a little clumsy and the moulding is not faultless.
But there is so much life and movement about the figure and the animals,
so much charm in the details, that one would give a great deal to be
able to carry it away and take it home.
Inside of the Château, the insipid Empire style is reproduced in every
apartment. Almost every room is adorned with busts of Louis-Philippe and
Madame Adélaïde. The present reigning family has a craze for being
portrayed on canvas. It is the bad taste of a parvenu, the mania of a
grocer who has accumulated money and who enjoys seeing himself in red,
white, and yellow, with his watch-charms dangling over his stomach, his
bewhiskered chin and his children gathered around him.
On one of the towers, and in spite of the most ordinary common sense,
they have built a glass rotunda which is used for a dining-room. True,
the view from it is magnificent. But the building presents so shocking
an appearance from the outside, that one would, I should think, prefer
to see nothing of the environs, or else to eat in the kitchen.
In order to go back to the city, we came down by a tower that was used
by carriages to approach the Château. The sloping gravelled walk turns
around a stone axle like the steps of a staircase. The arch is dark and
lighted only by the rays that creep through the loop-holes. The columns
on which the interior end of the vault rests, are decorated with
grotesque or vulgar subjects. A dogmatic intention seems to have
presided over their composition. It would be well for travellers to
begin the inspection at the bottom, with the _Aristoteles equitatus_ (a
subject which has already been treated on one of the choir statues in
the Cathedral of Rouen) and reach by degrees a pair embracing in the
manner which both Lucretius and _l'Amour Conjugal_ have recommended. The
greater part of the intermediary subjects have been removed, to the
despair of seekers of comical things, like ourselves; they have been
removed in cold blood, with deliberate intent, for the sake of decency,
and because, as one of the servants of his Majesty informed us
convincingly, "a great many were improper for the lady visitors to see."
CHÂTEAU DE CHENONCEAUX.
A something of infinite suavity and aristocratic serenity pervades the
Château de Chenonceaux. It is situated outside of the village, which
keeps at a respectful distance. It can be seen through a large avenue of
trees, and is enclosed by woods and an extensive park with beautiful
lawns. Built on the water, it proudly uprears its turrets and its square
chimneys. The Cher flows below, and murmurs at the foot of its arches,
the pointed corners of which form eddies in the tide. It is all very
peaceful and charming, graceful yet robust. Its calm is not wearying and
its melancholy has no tinge of bitterness.
One enters through the end of a long, arched hallway, which used to be a
fencing-room. It is decorated with some armours, which, in spite of the
obvious necessity of their presence, do not shock one's taste or appear
out of place. The whole scheme of interior decoration is tastefully
carried out; the furniture and hangings of the period have been
preserved and cared for intelligently. The great, venerable mantel-pieces
of the sixteenth century do not shelter the hideous and economical German
stoves, which might easily be hidden in some of them.
In the kitchen, situated in a wing of the castle, which we visited
later, a maid was peeling vegetables and a scullion was washing dishes,
while the cook was standing in front of the stove, superintending a
reasonable number of shining saucepans. It was all very delightful, and
bespoke the idle and intelligent home life of a gentleman. I like the
owners of Chenonceaux.
In fact, have you not often seen charming old paintings that make you
gaze at them indefinitely, because they portray the period in which
their owners lived, the ballets in which the farthingales of all those
beautiful pink ladies whirled around, and the sword-thrusts which those
noblemen gave each other with their rapiers? Here are some temptations
of history. One would like to know whether those people loved as we do,
and what difference existed between their passions and our own. One
would like them to open their lips and tell their history, tell us
everything they used to do, no matter how futile, and what their cares
and pleasures used to be. It is an irritating and seductive curiosity, a
dreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past life
of a mistress.... But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put to
them, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and we
pass on. The moths attack their canvases, but the latter are
revarnished; and the pictures will smile on when we are buried and
forgotten. And others will come and gaze upon them, till the day they
crumble to dust; then people will dream in the same old way before our
own likenesses, and ask themselves what used to happen in our day, and
whether life was not more alluring then.
I should not have spoken again of those handsome dames, if the large,
full-length portrait of Madame Deshoulières, in an elaborate white
_dêshabille_, (it was really a fine picture, and, like the much decried
and seldom read efforts of the poetess, better at the second look than
at the first), had not reminded me, by the expression of the mouth,
which is large, full, and sensual, of the peculiar coarseness of Madame
de Staël's portrait by Gérard. When I saw it two years ago, at Coppet,
in bright sunshine, I could not help being impressed by those red,
vinous lips and the wide, aspiring nostrils. George Sand's face offers a
similar peculiarity. In all those women who were half masculine,
spirituality revealed itself only in the eyes. All the rest remained
material.
In point of amusing incidents, there is still at Chenonceaux, in Diane
de Poitiers's room, the wide canopy bedstead of the royal favourite,
done in white and red. If it belonged to me, it would be very hard for
me not to use it once in a while. To sleep in the bed of Diane de
Poitiers, even though it be empty, is worth as much as sleeping in that
of many more palpable realities. Moreover, has it not been said that all
the pleasure in these things was only imagination? Then, can you
conceive of the peculiar and historical voluptuousness, for one who
possesses some imagination, to lay his head on the pillow that belonged
to the mistress of Francis the First, and to stretch his limbs on her
mattress? (Oh! how willingly I would give all the women in the world for
the mummy of Cleopatra!) But I would not dare to touch, for fear of
breaking them, the porcelains belonging to Catherine de Médicis, in the
dining-room, nor place my foot in the stirrup of Francis the First, for
fear it might remain there, nor put my lips to the mouth-piece of the
huge trumpet in the fencing-room, for fear of rupturing my lungs.
CHAPTER II.
CHÂTEAU DE CLISSON.
On a hill at the foot of which two rivers mingle their waters, in a
fresh landscape, brightened by the light colours of the inclined roofs,
that are grouped like many sketches of Hubert, near a waterfall that
turns the wheel of a mill hidden among the leaves, the Château de
Clisson raises its battered roof above the tree-tops. Everything around
it is calm and peaceful. The little dwellings seem to smile as if they
had been built under softer skies; the waters sing their song, and
patches of moss cover a stream over which hang graceful clusters of
foliage. The horizon extends on one side into a tapering perspective of
meadows, while on the other it rises abruptly and is enclosed by a
wooded valley, the trees of which crowd together and form a green ocean.
After one crosses the bridge and arrives at the steep path which leads
to the Château, one sees, standing upreared and bold on the moat on
which it is built, a formidable wall, crowned with battered
machicolations and bedecked with trees and ivy, the luxuriant growth of
which covers the grey stones and sways in the wind, like an immense
green veil which the recumbent giant moves dreamily across his
shoulders. The grass is tall and dark, the plants are strong and hardy;
the trunks of the ivy are twisted, knotted, and rough, and lift up the
walls as with levers or hold them in the network of their branches. In
one spot, a tree has grown through the wall horizontally, and, suspended
in the air, has let its branches radiate around it. The moats, the steep
slope of which is broken by the earth which has detached itself from the
embankments and the stones which have fallen from the battlements, have
a wide, deep curve, like hatred and pride; and the portal, with its
strong, slightly arched ogive, and its two bays that raise the
drawbridge, looks like a great helmet with holes in its visor.
When one enters, he is surprised and astonished at the wonderful mixture
of ruins and trees, the ruins accentuating the freshness of the trees,
while the latter in turn, render more poignant the melancholy of the
ruins. Here, indeed, is the beautiful, eternal, and brilliant laughter
of nature over the skeleton of things; here is the insolence of her
wealth and the deep grace of her encroachments, and the melodious
invasions of her silence. A grave and pensive enthusiasm fills one's
soul; one feels that the sap flows in the trees and that the grass grows
with the same strength and the same rhythm, as the stones crumble and
the walls cave in. A sublime art, in the supreme accord of secondary
discordances, has contrasted the unruly ivy with the sinuous sweep of
the ruins, the brambles with the heaps of crumbling stones, the
clearness of the atmosphere with the strong projections of the masses,
the colour of the sky with the colour of the earth, reflecting each one
in the other: that which was, and that which is. Thus history and nature
always reveal, though they may accomplish it in a circumscribed spot of
the world, the unceasing relation, the eternal hymen of dying humanity
and the growing daisy; of the stars that glow, and the men who expire,
of the heart that beats and the wave that rises. And this is so clearly
indicated here, is so overwhelming, that one shudders inwardly, as if
this dual life centred in one's own body; so brutal and immediate is the
perception of these harmonies and developments. For the eye also has its
orgies and the mind its delights.
At the foot of two large trees, the trunks of which are intersected, a
stream of light floods the grass and seems like a luminous river,
brightening the solitude. Overhead, a dome of leaves, through which one
can see the sky presenting a vivid contrast of blue, reverberates a
bright, greenish light, which illuminates the ruins, accentuating the
deep furrows, intensifying the shadows, and disclosing all the hidden
beauties. You advance and walk between those walls and under the trees,
wander along the barbicans, pass under the falling arcades from which
spring large, waving plants. The vaults, which contain corpses, echo
under your footfalls; lizards run in the grass, beetles creep along the
walls, the sky is blue, and the sleepy ruins pursue their dream.
With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, its
machicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one upon
the other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancient
Château of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed. The
memory of past existences exudes from its walls with the emanations of
the nettles and the coolness of the ivy. In that castle, men altogether
different from us were swayed by passions stronger than ours; their
hands were brawnier and their chests broader.
Long black streaks still mark the walls, as in the time when logs blazed
in the eighteen-foot fireplaces. Symmetrical holes in the masonry
indicate the floors to which one ascended by winding staircases now
crumbling in ruins, while their empty doors open into space. Sometimes a
bird, taking flight from its nest hanging in the branches, would pass
with spread wings through the arch of a window, and fly far away into
the country.
At the top of a high, bleak wall, several square bay-windows, of unequal
length and position, let the pure sky shine through their crossed bars;
and the bright blue, framed by the stone, attracted my eye with
surprising persistency. The sparrows in the trees were chirping, and in
the midst of it all a cow, thinking, no doubt, that it was a meadow,
grazed peacefully, her horns sweeping over the grass.
There is a window, a large window that looks out into a meadow called
_la prairie des chevaliers_. It was there, from a stone bench carved in
the wall, that the high-born dames of the period watched the knights
urge their iron-barbed steeds against one another, and the lances come
down on the helmets and snap, and the men fall to the ground. On a fine
summer day, like to-day, perhaps, when the mill that enlivens the whole
landscape did not exist, when there were roofs on the walls, and Flemish
hangings, and oil-cloths on the window-sills, when there was less grass,
and when human voices and rumours filled the air, more than one heart
beat with love and anguish under its red velvet bodice. Beautiful white
hands twitched with fear on the stone, which is now covered with moss,
and the embroidered veils of high caps fluttered in the wind that plays
with my cravat and that swayed the plumes of the knights.
We went down into the vaults where Jean V was imprisoned. In the men's
dungeon we saw the large double hook that was used for executions; and
we touched curiously with our fingers the door of the women's prison. It
is about four inches thick and is plated with heavy iron bars. In the
middle is a little grating that was used to throw in whatever was
necessary to prevent the captive from starving. It was this grating
which opened instead of the door, which, being the mouth of the most
terrible confessions, was one of those that always closed but never
opened. In those days there was real hatred. If you hated a person, and
he had been kidnapped by surprise or traitorously trapped in an
interview, and was in your power, you could torture him at your own
sweet will. Every minute, every hour, you could delight in his anguish
and drink his tears. You could go down into his cell and speak to him
and bargain with him, laugh at his tortures, and discuss his ransom; you
could live on and off him, through his slowly ebbing life and his
plundered treasures. Your whole castle, from the top of the towers to
the bottom of the trenches, weighed on him, crushing, and burying him;
and thus family revenges were accomplished by the family itself, a fact
which constituted their potency and symbolised the idea.
Sometimes, however, when the wretched prisoner was an aristocrat and a
wealthy man, and he near death, and one was tired of him, and his tears
had acted upon the hatred of his master like refreshing bleedings, there
was talk of releasing him. The captive promised everything; he would
return the fortified towns, hand over the keys to his best cities, give
his daughter in marriage, endow churches and journey on foot to the Holy
Sepulchre. And money! Money! Why, he would have more of it coined by the
Jews! Then the treaty would be signed and dated and counter-signed; the
relics would be brought forth to be sworn on, and the prisoner would be
a free man once more. He would jump on his horse, gallop away, and when
he reached home he would order the drawbridge hoisted, call his vassals
together, and take down his sword from the wall. His hatred would find
an outlet in terrific explosions of wrath. It was the time of frightful
passions and victorious rages. The oath? The Pope would free him from
it, and the ransom he simply ignored.
When Clisson was imprisoned in the Château de l'Hermine, he promised for
his freedom a hundred thousand francs' worth of gold, the restitution of
the towns belonging to the duke of Penthièvre, and the cancelling of his
daughter Marguerite's betrothal to the Duke of Penthièvre. But as soon
as he was set free, he began by attacking Chateladren, Guingamp,
Lamballe and St. Malo, which cities either were taken or they
capitulated. But the people of Brittany paid for the fun.
When Jean V. was captured by the Count of Penthièvre at the bridge of
Loroux, he promised a ransom of one million; he promised his eldest
daughter, who was already betrothed to the King of Sicily. He promised
Montcontour, Sesson and Jugan, etc., but he gave neither his daughter
nor the money, nor the cities. He had promised to go to the Holy
Sepulchre. He acquitted himself of this by proxy. He had taken an oath
that he would no longer levy taxes and subsidies. The Pope freed him
from this pledge. He had promised to give Nôtre-Dame de Nantes his
weight in gold; but as he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, he remained
greatly indebted. With all that he was able to pick up or snatch away,
he quickly formed a league and compelled the house of Penthièvre to buy
the peace which they had sold to him.
On the other side of the Sèvre, a forest covers the hill with its fresh,
green maze of trees; it is _La Garenne_, a park that is beautiful in
itself, in spite of the artificial embellishments that have been
introduced. M. Semot, (the father of the present owner), was a painter
of the Empire and a laureate, and he tried to reproduce to the best of
his ability that cold Italian, republican, Roman style, which was so
popular in the time of Canova and of Madame de Staël. In those days
people were inclined to be pompous and noble. They used to place
chiselled urns on graves and paint everybody in a flowing cloak, and
with long hair; then Corinne sang to the accompaniment of her lyre
beside Oswald, who wore Russian boots; and it was thought proper to have
everybody's head adorned with a profusion of dishevelled locks and to
have a multitude of ruins in every landscape.
This style of embellishment abounds throughout La Garenne. There is a
temple erected to Vesta, and directly opposite it another erected to
Friendship....
Inscriptions, artificial rocks, factitious ruins, are scattered
lavishly, with artlessness and conviction.... But the poetical riches
centre in the grotto of Héloïse, a sort of natural dolmen on the bank of
the Sèvre.
Why have people made Héloïse, who was such a great and noble figure,
appear commonplace and silly, the prototype of all crossed loves and the
narrow ideal of sentimental schoolgirls? The unfortunate mistress of the
great Abélard deserved a better fate, for she loved him with devoted
admiration, although he was hard and taciturn at times and spared her
neither bitterness nor blows. She dreaded offending him more than she
dreaded offending God, and strove harder to please him. She did not wish
him to marry her, because she thought that "it was wrong and deplorable
that the one whom nature had created for all ... should be appropriated
by one woman." She found, she said, "more happiness in the appellation
of mistress or concubine, than in that of wife or empress," and by
humiliating herself in him, she hoped to gain a stronger hold over his
heart.
* * * * *
The park is really delightful. Alleys wind through the woods and
clusters of trees bend over the meandering stream. You can hear the
bubbling water and feel the coolness of the foliage. If we were
irritated by the bad taste displayed here, it was because we had just
left Clisson, which has a real, simple, and solid beauty, and after all,
this bad taste is not that of our contemporaries. But what is, in fact,
bad taste? Invariably it is the taste of the period which has preceded
ours. Bad taste at the time of Ronsard was represented by Marot; at the
time of Boileau, by Ronsard; at the time of Voltaire, by Corneille, and
by Voltaire in the day of Chateaubriand, whom many people nowadays begin
to think a trifle weak. O men of taste in future centuries, let me
recommend you the men of taste of to-day! You will laugh at their
cramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, and
the faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is served
to them. Everything that is beautiful will then appear ugly; everything
that is graceful, stupid; everything that is rich, poor; and oh! how our
delightful boudoirs, our charming salons, our exquisite costumes, our
palpitating plays, our interesting novels, our serious books will all be
consigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure! O
posterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, our
Renaissance furniture, M. Pasquier's discourses, the shape of our hats,
and the aesthetics of _La Revue des Deux Mondes!_
While we were pondering upon these lofty philosophical considerations,
our wagon had hauled us over to Tiffanges. Seated side by side in a sort
of tin tub, our weight crushed the tiny horse, which swayed to and fro
between the shafts. It was like the twitching of an eel in the body of a
musk-rat. Going down hill pushed him forward, going up hill pulled him
backward, while uneven places in the road threw him from side to side,
and the wind and the whip lashed him alternately. The poor brute! I
cannot think of him now without a certain feeling of remorse.
The road down hill is curved and its edges are covered with clumps of
sea-rushes or large patches of a certain reddish moss. To the right, on
an eminence that starts from the bottom of the dale and swells in the
middle like the carapace of a tortoise, one perceives high, unequal
walls, the crumbling tops of which appear one above another.
One follows a hedge, climbs a path, and enters an open portal which has
sunken into the ground to the depth of one third of its ogive. The men
who used to pass through it on horseback would be obliged to bend over
their saddles in order to enter it to-day. When the earth is tired of
supporting a monument, it swells up underneath it, creeps up to it like
a wave, and while the sky causes the top to crumble away, the ground
obliterates the foundations. The courtyard was deserted and the calm
water that filled the moats remained motionless and flat under the
pond-lilies.
The sky was white and cloudless, but without sunshine. Its bleak curve
extended far away, covering the country with a cold and cheerless
monotony. Not a sound could be heard, the birds did not sing, even the
horizon was mute, and from the empty furrows came neither the scream of
the crows as they soar heavenward, nor the soft creaking of plough-wheels.
We climbed down through brambles and underbrush into a deep and dark
trench, hidden at the foot of a large tower, which stands in the water
surrounded by reeds. A lone window opens on one side: a dark square
relieved by the grey line of its stone cross-bar. A capricious cluster
of wild honeysuckle covers the sill, and its maze of perfumed blossoms
creeps along the walls. When one looks up, the openings of the big
machicolations reveal only a part of the sky, or some little, unknown
flower which has nestled in the battlement, its seed having been wafted
there on a stormy day and left to sprout in the cracks of the stones.
Presently, a long, balmy breeze swept over us like a sigh, and the trees
in the moats, the moss on the stones, the reeds in the water, the plants
among the ruins, and the ivy, which covered the tower from top to bottom
with a layer of shining leaves, all trembled and shook their foliage;
the corn in the fields rippled in endless waves that again and again
bent the swaying tops of the ears; the pond wrinkled and welled up
against the foot of the tower; the leaves of the ivy all quivered at
once, and an apple-tree in bloom covered the ground with pink blossoms.
Nothing, nothing! The open sky, the growing grass, the passing wind. No
ragged child tending a browsing cow; not even, as elsewhere, some
solitary goat sticking its shaggy head through an aperture in the walls
to turn at our approach and flee in terror through the bushes; not a
song-bird, not a nest, not a sound! This castle is like a ghost: mute
and cold, it stands abandoned in this deserted place, and looks accursed
and replete with terrifying recollections. Still, this melancholy
dwelling, which the owls now seem to avoid, was once inhabited. In the
dungeon, between four walls as livid as the bottom of an old
drinking-trough, we were able to discover the traces of five floors. A
chimney, with its two round pillars and black top, has remained
suspended in the air at a height of thirty feet. Earth has accumulated
on it, and plants are growing there as if it were a jardinière.
Beyond the second enclosure, in a ploughed field, one can recognise the
ruins of a chapel by the broken shafts of an ogive portal. Grass has
grown around it, and trees have replaced the columns. Four hundred years
ago, this chapel was filled with ornaments of gold cloth and silk,
censers, chandeliers, chalices, crosses, precious stones, gold vessels
and vases, a choir of thirty singers, chaplains, musicians, and children
sang hymns to the accompaniment of an organ which they took along with
them when they travelled. They were clad in scarlet garments lined with
pearl grey and vair. There was one whom they called archdeacon, and
another whom they called bishop, and the Pope was asked to allow them to
wear mitres like canons, for this chapel was the chapel, and this castle
one of the castles of Gilles de Laval, lord of Rouci, of Montmorency, of
Retz and of Craon, lieutenant-general of the Duke of Brittany and
field-marshal of France, who was burned at Nantes on the 25th of October,
1440, in the Prée de la Madéleine for being a counterfeiter, a murderer,
a magician, an atheist and a Sodomite.
He possessed more than one hundred thousand crowns' worth of furniture;
an income of thirty thousand pounds a year, the profits of his fiefs and
his salary as field-marshal; fifty magnificently appointed horsemen
escorted him. He kept open house, served the rarest viands and the
oldest wines at his board, and gave representations of mysteries, as
cities used to do when a king was within their gates. When his money
gave out, he sold his estates; when those were gone, he looked around
for more gold, and when he had destroyed his furnaces, he called on the
devil. He wrote him that he would give him all that he possessed,
excepting his life and his soul. He made sacrifices, gave alms and
instituted ceremonies in his honour. At night, the bleak walls of the
castle lighted up by the glare of the torches that flared amid bumpers
of rare wines and gipsy jugglers, and blushed hotly under the unceasing
breath of magical bellows. The inhabitants invoked the devil, joked with
death, murdered children, enjoyed frightful and atrocious pleasures;
blood flowed, instruments played, everything echoed with voluptuousness,
horror, and madness.
When he expired, four or five damsels had his body removed from the
stake, laid out, and taken to the Carmelites, who, after performing the
customary services, buried him in state.
On one of the bridges of the Loire, relates Guépin, opposite the Hôtel
de la Boule-d'Or, an expiatory monument was erected to his memory. It
was a niche containing the statue of the _Bonne Vierge de crée lait_,
who had the power of creating milk in nurses; the good people offered
her butter and similar rustic products. The niche still exists, but the
statue is gone; the same as at the town-house, where the casket which
contained the heart of Queen Anne is also empty. But we did not care to
see the casket; we did not even give it a thought. I should have
preferred gazing upon the trousers of the marshal of Retz to looking at
the heart of Madame Anne de Bretagne.
CHAPTER III.
CARNAC.
The field of Carnac is a large, open space where eleven rows of black
stones are aligned at symmetrical intervals. They diminish in size as
they recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four thousand
of these rocks and Fréminville has counted twelve hundred of them. They
are certainly very numerous.
What was their use? Was it a temple?
One day Saint Cornille, pursued along the shore by soldiers, was about
to jump into the ocean, when he thought of changing them all into stone,
and forthwith the men were petrified. But this explanation was good only
for fools, little children, and poets. Other people looked for better
reasons.
In the sixteenth century, Olaüs Magnus, archbishop of Upsal (who,
banished to Rome, wrote a book on the antiquities of his country that
met with widespread success except in his native land, Sweden, where it
was not translated), discovered that, when these stones form one long,
straight row, they cover the bodies of warriors who died while fighting
duels; that those arranged in squares are consecrated to heroes that
perished in battle; that those disposed in a circle are family graves,
while those that form corners or angular figures are the tombs of
horsemen or foot-soldiers, and more especially of those fighters whose
party had triumphed. All this is quite clear, but Olaüs Magnus has
forgotten to tell us how two cousins who killed each other in a duel on
horseback could have been buried. The fact of the duel required that the
stones be straight; the relationship required that they be circular; but
as the men were horsemen, it seems as if the stones ought to have been
arranged squarely, though this rule, it is true, was not formal, as it
was applied only to those whose party had triumphed. O good Olaüs
Magnus! You must have liked Monte-Pulciano exceeding well! And how many
draughts of it did it take for you to acquire all this wonderful
knowledge?
According to a certain English doctor named Borlase, who had observed
similar stones in Cornouailles, "they buried soldiers there, in the very
place where they died." As if, usually, they were carted to the
cemetery! And he builds his hypothesis on the following comparison:
their graves are on a straight line, like the front of an army on plains
that were the scene of some great action.
Then they tried to bring in the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Cochin
Chinese! There is a Karnac in Egypt, they said, and one on the coast of
Brittany. Now, it is probable that this Karnac descends from the
Egyptian one; it is quite certain! In Egypt they are sphinxes; here they
are rocks; but in both instances they are of stone. So it would seem
that the Egyptians (who never travelled), came to this coast (of the
existence of which they were ignorant), founded a colony (they never
founded any), and left these crude statues (they produced such beautiful
ones), as a positive proof of their sojourn in this country (which
nobody mentions).
People fond of mythology thought them the columns of Hercules; people
fond of natural history thought them a representation of the python,
because, according to Pausanias, a similar heap of stones, on the road
from Thebes to Elissonte, was called "the serpent's head," and
especially because the rows of stones at Carnac present the sinuosities
of a serpent. People fond of cosmography discovered a zodiac, like M. de
Cambry, who recognised in those eleven rows of stones the twelve signs
of the zodiac, "for it must be stated," he adds, "that the ancient Gauls
had only eleven signs to the zodiac."
Subsequently, a member of the Institute conjectured that it might
perhaps be the cemetery of the Venetians, who inhabited Vannes, situated
six miles from Carnac, and who founded Venice, as everybody knows.
Another man wrote that these Venetians, conquered by Cæsar, erected all
those rocks solely in a spirit of humility and in order to honour their
victor. But people were getting tired of the cemetery theory, the
serpent and the zodiac; they set out again and this time found a Druidic
temple.
The few documents that we possess, scattered through Pliny and Dionysius
Cassius, agree in stating that the Druids chose dark places for their
ceremonies, like the depths of the woods with "their vast silence." And
as Carnac is situated on the coast, and surrounded by a barren country,
where nothing but these gentlemen's fancies has ever grown, the first
grenadier of France, but not, in my estimation, the cleverest man,
followed by Pelloutier and by M. Mahé, (canon of the cathedral of
Vannes), concluded that it was "a Druidic temple in which political
meetings must also have been held."
But all had not been said, and it still remained to be discovered of
what use the empty spaces in the rows could have been. "Let us look for
the reason, a thing nobody has ever thought of before," cried M. Mahé,
and, quoting a sentence from Pomponius Mela: "The Druids teach the
nobility many things and instruct them secretly in caves and forests;"
and this one from Tucain: "You dwell in tall forests," he reached the
conclusion that the Druids not only officiated at the sanctuaries, but
that they also lived and taught in them. "So the monument of Carnac
being a sanctuary, like the Gallic forests," (O power of induction! where
are you leading Father Mahé, canon of Vannes and correspondent of the
Academy of Agriculture at Poitiers?), there is reason to believe that
the intervals, which break up the rows of stones, held rows of houses
where the Druids lived with their families and numerous pupils, and
where the heads of the nation, who, on state days, betook themselves to
the sanctuary, found comfortable lodgings. Good old Druids! Excellent
ecclesiastics! How they have been calumnied! They lived there so
righteously with their families and numerous pupils, and even were
amiable enough to prepare lodgings for the principals of the nation!
But at last came a man imbued with the genius of ancient things and
disdainful of trodden paths. He was able to recognize the rests of a
Roman camp, and, strangely enough, the rests of one of the camps of
Cæsar, who had had these stones upreared only to serve as support for
the tents of his soldiers and prevent them from being blown away by the
wind. What gales there must have been in those days, on the coasts of
Armorica!
The honest writer who, to the glory of the great Julius, discovered this
sublime precaution, (thus returning to Cæsar that which never belonged
to Cæsar), was a former pupil of l'École Polytechnique, an engineer, a
M. de la Sauvagère. The collection of all these data constitutes what is
called _Celtic Archæology_, the mysteries of which we shall presently
disclose.
A stone placed on another one is called a "dolmen," whether it be
horizontal or perpendicular. A group of upright stones covered by
succeeding flat stones, and forming a series of dolmens, is a "fairy
grotto," a "fairy rock," a "devil's stable," or a "giant's palace"; for,
like the people who serve the same wine under different labels, the
Celto-maniacs, who had almost nothing to offer, decorated the same
things with various names. When these stones form an ellipse, and have
no head-covering, one must say: There is a "cromlech"; when one
perceives a stone laid horizontally upon two upright stones, one is
confronted by a "lichaven" or a "trilithe." Often two enormous rocks are
put one on top of the other, and touch only at one point, and we read
that "they are balanced in such a way that the wind alone is sufficient
to make the upper rock sway perceptibly," an assertion which I do not
dispute, although I am rather suspicious of the Celtic wind, and
although these swaying rocks have always remained unshaken in spite of
the fierce kicks I was artless enough to give them; they are called
"rolling or rolled stones," "turned or transported stones," "stones that
dance or dancing stones," "stones that twist or twisting stones." You
must still learn what a _pierre fichade_, a _pierre fiche_, a _pierre
fixée_ are, and what is meant by a _haute borne_, a _pierre latte_ and a
_pierre lait_; in what a _pierre fonte_ differs from a _pierre fiette_,
and what connection there is between a _chaire à diable_ and a _pierre
droite_; then you will be as wise as ever were Pelloutier, Déric, Latour
d'Auvergne, Penhoet and others, not forgetting Mahé and Fréminville.
Now, all this means a _pulvan_, also called a _men-hir_, and designates
nothing more than a stone of greater or lesser size, placed by itself in
an open field.
I was about to forget the tumuli! Those that are composed of silica and
soil are called "barrows" in high-flown language, while the simple heaps
of stones are "gals-gals."
People have pretended that when they were not tombs the "dolmens" and
"trilithes" were altars, that the "fairy rocks" were assembling places
or sepultures, and that the business meetings at the time of the Druids
were held in the "cromlechs." M. de Cambry saw in the "swaying rocks"
the emblems of the suspended world. The "barrows" and "gals-gals" have
undoubtedly been tombs; and as for the "men-hirs," people went so far as
to pretend that they had a form which led to the deduction that a
certain cult reigned throughout lower Brittany. O chaste immodesty of
science, you respect nothing, not even a peulven!
A reverie, no matter how undefined, may lead up to splendid creations,
when it starts from a fixed point. Then the imagination, like a soaring
hippogriff, stamps the earth with all its might and journeys straightway
towards infinite regions. But when it applies itself to a subject devoid
of plastic art and history, and tries to extract a science from it, and
to reconstruct a world, it remains even poorer and more barren than the
rough stone to which the vanity of some praters has lent a shape and
dignified with a history.
To return to the stones of Carnac (or rather, to leave them), if anyone
should, after all these opinions, ask me mine, I would emit an
irresistible, irrefutable, incontestable one, which would make the tents
of M. de la Sauvagère stagger, blanch the face of the Egyptian Penhoët,
break up the zodiac of Cambry and smash the python into a thousand bits.
This is my opinion: the stones of Carnac are simply large stones!
* * * * *
So we returned to the inn and dined heartily, for our five hours' tramp
had sharpened our appetites. We were served by the hostess, who had
large blue eyes, delicate hands, and the sweet face of a nun. It was not
yet bedtime, and it was too dark to work, so we went to the church.
This is small, although it has a nave and side-aisles like a city
church. Short, thick stone pillars support its wooden roof, painted in
blue, from which hang miniature vessels, votive offerings that were
promised during raging storms. Spiders creep along their sails and the
riggings are rotting under the dust. No service was being held, and the
lamp in the choir burned dimly in its cup filled with yellow oil;
overhead, through the open windows of the darkened vault, came broad
rays of white light and the sound of the wind rustling in the tree-tops.
A man came in to put the chairs in order, and placed two candles in an
iron chandelier riveted to the stone pillar; then he pulled into the
middle of the aisle a sort of stretcher with a pedestal, its black wood
stained with large white spots. Other people entered the church, and a
priest clad in his surplice passed us. There was the intermittent
tinkling of a bell and then the door of the church opened wide. The
jangling sound of the little bell mingled with the tones of another and
their sharp, clear tones swelled louder as they came nearer and nearer
to us.
A cart drawn by oxen appeared and halted in front of the church. It held
a corpse, whose dull white feet protruded from under the winding-sheet
like bits of washed alabaster, while the body itself had the uncertain
form peculiar to dressed corpses. The crowd around was silent. The men
bared their heads; the priest shook his holy-water sprinkler and mumbled
orisons, and the pair of oxen swung their heads to and fro under the
heavy, creaking yoke. The church, in the background of which gleamed a
star, formed one huge shadow in the greenish outdoor atmosphere of a
rainy twilight, and the child who held a light on the threshold had to
keep his hand in front of it to prevent the wind from blowing it out.
They lifted the body from the cart, and in doing so struck its head
against the pole. They carried it into the church and placed it on the
stretcher. A crowd of men and women followed. They knelt on the floor,
the men near the corpse, and the women a little farther away, near the
door; then the service began.
It did not last very long, at least it impressed us that way, for the
low psalmodies were recited rapidly and drowned now and then by a
stifled sob which came from under the black hoods near the door. A hand
touched me and I drew aside to let a bent woman pass. With her clenched
fists on her breast, and face averted, she advanced without appearing to
move her feet, eager to see, yet trembling to behold, and reached the
row of lights which burned beside the bier. Slowly, very slowly, lifting
up her arm as if to hide herself under it, she turned her head on her
shoulder and sank in a heap on a chair, as limp as her garments.
By the light of the candles, I could see her staring eyes, framed by
lids that looked as if they had been scalded, so red were they; her
idiotic and contracted mouth, trembling with despair, and her whole
pitiful face, which was drenched with tears.
The corpse was that of her husband, who had been lost at sea; he had
been washed ashore and was now being laid to rest.
The cemetery adjoined the church. The mourners passed into it through a
side-door, while the corpse was being nailed in its coffin, in the
vestry. A fine rain moistened the atmosphere; we felt cold; the earth
was slippery and the grave-diggers who had not completed their task,
found it hard to raise the heavy soil, for it stuck to their shovels. In
the background, the women kneeling in the grass, throwing back their
hoods and their big white caps, the starched wings of which fluttered in
the wind, appeared at a distance like an immense winding-sheet hovering
over the earth.
When the corpse reappeared, the prayers began again, and the sobs broke
out anew, and could be heard through the dropping rain.
Not far from us, issued, at regular intervals, a sort of subdued gurgle
that sounded like laughter. In any other place, a person hearing it
would have thought it the repressed explosion of some overwhelming joy
or the paroxysm of a delirious happiness. It was the widow, weeping.
Then she walked to the edge of the grave, as did the rest of the
mourners, and little by little, the soil assumed its ordinary level and
everybody went home.
As we walked down the cemetery steps, a young fellow passed us and said
in French to a companion: "Heavens! didn't the fellow stink! He is
almost completely mortified! It isn't surprising, though, after being in
the water three weeks!"
* * * * *
One morning we started as on other mornings; we chose the same road, and
passed the hedge of young elms and the sloping meadow where the day
before we had seen a little girl chasing cattle to the drinking-trough;
but it was the last day, and the last time perhaps, that we should pass
that way.
A muddy stretch of land, into which we sank up to our ankles, extends
from Carnac to the village of Pô. A boat was waiting for us; we entered
it, and they hoisted the sail and pushed off. Our sailor, an old man
with a cheerful face, sat aft; he fastened a line to the gunwale and let
his peaceful boat go its own way. There was hardly any wind; the blue
sea was calm and the narrow track the rudder ploughed in the waters
could be seen for a long time. The old fellow was talkative; he spoke of
the priests, whom he disliked, of meat, which he thought was a good
thing to eat even on fast days, of the work he had had when he was in
the navy, and of the shots he had received when he was a customs
officer.... The boat glided along slowly, the line followed us and the
end of the _tape-cul_ hung in the water.
The mile we had to walk in order to go from Saint-Pierre to Quiberon was
quickly covered, in spite of a hilly and sandy road, and the sun, which
made our shoulders smart beneath the straps of our bags, and a number of
"men-hirs" that were scattered along the route.
CHAPTER IV.
QUIBERON.
In Quiberon, we breakfasted at old Rohan Belle-Isle's, who keeps the
Hôtel Penthièvre. This gentleman had his bare feet stuck in old
slippers, on account of the heat, and was drinking with a mason, a fact
which does not prevent him from being the descendant of one of the first
families of Europe; an aristocrat of the old stock! a real aristocrat!
_Vive Dieu!_ He immediately set to work to pound a steak and to cook us
some lobsters. Our pride was flattered to its innermost fibre.
The past of Quiberon is concentrated in a massacre. Its greatest
curiosity is a cemetery, which is filled to its utmost capacity and
overflows into the street. The head-stones are crowded together and
invade and submerge one another, as if the corpses were uncomfortable in
their graves and had lifted up their shoulders to escape from them. It
suggests a petrified ocean, the tombs being the waves, and the crosses
the masts of shipwrecked vessels.
In the middle, an open ossuary contains skeletons that have been exhumed
in order to make room for other corpses. Who has said: "Life is a
hostelry, and the grave is our home?" But these corpses do not remain in
their graves, for they are only tenants and are ejected at the
expiration of the lease. Around this charnel-house, where the heaps of
bones resemble a mass of fagots, is arranged, breast-high, a series of
little black boxes, six inches square, surmounted by a cross and cut out
in the shape of a heart in front, so that one can see the skulls inside.
Above the heart-shaped opening are the following words in painted
letters: "This is the head of ---- ----, deceased on such and such a
day, in such and such a year." These heads belonged to persons of a
certain standing, and one would be considered an ungrateful son if,
after seven years, he did not give his parents' skulls the luxury of one
of these little black boxes. The remainder of the bodies is thrown into
the bone-house, and twenty-five years afterwards the heads are sent to
join them. A few years ago they tried to abolish the custom; but a riot
ensued and the practice continued.
Perhaps it is wicked to play with those round skulls which once
contained a mind, with those empty circles in which passion throbbed.
Those boxes surrounding the ossuary and scattered over the graves, over
the wall and in the grass, without any attempt at order, may appear
horrible to a few and ridiculous to many; but those black cases rotting
even as the bones blanch and crumble to dust; those skulls, with noses
eaten away and foreheads streaked by the slimy trails of snails, and
hollow, staring eyes; those thigh-bones piled up as in the great
charnel-houses mentioned in the Bible; those pieces of skulls lying
around filled with earth, in which a flower springs up sometimes and
grows through the holes of the eyes; even the vulgarity of those
inscriptions, which are as similar as the corpses they identify--all
this human rottenness appeared beautiful to us, and procured us a
splendid sight.
If the post of Auray had arrived, we should have started at once for
Belle-Isle; but they were waiting for it. Transient sailors with bare
arms and open shirts sat in the kitchen of the inn, drinking to pass
away the time.
"At what time is the post due here in Auray?"
"That depends; usually at ten o'clock," replied the innkeeper.
"No, at eleven," put in a man.
"At twelve," said M. de Rohan.
"At one."
"At half-past one."
"Sometimes it doesn't reach here until two o'clock."
"It isn't very regular!"
We were aware of that; it was already three. We could not start before
the arrival of this ill-fated messenger, which brings Belle-Isle the
despatches from _terra firma_, so we had to resign ourselves. Once in a
while some one would get up, go to the door, look out, come back, and
start up again. Oh! he will not come to-day.--He must have stopped on
the way.--Let's go home.--No, let's wait for him.--If, however, you are
tired of waiting gentlemen.... After all, there may not be any
letters.... No, just wait a little longer.--Oh! here he comes!--But it
was some one else, and the dialogue would begin all over again.
At last we heard the beating of tired hoofs on the cobblestones, the
tinkling of bells, the cracking of a whip and a man's voice shouting:
"Ho! Ho! Here's the post! Here's the post!"
The horse stopped in front of the door, hunched its back, stretched its
neck, opened its mouth, disclosed its teeth, spread its hind legs and
rose on its hocks.
The animal was lean and tall, and had a moth-eaten mane, rough hoofs and
loose shoes; a seton bobbed up and down on its breast. Lost in a saddle
that swallowed him up, supported at the back by a valise and in front by
the mail-bag, which was passed through the saddle-bow, its rider sat
huddled on it like a monkey. His small face, adorned with straggling
blond whiskers and as wrinkled and rough as a winter apple, was hidden
by a large oil-cloth hat lined with felt; a sort of gray coutil coat was
drawn up to his hips and bagged around his stomach, while his trousers
stopped at the knees and disclosed his bare legs reddened by the rubbing
of the stirrup-straps, and his blue hose, which hung over his shoes. The
harness was held together with strings, the rider's clothes had been
mended with threads of different colours; all sorts of patches and all
kinds of spots, torn linen, greasy leather, dried mud, recent dust,
hanging straps, bright rags, a dirty man and a mangy horse, the former
sickly and perspiring, the latter consumptive and almost spent; the one
with his whip and the other with its bells--all this formed but one
object which had the same colour and movement and executed almost the
same gestures, which served the same purpose, the conducting of the
Auray post.
After another hour, when all the packages and commissions had been
attended to and we had waited for several passengers who were to come,
we finally left the inn and went aboard. At first there was nothing but
a confused mass of people and luggage, oars that caused us to stumble,
sails that dropped on our heads, men falling over each other and not
knowing where to go; then everything quieted down, each one found his
nook, the luggage was put in the bottom of the boat, the sailors got on
the benches, and the passengers seated themselves as best they could.
There was no breeze and the sails clung limply to the masts. The heavy
boat hardly moved over the almost motionless sea, which swelled and
subsided with the gentle rhythm of a sleeping breast.
Leaning against one of the gunwales, we gazed at the water, which was as
blue and calm as the sky, and listened to the splashing of the oars;
sitting in the shadow of the sail, the six rowers lifted their oars
regularly to make the forward stroke, and when they dipped them into the
water and brought them up again, drops of crystal clung to their
paddles. Reclining on the straw, or sitting on the benches, with their
legs dangling and their chins in their hands, or leaning against the
sides of the boat, between the big jambs of the hull, the tar of which
was melting in the heat, the silent passengers hung their heads and
closed their eyes to shut out the glare of the sun, that shone on the
flat ocean as on a mirror.
A white-haired man was sleeping at my feet, a gendarme was sweltering
under his three-cornered hat, and two soldiers had unfastened their
knapsacks and used them as pillows. Near the bowsprit stood a cabin-boy
looking into the stay-sail and whistling for wind, while the skipper
remained aft and managed the tiller. Still no wind arose. Orders were
given to haul in the sails; slowly and gently they came down and fell in
a heap on the benches; then each sailor took off his waistcoat, stowed
it away under the bow of the boat, and the men began to row again with
all their might.
* * * * *
Our departure had been so delayed that there was hardly any water left
in the harbour and we had great difficulty in landing. Our boat grated
on the pebbles, and in order to leave it, we were compelled to walk on
an oar as if it were a tight-rope.
Ensconced between the citadel and its ramparts, and cut in two by an
almost empty port, the Palay appeared to us a useless little town
overcome with military ennui, and put me in mind, I do not know why, of
a gaping _sous-officier_.
One fails to see the low-crowned, broad-brimmed black felt hats of Le
Morbihan, that give protection to the shoulders as well as the head. The
women do not affect the big, white caps that stand out from their faces,
and reach down their backs like those worn by the nuns, so that when
worn by little girls they cover half of their bodies. Their gowns are
made without the wide stripe of velvet applied on each shoulder and
rounding away under the arms. Nor do they wear the low shoes with square
toes, high heels, and long black ribbon streamers. Here, as elsewhere,
we found faces that resemble other faces, costumes that really are no
costumes at all, cobblestones, and even a sidewalk.
Was it worth while to expose ourselves to seasickness (which, by the
way, we escaped, a fact that inclined us to leniency), only to see a
citadel that we do not admire, a lighthouse that did not appeal to us in
the least, and a rampart built by Vauban, of whom we were already
heartily tired? But people had spoken to us of Belle-Isle's rocks. So we
started at once, and taking a short cut across the fields, walked to the
beach.
We saw one grotto, only one (the day was near its close), but it
appeared so beautiful to us (it was draped with sea-weed and decorated
with shells, and water dripped from the top), that we resolved to spend
a day in Belle-Isle, in order to discover more of them, if there were
any, and feast our eyes leisurely upon their beauties.
The following day, at dawn, having filled our flasks and put some
sandwiches in our knapsacks, we decided to go where we pleased; so,
without a guide or information of any sort (this is the best way), we
set out to walk, having resolved that we would go anywhere, provided it
were far, and would return home at any time, provided it were late.
We began by a path which led to the top of a cliff, then followed its
asperities and valleys and continued around the whole island. When we
reached places where landslips had obliterated it, we struck out into
the country and let our eyes roam over the horizon of the sea, the deep
blue line of which touched the sky; then we walked back to the edge of
the rocks, which had suddenly reappeared at our side. The perpendicular
cliff, the top of which we were treading, concealed the flank of the
rocks, and we could only hear the roaring of the breakers below us.
Sometimes the rock was split in its entire length, disclosing its two
almost straight sides, streaked with layers of silica, with tufts of
yellow flowers scattered here and there. If we threw a stone, it
appeared suspended in the air for a time, would then strike the sides of
the cliff, rebound from the one to the other, break into a thousand
bits, scattering earth and pebbles in its course, and finally land at
the bottom of the pit, where it frightened the cormorants, which
shrieked and took flight.
Frequent storms and thaws have pushed a part of the upper grounds into
these gorges, and so their steep slope has grown less abrupt, and one is
able to climb down to the bottom. We attempted to do so by sliding down
like children, holding ourselves back with our hands and feet, and
finally we landed safely on the soft, wet sand.
The tide was going out, but in order to be able to pass, we had to wait
until the breakers receded. We watched them approach us. They dashed
against the rocks, swirled in the crevices, rose like scarfs on the
wind, fell back in drops and sprays, and with one long, sweeping
libration, gathered their green waters together and retreated. When one
wave left the sand, its currents immediately joined, and sought lower
levels. The sea-weed moved its slimy branches; the water bubbled between
the pebbles, oozed through the cracks of the rocks and formed a thousand
rivulets and fountains. The drenched sand absorbed it all, and soon its
yellow tint grew white again through the drying action of the sun.
As soon as we could, we jumped over the rocks and continued on our way.
Soon, however, they increased in numbers, their weird groups being
crowded together, piled up and overturned on one another. We tried to
hold on with our hands and feet, but we slid on their slippery
asperities. The cliff was so very high that it quite frightened us to
look up at it. Although it crushed us by its formidable placidity, still
it fascinated us, for we could not help looking at it and it did not
tire our eyes.
A swallow passed us and we watched its flight; it came from the sea; it
ascended slowly through the air, cutting the luminous, fluid atmosphere
with its sharp, outstretched wings that seemed to enjoy being absolutely
untrammelled. The bird ascended higher and higher, rose above the cliff
and finally disappeared.
Meanwhile we were creeping over the rocks, the perspective of which was
renewed by each bend of the coast. Once in a while, when the rocks
ended, we walked on square stones that were as flat as marble slabs and
seamed by almost symmetrical furrows, which appeared like the tracks of
some ancient road of another world.
In some places were great pools of water as calm as their greenish
depths and as limpid and motionless as a woodland stream on its bed of
cresses. Then the rocks would reappear closer than before and more
numerous. On one side was the ocean with its breakers foaming around the
lower rocks; on the other, the straight, unrelenting, impassive coast.
Tired and bewildered, we looked about us for some issue; but the cliff
stretched out before us, and the rocks, infinitely multiplying their
dark green forms, succeeded one another until their unequal crags seemed
like so many tall, black phantoms rising out of the earth.
We stumbled around in this way until we suddenly perceived an undulating
series of rough steps which enabled us to climb up to flat land again.
It is always a pleasure, even when the country is ugly, to walk with a
friend, to feel the grass under one's feet, to jump over fences and
ditches, to break thistles with one's stick, to pull leaves from the
bushes and wheat from the fields, to go where one's fancy dictates,
whistling, singing, talking, dreaming, without strange ears to listen to
one's conversation, and the sound of strange footsteps behind one, as
absolutely free as if one were in the desert!
Ah! Let us have air! air! And more space! Since our contracted souls
suffocate and die on the window-sill, since our captive spirits, like
the bear in its cage, turn around and around, and stagger against the
walls of their prison, why not, at least, let our nostrils breathe the
different perfumes of all the winds of the earth, why not let our eyes
rove over every horizon?
No steeple shone in the distance, no hamlet with thatched roofs and
square yards framed by clusters of trees, appeared on the side of a
hill; not a soul was to be seen, not even a peasant, a grazing sheep, or
a stray dog.
All those cultivated fields look uninhabited; the peasants work in them,
but they do not live there. One is led to believe that they benefit by
them but do not care about them in the least.
We saw a farm and walked in; a ragged woman served us some ice-cold milk
in earthen cups. The silence all around was peculiar. The woman watched
us eagerly, and we soon took our departure.
We walked into a valley, the narrow gorge of which appeared to extend to
the ocean. Tall grass with yellow flowers reached up to our waists, and
we had to take long strides in order to advance. We could hear the
murmur of flowing water near by, and we sank ankle-deep into the marshy
soil. Presently the two hills parted; their barren sides were covered
with short, stubby grass and here and there were big yellow patches of
moss. At the foot of one hill a stream wends its way through the
drooping boughs of the stunted shrubs that grow on its edges, and loses
itself in a quiet pond where long-legged insects disport themselves on
the leaves of the water-lilies. The sun beat down on us. The gnats
rubbed their wings together and bent the slender ends of the reeds with
the weight of their tiny bodies. We were alone in the tranquillity of
this desert.
At this point, the valley curved and widened and formed a sharp bend. We
climbed a little hill, in order to locate ourselves, but the horizon
either ended abruptly, enclosed by another hill, or else stretched out
over new plains. We did not lose courage, however, and continued to
advance, while we thought of the travellers on desert islands who climb
on promontories in the hope of sighting some vessel setting sail towards
them.
The soil was growing less moist, and the grass less high; presently the
ocean came in view, ensconced in a narrow bay, and soon the shore,
strewn with débris of shells and madrepores, crunched beneath our
footsteps. We let ourselves drop to the ground and as we were exhausted,
we soon fell asleep. An hour later the cold woke us up, and we started
homeward without any fear of losing our way this time. We were on the
coast facing France, and Palay was on our left. It was here, the day
before, that we had discovered the grotto we admired so much. It did not
take us long to find others, higher and deeper even than the first one.
They always opened through large, pointed arches which were either
upright or inclined, their bold columns supporting enormous pieces of
rock. Black, veined with purple, fiery red, or brown streaked with
white, these beautiful grottoes displayed for their visitors the
infinite variety of their shapes and colouring, their graces and their
grand caprices. There was one all of silver veined with deep red; in
another, tufts of flowers resembling periwinkles had grown on glazings
of reddish granite, and drops of water fell from the ceiling on the fine
sand with never-ceasing regularity. In the background of another grotto,
beneath a long semi-circle, a bed of polished white gravel, which the
tide no doubt turns and makes fresh every day, seemed to be waiting to
receive the body of a mermaid; but the bed is empty and has lost her
forever! Only the moist seaweed remains on which she used to stretch her
delicate nude limbs when she was tired of swimming, and on which she
reclined till daybreak, in the pale light of the moon.
The sun was setting, and the tide was coming in over the rocks that
melted in the blue evening mist, which was blanched on the level of the
ocean by the foam of the tumbling waves. In the other part of the
horizon, the sky streaked with orange stripes looked as if it had been
swept by a gale. Its light reflected on the waters and spread a gleaming
sheen over them, and projected on the sand, giving it a brownish tinge
and making it glitter like steel.
Half a mile to the south, the coast is covered by a line of rocks that
extends to the sea. In order to reach them, we should have been
compelled to tramp as we had already done that morning. We were tired,
and it was far; but a temptation seemed to push us forward. The breeze
played in the cracks of the rocks and wrinkled the surface of the pools;
the sea-weed, cleaving to the sides of the cliff, shook in the wind, and
from the part of the sky where the moon was to rise, a pale light spread
over the waters. It was the hour when the shadows lengthen. The rocks
appeared larger, and the breakers a deeper green. The sky seemed to
expand, and all nature assumed a different appearance.
So we started, without giving a thought to the incoming tide or whether
or not we should find later a way to get back to land. We wished to
enjoy our pleasure to the fullest extent. We seemed lighter than in the
morning, and ran and jumped without the slightest feeling of fatigue. An
abundance of animal spirits impelled us onward and we felt a peculiarly
robust twitching in our muscles. We shook our heads in the wind and
touched the grasses with our fingers. We breathed the salt air of the
ocean, and noted and assimilated every color, every sunbeam, every
sound, the design of the seaweed, the softness of the sand, the hardness
of the rocks that echoed under our footsteps, the height of the cliffs,
the fringe of the waves, the accidents of the coast, and the voice of
the horizon; and the breeze that passed over our faces like intangible
kisses, the sky with its passing clouds, the rising moon, the peeping
stars. Our souls bathed in all this splendour, and our eyes feasted on
it; we opened our ears and nostrils wide; something of the very life of
the elements, forced from them undoubtedly by the attraction of our
eyes, reached us and was assimilated, so that we were able to comprehend
them in a closer relation and feel them more keenly, thanks to this
complex union.
By thus entering and penetrating into nature, we became a part of it,
diffused ourselves in it, and were claimed by it once more; we felt that
it was overpowering us, and we rejoiced; we desired to be lost in it, to
be borne away, or to carry it away with us. As in the raptures of love,
one wishes more hands with which to caress, more lips with which to
kiss, more eyes with which to see, more soul with which to worship;
spreading ourselves out in nature, with a joyful and delirious abandon,
we regretted that our eyes could not penetrate to the innermost parts of
the rocks, to the bottom of the sea, to the end of the heavens, in order
to see how the stones grow, how the breakers are made, how the stars are
lighted; we regretted that our ears could not catch the rumour of the
fermentation of the granite in the bowels of the earth, could not hear
the sap circulate in the plants and the coral roll in the solitudes of
the ocean. And while we were under the spell of that contemplative
effusion, we wished that our souls, radiating everywhere, might live all
these different lives, assume all these different forms, and, varying
unceasingly, accomplish their metamorphoses under an eternal sun!
But man was made to enjoy each day only a small portion of food,
colours, sounds, sentiments and ideas. Anything above the allotted
quantity tires or intoxicates him; it becomes the idiocy of the drunkard
or the ravings of the ecstatic. O, God! How small is our glass and how
large is our thirst! What weak heads we have!
CHAPTER V.
RETURN.
In order to return to Quiberon, we were compelled, on the following day,
to arise before seven o'clock, a feat which required some courage. While
we were still stiff from fatigue and shivering with sleep, we got into a
boat along with a white horse, two drummers, the same one-eyed gendarme
and the same soldier who, this time, however, did not lecture anybody.
As drunk as a lord, he kept slipping under the benches and had all he
could do to keep his shako on his head and extricate his gun from
between his feet. I could not say which was the sillier of the two. The
gendarme was sober, but he was very stupid. He deplored the soldier's
lack of manners, enumerated the punishments that would be dealt out to
him, was scandalised by his hiccoughs and resented his demeanour. Viewed
from the side of the missing eye, with his three-cornered hat, his sabre
and his yellow gloves, the gendarme presented one of the sorriest
aspects of human life. Besides, there is something so essentially
grotesque about gendarmes that I cannot help laughing at them; these
upholders of the law always produce the same comic effect on me, and so
do attorneys for the king, magistrates, and professors of literature.
Tipped to one side, the boat skimmed lightly through the foaming waves.
The three sails were comfortably swelled; the masts creaked and the wind
rattled the pulleys. A cabin-boy stood at the helm singing. We could not
catch the words, but it was some slow, monotonous lay which neither rose
nor fell and was repeated again and again, with long-drawn-out
inflections and languid refrain. And it swept softly and sadly out over
the ocean, as some confused memory sweeps through one's mind.
The horse stood as straight as it could on its four legs and pulled at a
bundle of hay. The sailors, with folded arms, looked absently at the
sails and smiled a far-away smile.
* * * * *
So we journeyed on without speaking a word and as best we could, without
reaching the edge of the bay, where it looked as if Plouharnel might be.
However, after a while we arrived there. But when we did, we were
confronted by the ocean, for we had followed the right side of the coast
instead of the left, and were forced to turn back and go over a part of
the route.
A muffled sound was heard. A bell tinkled and a hat appeared. It was the
Auray post. Again the same man, the same horse, the same mail-bag. He
was ambling quietly towards Quiberon; he would be back directly and
return again the next day. He is the guest of the coast; he passes in
the morning and again at night. His life is spent going from one point
to another; he is the only one who gives the coast some animation,
something to look forward to, and, I was almost going to say, some
charm.
He stopped and talked to us for a few minutes, then lifted his hat and
was off again.
What an ensemble! What a horse, and what a rider! What a picture! Callot
would probably have reproduced it, but it would take Cervantes to write
it.
After passing over large pieces of rock that have been placed in the sea
in order to shorten the route by cutting the back of the bay in two, we
finally arrived at Plouharnel.
The village was quiet; chickens cackled and scratched in the streets,
and in the gardens enclosed by stone walls, weeds and oats grew side by
side.
While we were sitting in front of the host's door, an old beggar passed
us. He was as red as a lobster, dirty and unkempt and covered with rags
and vermin. The sun shone on his dilapidated garments and on his purple
skin; it was almost black and seemed to transude blood. He kept
bellowing in a terrible voice, while beating a tattoo on the door of a
neighbouring house.
CHAPTER VI.
QUIMPER.
Quimper, although it is the centre of the real Brittany, is distinctly
different from it. The elm-tree promenade that follows the winding
river, which has quays and boats, renders the town very pretty and the
big Hôtel de la Préfecture, which alone covers the little western delta,
gives it a thoroughly administrative and French appearance. You are
aware that you are in the _chef-lieu_ of a department, a fact brought
home to you by the latter's division in _arrondissements_, with their
large, medium, and small parishes, its committee of primary instruction,
its saving banks, its town council and other modern inventions, which
rob the cities of local colour, dear to the heart of the innocent
tourist.
With all due deference to the people who pronounce the name of
Quimper-Corentin as the synonyme of all that is ridiculous and
provincial, it is a most delightful place, and well worth other more
respected ones. You will not, it is true, find the charms and riotous
wealth of colouring possessed by Quimperlé; still, I know of few things
that can equal the charming appearance of that alley following the edge
of the river and shaded by the escarpment of a neighbouring mountain,
which casts the dark shadows of its luxuriant foliage over it.
It does not take long to go through cities of this kind, and to know
their most intimate recesses, and sometimes one stumbles across places
that stay one's steps and fill one's heart with gladness.
Small cities, like small apartments, seem warmer and cosier to live in.
But keep this illusion! There are more draughts in such apartments than
in a palace, and a city of this kind is more deadly monotonous than the
desert.
Returning to the hotel by one of those paths we dearly love, that rises
and falls and winds, sometimes through a field, sometimes through grass
and brambles, sometimes along a wall, which are filled in turn with
daisies, pebbles and thistles, a path made for light thoughts and
bantering conversation,--returning, I said, to the city, we heard cries
and plaintive wails issue from under the slated roof of a square
building. It was the slaughter-house.
At that moment I thought of some terrible city, of some frightful and
immense place like Babylon or Babel, filled with cannibals and
slaughter-houses, where they butchered men instead of animals; and I
tried to discover a likeness to human agonies in those bleating and
sobbing voices. I thought of groups of slaves brought there with ropes
around their necks, to be tied to iron rings, and killed in order to
feed their masters, who would eat their flesh from tables of carved
ivory and wipe their lips on fine linen. Would their attitudes be more
dejected, their eyes sadder or their prayers more pitiful?
While we were in Quimper, we went out one day through one side of the
town and came back through the other, after tramping about eight hours.
Our guide was waiting for us under the porch of the hotel. He started in
front of us and we followed. He was a little white-haired man, with a
linen cap and torn shoes, and he wore an old brown coat that was many
sizes too large for him. He stuttered when he spoke, and when he walked
he knocked his knees together; but in spite of all this, he managed to
advance very quickly, with a sort of nervous, almost febrile
perseverance. From time to time, he would pull a leaf off a tree and
clap it over his mouth to cool his lips. His business consists in going
from one place to another, attending to letters and errands. He goes to
Douarnenez, Quimperlé, Brest and even to Rennes, which is forty miles
away (a journey which he accomplished in four days, including going and
coming). His whole ambition, he said, was to return to Rennes once more
during his lifetime. And only for the purpose, mind you, of going back,
of making the trip, and being able to boast of it afterwards. He knows
every road and every _commune_ that has a steeple; he takes short cuts
across the fields, opens gates, and when he passes in front of a farm,
he never fails to greet its owners. Having listened to the birds all his
life, he has learned to imitate their chirpings, and when he walks along
the roads, under the trees, he whistles as his feathered friends do, in
order to charm his solitude.
Our first stop was at Loc-Maria, an ancient monastery, given in olden
times by Conan III to the abbey of Fontevrault; it is situated a quarter
of a mile from the town. This monastery has not been shamefully utilised
like the abbey of poor Robert d'Arbrissel.[2] It is deserted, but has
not been sullied. Its Gothic portal does not re-echo the voices of
jailers, and though there may not be much of it, one experiences neither
disgust nor rebellion. In that little chapel, of a rather severe Romance
style, the only curious thing is a large granite holy-water basin which
stands on the floor and is almost black. It is wide and deep and
represents to perfection the real Catholic holy-water basin, made to
receive the entire body of an infant, and not in the least like those
narrow shells in our churches in which you can only dip your fingers.
With its clear water rendered more limpid by the contrast of a greenish
bed, the vegetation which has grown all around it during the religious
calm of centuries, its crumbling angles, and its great mass of bronzed
stone, it looks like one of those hollowed rocks which contain salt
water.
After we had inspected the chapel carefully, we walked to the river,
crossed it in a boat, and plunged into the country.
It is absolutely deserted and strangely empty. Trees, bushes, sea-rushes,
tamarisks, and heather grow on the edge of the ditches. We came to broad
stretches of land, but we did not see a soul anywhere. The sky was bleak
and a fine rain moistened the atmosphere and spread a grey veil over the
country. The paths we chose were hollow and shaded by clusters of
foliage, the branches of which, uniting, drooped over our heads and
almost prevented us from walking erect. The light that filtered through
the dome of leaves was greenish, and as dim as on a winter evening. But
farther away, it was brilliant, and played around the edges of the leaves
and accentuated their delicate pinking. Later we reached the top of a
barren slope, which was flat and smooth, and without a blade of grass to
relieve the monotony of its colour. Sometimes, however, we came upon a
long avenue of beech-trees with moss growing around the foot of their
thick, shining trunks. There were wagon-tracks in these avenues, as if
to indicate the presence of a neighbouring castle that we might see at
any moment; but they ended abruptly in a stretch of flat land that
continued between two valleys, through which it would spread its green
maze furrowed by the capricious meanderings of hedges, spotted here and
there by a grove, brightened by clumps of sea-rushes, or by some field
bordering the meadows which rose slowly to meet the hills and lost
themselves in the horizon. Above these hills, far away in the mist,
stretched the blue surface of the ocean.
The birds are either absent or they do not sing; the leaves are thick,
the grass deadens one's footfalls, and the country gazes at you like
some melancholy countenance. It looks as if it had been created
expressly to harbour ruined lives and shattered hopes, and to foster
their bitterness beneath its weeping sky, to the low rustling of the
trees and the heather. On winter nights, when the fox creeps stealthily
over the dry leaves, when the tiles fall from the pigeon-house and the
reeds bend in the marshes, when the beech-trees stoop in the wind, and
the wolf ambles over the moonlit snow, while one is alone by the dying
embers listening to the wind howl in the empty hallways, how charming it
must be to let one's heart dwell on its most cherished despairs and long
forgotten loves!
We spied a hovel with a Gothic portal; further on was an old wall with
an ogive door; a leafless bush swayed there in the breeze. In the
courtyard the ground is covered with heather, violets, and pebbles; you
walk in, look around and go out again. This place is called "The temple
of the false gods," and used to be, it is thought, a commandery of
Templars.
Our guide started again and we followed him. Presently a steeple rose
among the trees; we crossed a stubble-field, climbed to the top of a
ditch and caught a glimpse of a few of dwellings: the village of
Pomelin. A rough road constitutes the main street and the village
consists of several houses separated by yards. What tranquillity! or
rather what forlornness! The thresholds are deserted; the yards are
empty.
Where are the inhabitants? One would think that they had all left the
village to lie in wait behind the furze-bushes to catch a glimpse of the
_Blues_ who are about to pass through the ravine.
The church is poor and perfectly bare. No beautiful painted saints, no
pictures on the walls or on the roof, no hanging lamp oscillating at the
end of a long, straight cord. In a corner of the choir, a wick was
burning in a glass filled with oil. Round wooden pillars hold up the
roof, the blue paint of which has been freshened recently. The bright
light of the fields, filtering through the green foliage which covers
the roof of the church, shines through the white window-panes. The door,
a little wooden door that closes with a latch, was open; a flight of
birds came in, chirping and beating their wings against the walls; they
fluttered for awhile beneath the vault and around the altar, two or
three alighted upon the holy-water basin, to moisten their beaks, and
then all flew away as suddenly as they had come.
It is not an unusual thing to see birds in the Breton churches; many
live there and fasten their nests to the stones of the nave; they are
never disturbed. When it rains, they all gather in the church, but as
soon as the sun pierces the clouds and the rain-spouts dry up, they
repair to the trees again. So that during the storm two frail creatures
often enter the blessed house of God together; man to pray and allay his
fears, and the bird to wait until the rain stops and to warm the naked
bodies of its frightened young.
A peculiar charm pervades these churches. It is not their poverty that
moves us, because even when they are empty, they appear to be inhabited.
Is it not, then, their modesty that appeals to us? For, with their
unpretentious steeples, and their low roofs hiding under the trees, they
seem to shrink and humiliate themselves in the sight of God. They have
not been upreared through a spirit of pride, nor through the pious fancy
of some mighty man on his death-bed. On the contrary, we feel that it is
the simple impression of a need, the ingenuous cry of an appetite, and,
like the shepherd's bed of dried leaves, it is the retreat the soul has
built for itself where it comes to rest when it is tired. These village
churches represent better than their city sisters the distinctive
features of the places where they are built, and they seem to
participate more directly in the life of the people who, from father to
son, come to kneel at the same place and on the same stone slab. Every
day, every Sunday, when they enter and when they leave, do they not see
the graves of their parents, are these not near them while they pray,
and does it not seem to them as if the church was only a larger family
circle from which the loved ones have not altogether departed? These
places of worship thus have a harmonious sense, and the life of these
people is influenced by it from the baptismal font to the grave. It is
not the same with us, because we have relegated eternity to the
outskirts of the city, have banished our dead to the faubourgs and laid
them to rest in the carpenter's quarter, near the soda factories and
night-soil magazines.
About three o'clock in the afternoon, we arrived at the chapel of
Kerfeunteun, near the entrance to Quimper. At the upper end of the
chapel is a fine glass window of the sixteenth century, representing the
genealogical tree of the Holy Trinity. Jacob forms the trunk, and the
top is figured by the Cross surmounted by the Eternal Father with a
tiara on His head. On each side, the square steeple represents a
quadrilateral pierced by a long straight window. This steeple does not
rest squarely on the roof, but instead, by means of a slender basis, the
narrow sides of which almost touch, it forms an obtuse angle near the
ridge of the roof. In Brittany, almost every church has a steeple of
this kind.
Before returning to the city, we made a détour in order to visit the
chapel of _La Mère-Dieu_. As it is usually closed, our guide summoned
the custodian, and the latter accompanied us with his little niece, who
stopped along the road to pick flowers. The young man walked in front of
us. His slender and flexible figure was encased in a jacket of light
blue cloth, and the three velvet streamers of his black hat, which was
carefully placed on the back of his head, over his knotted hair, hung
down his back.
At the bottom of a valley, or rather a ravine, can be seen the church of
_La Mère-Dieu_, veiled by thick foliage. In this place, amid the silence
of all these trees and because of its little Gothic portal (which
appears to be of the thirteenth century, but which, in reality, is of
the sixteenth), the church reminds one of the discreet chapels mentioned
in old novels and old melodies, where they knighted the page starting
for the Holy Land, one morning when the stars were dim and the lark
trilled, while the mistress of the castle slipped her white hand through
the bars of the iron gate and wept when he kissed her goodbye.
We entered the church. The young custodian took off his hat and knelt on
the floor. His thick, blond hair uncoiled and fell around his shoulders.
It clung a moment to the coarse cloth of his jacket, and then, little by
little, it separated and spread like the hair of a woman. It was parted
in the middle and hung on both sides over his shoulders and neck. The
golden mass rippled with light every time he moved his head bent in
prayer.
The little girl kneeled beside him and let her flowers fall to the
ground. For the first time in my life, I understood the beauty of a
man's locks and the fascination they may have for bare and playful arms.
A strange progress, indeed, is that which consists in curtailing
everywhere the grand superfetations nature has bestowed upon us, so that
whenever we discover them in all their virgin splendour, they are a
revelation to us.
CHAPTER VII.
PONT-L'ABBÉ.
At five o'clock in the evening, we arrived at Pont-l'Abbé, covered with
quite a respectable coating of mud and dust, which fell from our
clothing upon the floor of the inn with such disastrous abundance, every
time we moved, that we were almost mortified at the mess we made.
Pont-l'Abbé is a peaceful little town, cut in two in its entire length
by a broad, paved street. Its modest inhabitants cannot possibly look
any more stupid or insignificant than the place itself.
For those who must see something wherever they go, there are the
unimportant remains of the castle and the church, an edifice that would
be quite passable were it not for the thick coat of paint that covers
it. The chapel of the Virgin was a bower of flowers; bunches of
jonquils, pansies, roses, jessamine, and honeysuckle were arranged in
blue glasses or white china vases and spread their bright colours over
the altar and upward between the two tall candlesticks framing the
Virgin's face and her silver crown, from which fell a long veil caught
on the gold star of the plaster Infant she held in her arms. One could
smell the odour of the holy water and the flowers. It was a perfumed,
mysterious little nook all by itself, a hidden retreat decorated by
loving hands, and peculiarly adapted for the exhalation of mystical
desires and long, heart-broken orisons. All his heart's sensuousness,
compressed by the climate and numbed by misery, is brought here by man
and laid at the feet of Mary, the Divine Mother, and he is thus able to
satisfy his unquenchable longing for love and enjoyment. No matter if
the roof leaks and there are no benches or chairs in the rest of the
church, you will always find the chapel of the Virgin bright with
flowers and lights, for it seems as if all the religious tenderness of
Brittany has concentrated there; it is the softest spot of its heart; it
is its weakness, its passion, its treasure. Though there are no flowers
in these parts, there are flowers in the church; though the people are
poor, the Virgin is always sumptuous and beautiful. She smiles at you,
and despairing souls go to warm themselves at her knees as at a
hearthstone that is never extinguished. One is astonished at the way
these people cling to their belief; but does one know the pleasure and
voluptuousness they derive from it? Is not asceticism superior
epicureanism, fasting, refined gormandising? Religion can supply one
with almost carnal sensations; prayer has its debauchery and
mortification its raptures; and the men who come at night and kneel in
front of this dressed statue, feel their hearts beat thickly and a sort
of vague intoxication, while in the streets of the city, the children on
their way home from school stop and gaze dreamily at the woman who
smiles at them from the stained window of the church.
But you must attend a fête in order to gain an insight into the gloomy
character of these people. They don't dance; they merely turn; they
don't sing; they only whistle. That very evening we went to a
neighbouring village to be present at the inauguration of a
threshing-floor. Two _biniou_ players were stationed on top of the wall
surrounding the yard, and played continuously while two long lines of
men and women, following in one anothers' footsteps, trotted around the
place and described several figures. The lines would turn, break up and
form again at irregular intervals. The heavy feet of the dancers struck
the ground without the slightest attempt at rhythm, while the shrill
notes of the music succeeded one another rapidly and with desperate
monotony. The dancers who tired withdrew without interrupting the dance,
and when they had rested, they re-entered it. During the whole time we
watched this peculiar performance, the crowd stopped only once, while
the musicians drank some cider; then, when they had finished, the lines
formed anew and the dance began again. At the entrance of the yard was a
table covered with nuts; beside it stood a pitcher of brandy and on the
ground was a keg of cider; near by stood a citizen in a green frock coat
and a leather cap; a little farther away was a man wearing a jacket and
a sword suspended from a white shoulder-belt; they were the _commissaire
de police_, of Pont-l'Abbé and his _garde-champêtre_. Suddenly, M. le
commissaire pulled out his watch and motioned to the _garde_. The latter
drew several peasants aside, spoke to them in a low tone, and presently
the assembly broke up.
All four of us returned to the city together, which afforded us the
opportunity of again admiring mother of the harmonious combinations of
Providence which had created this _commissaire de police_ for this
_garde-champêtre_ and this _garde-champêtre_ for his _commissaire de
police_. They were made for each other. The same fact would give rise in
both of them to the same reflections; from the same idea both would draw
parallel conclusions. When the _commissaire_ laughed, the _garde_
grinned; when he assumed a serious expression, his shadow grew gloomy;
if the frock-coat said, "This must be done," the jacket replied, "I
think so, too;" if the coat added, "It is necessary;" the waistcoat
affirmed: "It is indispensable." Notwithstanding this inward
comprehension, their outward relations of rank and authority remained
unchanged. For the _garde_ spoke in a lower tone than the _commissaire_,
and was a trifle shorter and walked behind him. The _commissaire_ was
polished, important, fluent; he consulted himself, ruminated, talked to
himself, and smacked his tongue; the _garde_ was deferential, attentive,
pensive and observing, and would utter an exclamation from time to time
and scratch his nose. On the way, he inquired about the news, asked the
_commissaire's_ advice, and solicited his orders, while his superior
questioned, meditated, and issued commands.
We had just come in sight of the first houses of the city, when we heard
shrieks issue from one of them. The street was blocked by an excited
crowd, and several persons rushed up to the _commissaire_ and exclaimed:
"Come, come quickly, Monsieur, they're having a fight! Two women are
being killed!"
"By whom?"
"We don't know."
"Why?"
"They are bleeding."
"But with what?"
"With a rake."
"Where's the murderer?"
"One on the head and the other on the arm. Go in, they're waiting for
you; the women are there."
So the _commissaire_ went in and we followed. We heard sobs, screams,
and excited conversation and saw a jostling, curious mob. People stepped
on one another's toes, dug one another's ribs, cursed, and caused
general confusion.
The _commissaire_ got angry; but as he could not speak Breton, the
_garde_ got angry for him and chased the crowd out, taking each
individual by his shoulders and shoving him through the door into the
street.
When the room had been cleared of all except a dozen persons, we managed
to discover in a corner, a piece of flesh hanging from an arm and a mass
of black hair dripping with blood. An old woman and a young girl had
been hurt in the fight. The old woman was tall and angular and had skin
as yellow and wrinkled as parchment; she was standing up, groaning and
holding her left arm with her right hand; she did not seem to be
suffering much, but the girl was crying. She was sitting on a chair with
her hands spread out on her knees and her head bent low; she was
trembling convulsively and shaking with low sobs. As they replied by
complaints to all our questions, and as the testimony of the witnesses
was conflicting, we could not ascertain who had started the fight or
what it was about. Some said that a husband had surprised his wife;
others, that the women had started the row and that the owner of the
house had tried to kill them in order to make them stop. But no one knew
anything definite. M. _le commissaire_ was greatly perplexed and the
_garde_ perfectly nonplussed.
As the doctor was away, and as it might be that the good people did not
wish his services, because it meant expense, we had the audacity to
offer the help of our limited knowledge and rushed off for our satchels,
a piece of cerecloth, and some linen and lint which we had brought with
us in anticipation of possible accidents.
It would really have been an amusing sight for our friends, had they
been able to see us spread out our bistoury, our pincers, and three
pairs of scissors, one with gold branches, on the table of this hut. The
_commissaire_ praised our philanthropy, the women watched us in awed
silence, and the tallow candle melted and ran down the iron candle-stick
in spite of the efforts of the _garde_, who kept trimming the wick with
his fingers. We attended to the old woman first. The cut had been given
conscientiously; the bare arm showed the bone, and a triangle of flesh
about four inches long hung over it like a cuff. We tried to put this
back in its place by adjusting it carefully over the edge of the gaping
wound and bandaging the arm. It is quite possible that the violent
compression the member was subjected to caused mortification to set in,
and that the patient may have died.
We did not know exactly what ailed the girl. The blood trickled through
her hair, but we could not see whence it came; it formed oily blotches
all over it and ran down into her neck. The _garde_, our interpreter,
bade her remove the cotton band she wore on her head, and her tresses
tumbled down in a dull, dark mass and uncoiled like a cascade full of
bloody threads. We parted the thick, soft, abundant locks, and found a
swelling as large as a nut and pierced by an oval hole on the back of
her head. We shaved the surrounding parts; and after we had washed and
stanched the wound, we melted some tallow and spread it over some lint,
which we adapted to the swelling with strips of diachylum. Over this we
placed first a bandage, then the cotton band, and then the cap. While
this was taking place, the justice of the peace arrived. The first thing
he did was to ask for the rake, and the only thing he seemed to care
about was to examine it. He took hold of the handle, counted the teeth,
waved it in the air, tested the iron and bent the wood.
"Is this," he demanded, "the instrument with which the assault was
committed? Jérôme, are you sure it is?"
"They say so, Monsieur."
"You were not present, Monsieur le commissaire?"
"No, Monsieur le juge de paix."
"I would like to know whether the blows were really dealt with a rake or
whether they were given with a blunt instrument. Who is the assailant?
And did the rake belong to him or to some one else? Was it really with
this that these women were hurt? Or was it, I repeat, with a blunt
instrument? Do they wish to lodge a complaint? What do you think about
it, Monsieur le commissaire?"
The victims said little, remarking only that they suffered great pain;
so they were given over night to decide whether or not they wished to
seek redress by law. The young girl could hardly speak, and the old
woman's ideas were muddled, seeing that she was drunk, according to what
the neighbours intimated,--a fact which explained her insensibility when
we had endeavoured to relieve her suffering.
After they had looked at us as keenly as they could in order to
ascertain who we were, the authorities of Pont-l'Abbé bade us good night
and thanked us for the services we had rendered the community. We put
our things back into our satchel, and the _commissaire_ departed with
the _garde_, the _garde_ with his sword, and the justice of the peace
with the rake.
CHAPTER VIII.
ROAMING.
En route! the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and our feet are eager to
tread on the grass. From Crozon to Leudevenec the country is quite flat,
and there is not a house nor a tree to be seen. As far as the eye can
reach, reddish moss spreads over the ground. Sometimes fields of ripe
wheat rise above the little stunted sea-rushes. The latter are
flowerless now, and look as they did before the springtime. Deep
wagon-tracks, edged by rolls of dried mud, make their appearance and
continue for a long time; then they suddenly describe a bend and are lost
to the eye. Grass grows in large patches between these sunken furrows.
The wind whistles over the flats; we walk on; a welcome breeze dries
the beads of perspiration on our cheeks, and when we halted we were able
to hear, above the sound of our beating arteries, the rustling of the
wind in the grass.
From time to time, a mill with rapidly revolving wheels would rise up
and point the way. The creaking wooden fans descended, grazed the ground
and then rose. Standing erect in the open garret-window, the miller
watched us pass.
We walked on; coming to a hedge of elm-trees which probably concealed a
village, we caught sight of a man standing in a tree, at the foot of
which was a woman with her blue apron spread out to catch the plums he
was throwing to her. I recollect a crop of dark hair falling in masses
over her shoulders, two uplifted arms, the movement of the supple neck
and the sonorous laughter that floated over the hedge to me.
The path we were following grew narrower. Presently the plain
disappeared and we found ourselves on the crest of a promontory
dominating the ocean. Looking towards Brest, it seemed to extend
indefinitely; but on the other side, it projected its sinuosities into
the land, between short hills covered with underwood. Each gulf is
ensconced between two mountains; each mountain is flanked by two gulfs,
and nothing can equal the beauty of those vast green slopes rising
almost in a straight line out of the sea. The hills have rounded tops
and flattened bases, and describe a wide, curved chain which joins the
plateaux with the graceful sweep of a Moorish arch; following so closely
upon one another, the colour of their foliage and their formation are
almost exactly alike. Propelled by the sea-breeze, the breakers dashed
up against the foot of these hills, and the sun, falling on them, made
them gleam; the whole surface of the ocean was blue and glittering with
silver, and we could not get enough of its beauty. Then we watched the
sunbeams glide over the hills. One of the latter had already been
deserted by them, and appeared more indistinct than the rest, while a
broad black shadow was rapidly gathering over another. As we approached
the level of the shore the mountains that faced us a moment ago seemed
to grow loftier; the gulfs deepened and the ocean expanded. We walked
on, oblivious to everything, and let our eyes roam at will, and the
pebbles that our feet dislodged rolled down the hill quickly and
disappeared in the bushes edging the road.
The roads followed hedges that were as compact and thick as walls; we
climbed up and we climbed down; meanwhile, it was growing dark, and the
country was settling into the deep silence characteristic of midsummer
evenings.
As we failed to meet anybody who could show us the way, the few peasants
we had questioned having responded by unintelligible cries, we produced
our map and our compass, and, locating ourselves by the setting sun, we
resolved to head straight for Daoulas. Instantly our vigour returned,
and we started across the fields, vaulting fences and ditches, and
uprooting, tearing and breaking everything in our way, without giving a
thought to the stiles we left open or the damaged crops.
At the top of a slope, we discovered the village of l'Hôpital lying in a
meadow watered by a stream. A bridge spans the latter and on this bridge
is a mill; beyond the meadow is a hill, which we started to climb
nimbly, when suddenly we saw, by a ray of light, a beautiful yellow and
black salamander creeping along the edge of a ditch with its slender
tail dragging in the dust and undulating with every motion of its
speckled body. It had come from its retreat under a big stone covered
with moss, and was hunting insects in the rotten trunks of old
oak-trees.
A pavement of uneven cobblestones echoed beneath our feet, and a street
stretched out before us. We had arrived in Daoulas. There was light
enough to enable us to distinguish a square sign swinging on an iron rod
on one of the houses. We should have recognised the inn even without the
sign, as houses, like men, have their professions stamped on their
faces. So we entered, for we were ravenous, and told the host above all
things not to keep us waiting.
While we were sitting in front of the door, waiting for our dinner, a
little girl in rags came along with a basket of strawberries on her
head. She entered the inn and came out again after a short while,
holding a big loaf of bread in both hands. Uttering shrill cries, she
scampered off with the alertness of a kitten. Her dusty hair fluttered
in the wind and stood out straight from her wizened face, and her bare
legs, which she lifted high in the air when running, disappeared under
the rags that covered her form.
After our meal, which comprised, besides the unavoidable omelet and the
fatal veal, the strawberries the little girl had brought, we went up to
our rooms.
The winding staircase with its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our
weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was a
room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there.
The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of
the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the
window-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece of
unpolished glass. The beds, four walnut boards carelessly put together,
had big, round, worm-eaten knobs, and the wood was split by the dryness.
On each bed was a mattress and a matting, covered with a ragged green
spread. A piece of mirror in a varnished frame, an old game-bag on a
nail, and a worn silk cravat which showed the crease of its folds,
indicated that the room belonged to some one who probably slept there
every night.
Under one of the red cotton pillows I discovered a hideous object, a cap
of the same color as the coverlet, but coated with a greasy glazing
which prevented its texture from being recognisable; a worn, shapeless,
clammy, oily thing. I am sure that its owner prizes it highly and that
he finds it warmer than any other cap. A man's life, the perspiration of
an entire existence, is secreted in this layer of mouldy cerate. How
many nights it must have taken to make it so thick! How many nightmares
have galloped under this cap? How many dreams have been dreamed beneath
it? And charming ones, too, perhaps,--why not?
If you are neither an engineer, nor a blacksmith, nor a builder, Brest
will not interest you very much. The port is magnificent, I admit;
beautiful, if you say so; gigantic, if you wish. It is imposing, you
know, and gives the impression of a powerful nation. But those piles of
cannons and anchors and cannon-balls, the infinite extension of those
quays, which enclose a calm, flat sea that appears to be chained down,
and those big workshops filled with grinding machinery, the never-ceasing
clanking of galley chains, the convicts who pass by in regular gangs and
work in silence,--this entire, pitiless, frightful, forced mechanism,
this organized defiance, quickly disgusts the soul and tires the eye. The
latter can rest only on cobblestones, shells, piles of iron, madriers,
dry docks containing the naked hulls of vessels, and the grey walls of
the prison, where a man leans out of the windows and tests the iron bars
with a hammer.
Nature is absent and more completely banished from this place, than from
any other spot on the face of the earth; everywhere can be seen denial
and hatred of it, as much in the crowbar which demolishes the rocks, as
in the sabre of the _garde-chiourme_ who watches over the convicts.
Outside of the arsenal and the penitentiary, there is nothing but
barracks, corps-de-garde, fortifications, ditches, uniforms, bayonets,
sabres and drums. From morning until night, military music sounds under
your windows, soldiers pass through the streets, come, go, and drill;
the bugle sounds incessantly and the troops file past. You understand at
once that the arsenal constitutes the real city and that the other is
completely swallowed up by it. Everywhere and in every form reappear
discipline, administration, ruled paper. Factitious symmetry and idiotic
cleanliness are much admired. In the navy hospital for instance, the
floors are so highly polished that a convalescent trying to walk on his
mended leg would probably fall and break the other. But it looks nice.
Between each ward is a yard, but the sun never shines in it, and the
grass is carefully kept out. The kitchens are beautiful, but are
situated so far from the main building that in winter the food must be
cold before it reaches the patients. But who cares about them? Aren't
the saucepans like polished suns? We saw a man who had broken his skull
in falling from a vessel, and who for eighteen hours had received no
medical assistance whatsoever; but his sheets were immaculate, for the
linen department is very well kept.
In the prison ward I was moved like a child by the sight of a litter of
kittens playing on a convict's bed. He made them little paper balls, and
they would chase them all over the bed-spread, and cling to its edges
with their claws. Then he would turn them over, stroke them, kiss them
and cuddle them to his heart. More than once, when he is put back to
work and sits tired and depressed on his bench, he will dream of the
quiet hours he spent alone with the little animals, and of the softness
of their fur on his rough hands and the warmth of their little bodies
against his breast. I believe, though, that the rules forbid this kind
of recreation and that probably he had them through the kindness of the
sister in charge.
But here, as well as elsewhere, rules have their exceptions, for, in the
first place, the distinction of caste does not disappear (equality being
a lie, even in the penitentiary). Delicately scented locks sometimes
show beneath the numbered caps, just as the sleeve of the red blouse
often reveals a cuff surrounding a well-kept hand. Moreover, special
favours are shown toward certain professions, certain men. How have they
been able, in spite of the law and the jealousy of their fellow-prisoners,
to attain this eccentric position which makes them almost amateur
convicts, and keep it without anybody trying to wrest it from them? At
the entrance to the workshop, where boats are built, you will find a
dentist's table filled with instruments. In a pretty frame on the wall,
rows of plates are exhibited, and when you pass, the artist utters a
little speech to advertise his ability. He stays in his place all day,
polishing his instruments and stringing teeth; he can talk to visitors
without feeling the restraint of being watched, be informed of what is
going on in the medical world, and practise his profession like a
licensed dentist. At the present time, I daresay, he must use ether.
More than that, he may have pupils and give lectures. But the man who
has the most enviable position of all is the curé Delacollonge.[3] He is
the mediator between the convicts and the ban; the authorities use his
ascendency over the prisoners, and they, in turn, address themselves to
him when they want to obtain any favours.
He lives apart from the rest of them in a neat little room, has a man to
wait on him, eats big bowls of Plougastel strawberries, takes his coffee
and reads the newspapers.
If Delacollonge is the head of the penitentiary, Ambroise is its arm.
Ambroise is a superb negro almost six feet tall, who would have made a
fine servant for a sixteenth century man of quality. Heliogobalus must
have kept some such fellow to furnish amusement for himself and his
guests by strangling lions and fighting gladiators single-handed. His
polished skin is quite black, with steely reflections; his body is well
knit and as vigorous as a tiger's, and his teeth are so white that they
almost frighten one.
King of the penitentiary by right of strength, all the convicts fear and
admire him; his athletic reputation compels him to test every newcomer,
and up to the present time, all these contests have turned out in his
favour. He can bend iron rods over his knee, carry three men with one
hand, and knock down eight by opening his arms; he eats three times as
much as an ordinary man, for he has an enormous appetite and a heroic
constitution.
When we saw him, he was watering the plants in the botanical garden. He
is always hanging around the hot-house behind the plants and the
palm-trees, digging the soil and cleansing the wood-work.
On Thursday, when the public is admitted, Ambroise receives his
mistresses behind the boxed orange-trees; he has several of them, in
fact, more than he wishes. He knows how to procure them, whether by his
charms, his strength or his money, which he always carries in quantities
about his person and spends lavishly whenever he wishes to enjoy
himself. So he is very popular among a certain class of women, and the
people who have put him where he is, have never perhaps been loved as
much as Ambroise.
In the middle of the garden, in a little lake shaded by a willow-tree
and bordered by plants, is a swan. With one stroke of its leg it can
swim from one side of the pond to the other, and although it crosses it
a hundred times a day and catches gold fishes to while away the time, it
never thinks of wandering away.
Further on, in a line against the wall, are some cages for rare animals
from foreign lands destined for the Museum of Paris. Most of the cages,
however, were empty. In front of one, in a narrow grated yard, a convict
was teaching a young wild-cat to obey commands like a dog. Hasn't this
man had enough of slavery himself? Why does he torment this poor little
beast? The lashes with which he is threatened he gives the wild-cat,
which, some day, will probably take its revenge by jumping over the iron
railing and killing the swan.
One moonlit evening, we decided to take a stroll through the streets
known to be frequented by _filles de joie_. They are very numerous. The
navy, the artillery, the infantry, each has its own particular streets,
without mentioning the penitentiary, which covers a whole district of
the city. Seven parallel streets ending at its walls, compose what is
called Keravel, and are filled by the mistresses of jailers and
convicts. They are old frame houses, crowded together, with every door
and window closed tight. No sound issues from them, nobody is seen
coming out, and there are no lights in the windows; at the end of each
street is a lamp-post which the wind sways from side to side, thus
making its long yellow rays oscillate on the sidewalk. The rest of the
quarter is in absolute darkness. In the moonlight, these silent houses
with their uneven roofs projected fantastic glimmerings.
When do they open? At unknown hours, at the most silent time of the
darkest nights. Then comes the jailer who has slipped away from his
watch, or the convict who has managed to escape from the prison, though
sometimes they arrive together, aiding and abetting each other; then,
when daylight dawns, the jailer turns his head away and nobody is the
wiser.
In the sailor's district, on the contrary, everything is open and
above-board. The disreputable houses are full of noise and light; there
is dancing and shouting and fighting. On the ground floors, in the low
rooms, women in filmy attire sit on the benches that line the
white-washed walls lighted by an oil lamp; others, in the doorway,
beckon to you, and their animated faces stand out in relief on the
background of the lighted resort, from which issues the sound of
clinking glasses and coarse caresses. You can hear the kisses which fall
on the opulent shoulders of the women and the laughter of the girl who
is sitting on some tanned sailor's lap, her unruly locks slipping from
under her cap and her bare shoulders issuing from her chemise. The
street is thronged, the place is packed, the door is wide open, anybody
who wishes may go in. Men come and peep through the windows or talk in
an undertone to some half-clad creature, who bends eagerly over their
faces. Groups stand around and wait their turn. It is all quite informal
and unrestrained.
Being conscientious travellers, and desiring to see and study everything
at close range, we entered.
In a room papered in red, three or four girls were sitting at a round
table, and a man with a cap on his head and a pipe in his mouth was
reclining on the sofa; he bowed politely when we entered. The women wore
Parisian dresses and were modest in their demeanour. The mahogany
furniture was covered with red plush, the floor was polished and
engravings of battles decorated the walls. O Virtue! you are beautiful,
for very stupid is vice. The woman who was sitting by my side had hands
which were sufficient in themselves to make a man forget her sex, and
not knowing how to spend our time we treated the whole company to
drinks. Then I lighted a cigar, stretched out on the divan, and, sad and
depressed, while the voices of the women rose shrilly and the glasses
were being drained, I said to myself:
Where is she? Where can she be? Is she dead to the world, and will men
never see her again?
She was beautiful, in olden times, when she walked up the steps leading
to the temple, when on her shell-like feet fell the golden fringe of her
tunic, or when she lounged among Persian cushions, twirling her collar
of cameos and chatting with the wise men and the philosophers.
She was beautiful when she stood naked on the threshold of her _cella_
in the street of Suburra, under the rosin torchlight that blazed in the
night, slowly chanting her Campanian lay, while from the Tiber came the
refrains of the orgies.
She was beautiful, too, in her old house of the _Cité_ behind the Gothic
windows, among the noisy students and dissipated monks, when, without
fear of the sergeants, they struck the oaken tables with their pewter
mugs, and the worm-eaten beds creaked beneath the weight of their
bodies.
She was beautiful when she leaned over the green cloth and coveted the
gold of the provincials; then she wore high heels and had a small waist
and a large wig which shed its perfumed powder on her shoulders, a rose
over her ear and a patch on her cheek.
She was beautiful also among the goat-skins of the Cossacks and the
English uniforms, pushing her way through the throngs of men and letting
her bare shoulders dazzle them on the steps of the gambling houses,
under the jewellers' windows, beneath the lights of the cafés, between
starvation and wealth.
What are you regretting? I am regretting the _fille de joie_.
On the boulevard, one evening, I caught a glimpse of her as she passed
under the gaslight, with watchful and eager eyes, dragging her feet over
the sidewalk. I saw her pale face on the street-corner, while the rain
wet the flowers in her hair, and heard her soft voice calling to the
men, while her flesh shivered in her low-necked bodice.
It was her last day; after that she disappeared.
Fear not that she will ever return, for she is dead, quite dead! Her
dress is made high, she has morals, objects to coarse language, and puts
the sous she earns in a savings bank.
Cleared of her presence, the street has lost the only poetry it still
retained; they have filtered the gutter and sorted the garbage.
In a little while, the mountebanks will also have disappeared, in order
to make room for magnetic _séances_ and reform banquets, and the
rope-dancer with her spangled skirt and long balancing-pole will be as
remote from us as the bayadère of the Ganges.
Of all that beautiful, glittering world as flighty as fancy itself, so
melancholy and sonorous, so bitter and yet so gay, full of inward pathos
and glaring sarcasms, where misery was warm and grace was sad, the last
vestige of a lost age, a distant race, which, we are told, came from the
other end of the earth and brought us in the tinkling of its bells the
echo and vague memory of idolised joys; some covered wagon moving slowly
along the road, with rolled tents on its roof and muddy dogs beneath it,
a man in a yellow jacket, selling _muscade_ in tin cups, the poor
marionnettes in the Champs-Elysées, and the mandolin players who visit
the cafés in the outskirts of the city, are all that is left.
Since then, it is true, we have had a number of farces of a higher class
of humour. But is the new as good as the old? Do you prefer Tom Thumb or
the Museum of Versailles?
On a wooden stand that formed a balcony around a square tent of grey
canvas, a man in a blouse was beating a drum; behind him was a big
painted sign representing a sheep and a cow, and some ladies, gentlemen,
and soldiers. The animals were the two young phenomena from Guérande,
with one arm and four shoulders. Their exhibitor, or editor, was
shouting himself hoarse and announcing that besides these two beautiful
things, battles between wild beasts would take place at once. Under the
wooden stand stood a donkey and three bears, and the barking of the
dogs, which proceeded from the interior of the tent, mingled with the
beating of the drum, the shouts of the owner of the two phenomena and
the cries of another fellow who was not as jovial and fat as the former,
but tall and lanky, with a funereal expression and ragged clothes. This
was the partner; they had met on the road and had combined their shows.
The lean one contributed his bears, his dogs and his donkey, while the
fat man brought his two phenomena and a grey felt hat which was used in
their performance.
The theatre was roofless and its walls were of grey canvas; they
fluttered in the wind and would have blown down had it not been for the
poles which held them. Along the sides of the ring was a railing, behind
which was the audience, and in a reserved corner we perceived the two
phenomena nibbling at a bundle of hay half concealed by a gorgeous
blanket. In the middle of the ring a high post was sunk in the ground,
and here and there, attached to smaller posts, were dogs, barking and
tugging at their chains. The men continued to shout and beat the drum,
the bears growled, and the crowd began to file in.
First they brought out a poor, half-paralyzed bear, which seemed
considerably bored. It wore a muzzle and had a big collar with an iron
chain around its neck, a rope in its nose, to make it obey commands
promptly, and a sort of leather hood over its ears. They tied bruin to
the centre post, and the barks grew louder and fiercer. The dogs stood
up, a bristling, scratching crew, their hind-quarters elevated, their
snouts near the ground, their legs spread, while their masters stood in
opposite corners of the ring and yelled at them in order to increase
their ferocity. They let three bull-dogs go and the brutes rushed at the
bear, which began to dodge around the post. The dogs followed, crowding
and barking; sometimes the bear would upset them and trample them with
its huge paws, but they would immediately scramble to their feet and
make a dash for its head, clinging to its neck so that it was unable to
shake off their wriggling bodies. With watchful eye, the two masters
waited the moment when it looked as if the bear would be strangled; then
they rushed at the dogs, tore them away, pulled their necks and bit
their tails to make them unlock their jaws. The brutes whined with pain,
but they would not let go. The bear struggled to free itself from the
dogs, the dogs bit the bear, and the men bit the dogs. One young bull-dog
especially, was remarkable for its ferocity; it clung to the bear's back
and would not let go, though they chewed and bent its tail, and lacerated
its ears. The men were compelled to get a mattock to loosen its jaws.
When they had all been disentangled, everyone took a rest; the bear lay
down on the ground, the gasping dogs hung their tongues out, and the
perspiring men pulled the hairs from between their teeth, while the dust
that had arisen during the fight scattered in the atmosphere and settled
on the heads of the spectators.
Two more bears were led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of the
fable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and played
dead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itself
well; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; with
its tail between its legs and its ears back, it ran around the ring
trying to get its foes under its forelegs while they endeavoured to run
around it and fasten their teeth in its throat. When the men finally
rescued it, it was completely winded and shaking with fright; it was
covered with drops of blood which trickled down its legs (on which
repeated wounds had left scars), and, mingling with sweat, moistened its
worn hoofs.
But the best of the performance was the general fight between the dogs;
all took part in it, the big and the little ones, the bull-dogs, the
sheep-dogs, the white ones, the black ones, the spotted ones, and the
russet variety. Fully fifteen minutes were spent in bringing them to the
proper pitch of excitement. The owners held them between their legs and
pointing their heads in the direction of their adversaries, would knock
them together violently. The thin man, especially, worked with great
gusto. With much effort he succeeded in producing a ferocious, hoarse
chest-note that maddened the whole irritated pack. As serious as an
orchestra leader, he would absorb the discordant harmony, and direct and
strengthen its emission; but when the brutes were let loose and the
howling band tore one another to pieces, he would be in a frenzy of
enthusiasm and delight. He would applaud and bark and stamp his feet and
imitate all the motions of the dogs; he would have enjoyed biting and
being bitten, would gladly have been a dog himself with a snout, so that
he could wallow in the dust and blood, and sink his teeth in the hairy
skins and warm flesh, and enjoy the fray to his heart's content.
There was a critical moment when all the dogs, one on top of another,
formed a wriggling mass of legs, backs, tails and ears, which oscillated
to and fro in the ring without separating, and in another instant had
torn down the railing and threatened to harm the two young phenomena.
The owner's face paled and he hastily sprang forward, while his partner
rushed to his side. Then tails were bitten, and kicks and blows were
distributed right and left! They grabbed the dogs everywhere, pulled
them away and flung them over their shoulders like bundles of hay. It
was all over in a second, but I had seen the moment when the two young
phenomena were near being reduced to chopped meat, and I trembled for
the safety of the arm which grows on their back.
Flustered, no doubt, by their narrow escape, they did not care to be
shown off. The cow backed and the sheep bucked; but finally the green
blanket with yellow fringe was removed and their appendage was exhibited
to the public, and then the performance ended....
CHAPTER IX.
BREST.
At the light-house of Brest. Here the Old World ends. This is its most
advanced point; its farthest limit. Behind you spread Europe and Asia;
before you lies the entire ocean. As great as space appears to our eye,
does it not always seem limited as soon as we know that it has a
boundary? Can you not see from our shores, across the Channel, the
streets of Brighton and the fortresses of Provence; do you not always
think of the Mediterranean as an immense blue lake ensconced in rocks,
with promontories covered with falling monuments, yellow sands, swaying
palm-trees and curved bays? But here nothing stops your eye. Thought can
fly as rapidly as the winds, spread out, divagate, and lose itself,
without finding anything but water, or perhaps vague America, nameless
islands, or some country with red fruits, humming-birds and savages; or
the silent twilight of the pole, with its spouting whales; or the great
cities lighted by coloured glass, Japan with its porcelain roofs, and
China with its sculptured staircases and its pagodas decorated with
golden bells.
Thus does the mind people and animate this infinity, of which it tires
so soon, in order that it may appear less vast. One cannot think of the
desert without its caravans, of the ocean without its ships, of the
bowels of the earth without evoking the treasures that they are supposed
to conceal.
We returned to Conquet by way of the cliff. The breakers were dashing
against its foot. Driven by a sea-breeze, they would come rushing in,
strike the rocks and cover them with rippling sheets of water. Half an
hour later, in a _char-à-banc_ drawn by two sturdy little horses, we
reached Brest, which we left with pleasure two days afterwards. When you
leave the coast and approach the Channel, the country undergoes a marked
change; it becomes less wild, less Celtic; the dolmens become scarcer,
the flats diminish as the wheat fields grow more numerous, and, little
by little, one reaches the fertile land of Léon, which is, as M.
Pitre-Chevalier has gracefully put it, "the Attica of Brittany."
Landerneau is a place where there is an elm-tree promenade, and where we
saw a frightened dog running through the streets with a pan attached to
its tail.
In order to go to the Château de la Joyeuse-Garde, one must first follow
the banks of the Eilorn and then walk through a forest, in a hollow
where few persons go. Sometimes, when the underwood thins out and
meadows appear between the branches, one catches sight of a boat sailing
up the river.
Our guide preceded us at quite a distance. Alone together we trod the
good old earth, flecked with bunches of purple heather and fallen
leaves. The air was perfumed with the breath of violets and
strawberries; slender ferns spread over the trunks of the trees. It was
warm; even the moss was hot. A cuckoo, hidden in the foliage, now and
then gave out its long cry, and gnats buzzed in the glades. We walked on
with a feeling of inward peace, and let our conversation touch on many
subjects; we spoke of sounds and colours, of the masters and their
works, and of the joys of the mind; we thought of different writings, of
familiar pictures and poses; we recited aloud some wonderful verses, the
beauty of which thrilled us so that we repeated the rhythm again and
again, accentuating the words and cadencing them so that they were
almost sung. Foreign landscapes and splendid figures rose before our
mind's eye, and we dwelt with rapture on soft Asiatic nights with the
moon shining on the cupolas; or our admiration was aroused by some
sonorous name; or we delighted in the artlessness of some sentence
standing out in relief in an ancient book.
Stretched out in the courtyard of Joyeuse-Garde, near the filled-up
subterranean vaults, beneath the semi-circle of its unique ivy-covered
arcade, we talked of Shakespeare and wondered whether the stars were
inhabited.
Then we started off again, having given but a hasty glance at the
crumbling home of good old Lancelot, the one a fairy stole from his
mother and kept in a shining palace at the bottom of a lake. The dwarfs
have disappeared, the drawbridge has flown away, and lizards now crawl
where formerly the entrancing Geneviève dreamed of her lover gone to
fight the giants in Trébizonde.
We went back through the same paths to the forest; the shadows were
lengthening, the flowers and shrubs were hardly visible, and the blue
peaks of the low mountains opposite seemed to grow taller against the
fading sky. The river, which is bordered by artificial quays for half a
mile outside the city, now becomes free to spread its waters at will
over the meadow; its wide curve stretched far away into the distance,
and the pools of water coloured by the setting sun looked like immense
golden platters forgotten on the grass.
Till it reaches Roche-Maurice, the Eilorn follows the road, which winds
around the foot of the rocky hills, the uneven eminences of which extend
into the valley. We were riding in a gig driven by a boy who sat on one
of the shafts. His hat had no strings and consequently blew off
occasionally, and during his efforts to catch it, we had plenty of time
to admire the landscape.
The Château de la Roche-Maurice is a real burgrave's castle, a vulture's
nest on the top of a mountain. It is reached by an almost perpendicular
slope along which great blocks of stone are strewn in place Of steps. At
the top is a wall built of huge stones laid one above another, and in
the wall are large windows, through which the whole surrounding country
can be viewed; the woods, the fields, the river, the long, white road,
the mountains with their uneven peaks, and the great meadow, which
separates them through the middle.
A crumbling flight of steps leads to a dilapidated tower. Here and there
stones crop out among the grass, and the rock shows amid the stones.
Sometimes it seems as if this rock assumed artificial shapes, and as if
the ruins, on the contrary, by crumbling more and more, had taken on a
natural appearance and gone back to original matter.
A whole side of the wall is covered with ivy; it begins at the bottom
and spreads out in an inverted pyramid, the color of which grows darker
towards the top. Through an aperture, the edges of which are concealed
by the foliage, one can see a section of the blue sky.
It was in these parts that the famous dragon lived, which was killed in
olden times by knight Derrien, who was returning from the Holy Land with
his friend, Neventer. Derrien attacked it as soon as he had rescued the
unfortunate Eilorn who, after giving over his slaves, his vassals and
his servants (he had no one left but his wife and son), had thrown
himself headlong from the top of the tower into the river; but the
monster, mortally wounded, and bound by the sash of its conqueror, soon
drowned itself in the sea, at Poulbeunzual,[4] like the crocodile of
Batz island, which obeyed the behest of Saint Pol de Léon and drowned
itself with the stole of the Breton saint wound around it. The gargoyle
of Rouen met a similar fate with the stole of Saint Romain.
How beautiful those terrific old dragons were, with their gaping,
fire-spitting jaws, their scales, their serpent-tails, their bat-wings,
their lion-claws, their equine bodies and fantastic heads! And the knight
who overpowered them was a wonderfully fine specimen of manhood! First,
his horse grew frightened and reared, and his lance broke on the scales
of the monster, whose fiery breath blinded him. Finally he alighted, and
after a day's battle, succeeded in sinking his sword up to the hilt in
the beasts belly. Black blood flowed in streams from the wound, the
audience escorted the knight home in triumph, and he became king and
married a fair maiden.
But where did the dragons come from? Are they a confused recollection of
the monsters that existed before the flood? Were they conceived from the
contemplation of the carcasses of the ichthyosaurus and pteropod, and
did the terror of men hear the sound of their feet in the tall grass and
the wind howl when their voices filled the caves? Are we not, moreover,
in the land of fairies, in the home of the Knights of the Round Table
and of Merlin, in the mythological birthplace of vanished epopees?
These, no doubt, revealed something of the old worlds which have become
mythical, and told something of the cities that were swallowed up, of Is
and Herbadilla, splendid and barbaric places, filled with the loves of
their bewitching queens, but now doubly wiped out, first, by the ocean
which has obliterated them and then by religion, which has cursed their
memory.
There is much to be said on this subject. And, indeed, what is there on
which much cannot be said? It might perhaps be Landivisian, for even the
most prolix man is obliged to be concise in his remarks, when there is a
lack of matter. I have noticed that good places are usually the ugliest
ones. They are like virtuous women; one respects them, but one passes on
in search of others. Here, surely, is the most productive spot of all
Brittany; the peasants are not as poor as elsewhere, the fields are
properly cultivated, the colza is superb, the roads are in good
condition, and it is frightfully dreary.
Cabbages, turnips, beets and an enormous quantity of potatoes, all
enclosed by ditches, cover the entire country from Saint Pol de Léon to
Roscoff. They are forwarded to Brest, Rennes, and even to Havre; it is
the industry of the place, and a large business is done with them.
Roscoff has a slimy beach and a narrow bay, and the surrounding sea is
sprinkled with tiny black islands that rise like the backs of so many
turtles.
The environs of Saint Pol are dreary and cheerless. The bleak tint of
the flats mingles without transition with the paleness of the sky, and
the short perspective has no large lines in its proportions, nor change
of colour on the edges. Here and there, while strolling through the
fields, you may come across some silent farm behind a grey stone wall,
an abandoned manor deserted by its owners. In the yard the pigs are
sleeping on the manure heap and the chickens are pecking at the grass
that grows among the loose stones; the sculptured shield above the door
has worn away under the action of rain and atmosphere. The rooms are
empty and are used for storage purposes; the plaster on the ceiling is
peeling off, and so are the remaining decorations, which, besides, have
been tarnished by the cobwebs of the spiders one sees crawling around
the joists. Wild mignonette has grown on the door of Kersa-lion; near
the turret is a pointed window flanked by a lion and a Hercules, which
stand out in bold relief on the wall like two gargoyles. At Kerland, I
stumbled against a wolf-trap while I was ascending the large winding
staircase. Ploughshares, rusted shovels, and jars filled with dried
grain were scattered around the rooms or on the wide stone window-seats.
Kerouséré has retained its three turrets with machicolations; in the
courtyard can still be seen the deep furrows of the trenches that have
been filled up little by little, and are now on level with the ground;
they are like the track of a bark, which spreads and spreads over the
water till it finally disappears. From the platform of one of the towers
(the others have pointed roofs), one can see the ocean between two low,
wooded hills. The windows on the first floor are half stopped up, so as
to keep the rain out; they look out into a garden enclosed by a high
wall. The grass is covered with thistles and wheat grows in the
flower-beds surrounded by rose-bushes.
A narrow path wends its way between a field where the ripe wheat sways
in the breeze and a line of elm-trees growing on the edge of a ditch.
Poppies gleamed here and there amongst the wheat; the ditch was edged
with flowers, brambles, nettles, sweet-brier, long prickly stems, broad
shining leaves, blackberries and purple digitalis, all of which mingled
their colours and various foliage and uneven branches, and crossed their
shadows on the grey dust like the meshes of a net.
When you have crossed a meadow where an old mill reluctantly turns its
clogged wheel, you follow the wall by stepping on large stones placed in
the water for a bridge; you soon come to the road that leads to Saint-Pol,
at the end of which rises the slashed steeple of Kreisker; tall and
slender, it dominates a tower decorated with a balustrade and produces a
fine effect at a distance; but the nearer one gets to it, the smaller
and uglier it becomes, till finally one finds that it is nothing more
than an ordinary church with a portal devoid of statues. The cathedral
also is built in a rather clumsy Gothic style, and is overloaded with
ornaments and embroideries: but there is one notable thing, at least, in
Saint-Pol, and that is the _table d'hôte_ of the inn.
The girl who waits on it has gold earrings dangling against her white
neck and a cap with turned up wings, like Molière's soubrettes, and her
sparkling blue eyes would incline anyone to ask her for something more
than mere plates. But the guests! What guests! All _habitués_! At the
upper end sat a creature in a velvet jacket and a cashmere waistcoat. He
tied his napkin around the bottles that had been uncorked, in order to
be able to distinguish them. He ladled the soup. On his left, sat a man
in a light grey frock-coat, with the cuffs and collar trimmed with a
sort of curly material representing fur; he ate with his hat on and was
the professor of music at the local college. But he has grown tired of
his profession and is anxious to find some place that would bring him
from eight to twelve hundred francs at the most. He does not care so
much about the salary, what he desires is the consideration that
attaches to such a place. As he was always late, he requested that the
courses be brought up again from the kitchen, and if he did not like
them, he would send them back untouched; he sneezed and expectorated and
rocked his chair and hummed and leaned his elbows on the table and
picked his teeth.
Everybody respects him, the waitress admires everything he says, and is,
I am sure, in love with him. The high opinion he has of himself shows in
his smile, his speech, his gestures, his silence, and in his way of
wearing his hair; it emanates from his entire obnoxious personality.
Opposite to us sat a grey-haired, plump man with red hands and thick,
moist lips, who looked at us so persistently and annoyingly, while he
masticated his food, that we felt like throwing the carafes at him. The
other guests were insignificant and only contributed to the picture.
One evening the conversation fell upon a woman of the environs who had
left her husband and gone to America with her lover, and who, the
previous week, and passed through Saint-Pol on her way home, and had
stopped at the inn. Everybody wondered at her audacity, and her name was
accompanied by all sorts of unflattering epithets. Her whole life was
passed in review by these people, and they all laughed contemptuously
and insulted her and grew quite hot over the argument. They would have
liked to have her there to tell her what they thought of her and see
what she would say. Tirades against luxury, virtuous horror, moral
maxims, hatred of wealth, words with a double meaning, shrugs,
everything, in fact, was used to crush this woman, who, judging by the
ferocity these ruffians displayed in their attacks, must have been
pretty, refined, and charming. Our hearts beat indignantly in our
breasts, and if we had taken another meal in Saint-Pol, I am sure that
something would have happened.
CHAPTER X.
SAINT-MALO.
Saint-Malo, which is built right on the ocean and is enclosed by
ramparts, looks like a crown of stones, the gems of which are the
machicolations. The breakers dash against its walls, and when the tide
is low they gently unfurl on the sand. Little rocks covered with
sea-weed dot the beach and look like black spots on its light surface.
The larger ones, which are upright and smooth, support the
fortifications, thus making them appear higher than they really are.
Above this straight line of walls, broken here and there by a tower or
the pointed ogive of a door, rise the roofs of the houses with their
open garret-windows, their gyrating weather-cocks, and their red
chimneys from which issue spirals of bluish smoke that vanishes in the
air.
Around Saint-Malo are a number of little barren islands that have not a
tree nor a blade of grass, but only some old crumbling walls, great
pieces of which are hurled into the sea by each succeeding storm.
On the other side of the bay, opposite the city and connected with dry
land by a long pier, which separates the port from the ocean, is
Saint-Servan, a large, empty, almost deserted locality, which lies
peacefully in a marshy meadow. At the entrance to Saint-Servan rise the
four towers of the Château de Solidor, which are connected by curtains
and are perfectly black from top to bottom. These alone are sufficient
compensation for having made that extended circuit on the beach, under
the broiling July sun, among the dock-yards and tar-pots and fires.
A walk around the city, over the ramparts, is one of the finest that can
be taken. Nobody goes there. You can sit down in the embrasures of the
cannons and dangle your feet over the abyss. In front of you lies the
mouth of the Rance, which flows between two green hills, the coast, the
islands, the rocks, and the ocean. The sentinel marches up and down
behind you, and his even footsteps echo on the sonorous stones.
One evening we remained out for a long time. The night was beautiful, a
true summer night, without a moon, but brilliant with stars and perfumed
by the sea-breeze. The city was sleeping. One by one the lights went out
in the windows, and the lighthouses shone red in the darkness, which was
quite blue above us and glittering with myriads of twinkling stars. We
could not see the ocean, but we could hear and smell it, and the
breakers that lashed the walls flung drops of foam over us through the
big apertures of the machicolations.
In one place, between the wall and the city houses, a quantity of
cannon-balls are piled up in a ditch. From that point you can see these
words written on the second floor of one of the dwellings:
"Chateaubriand was born here."
Further on, the wall ends at the foot of a tower called Quiquengrogne;
like its sister, La Générale, it is high, broad, and imposing, and is
swelled in the middle like a hyperbola.
Though they are as good as new and absolutely intact, these towers would
no doubt be improved if they lost some of their battlements in the sea
and if ivy spread its kindly leaves over their tops. Indeed, do not
monuments grow greater through recollection, like men and like passions?
And are they not completed by death?
We entered the castle. The empty courtyard planted with a few sickly
lime-trees was as silent as the courtyard of a monastery. The janitress
went and obtained the keys from the commander. When she returned, she
was accompanied by a pretty little girl who wished to see the strangers.
Her arms were bare and she carried a large bunch of flowers. Her black
curls escaped from beneath her dainty little cap, and the lace on her
pantalettes rubbed against her kid shoes tied around the ankles with
black laces. She ran up stairs in front of us beckoning and calling.
The staircase is long, for the tower is high. The bright daylight passes
through the loop-holes like an arrow. When you put your head through one
of these openings, you can see the ocean, which seems to grow wider and
wider, and the crude colour of the sky, which seems to grow larger and
larger, till you are afraid you will lose yourself in it. Vessels look
like launches and their masts like walking-sticks. Eagles must think we
look like ants. I wonder whether they really see us. Do they know that
we have cities and steeples and triumphal arches?
When we arrived on the platform, and although the battlement reached to
our chest, we could not help experiencing the sensation one always feels
at a great height from the earth. It is a sort of voluptuous uneasiness
mingled with fear and delight, pride and terror, a battle between one's
mind and one's nerves. You feel strangely happy; you would like to jump,
fly, spread out in the air and be supported by the wind; but your knees
tremble and you dare not go too near the edge.
Still, one night, in olden times, men climbed this tower with ropes. But
then, it is not astonishing for those times, for that wonderful
sixteenth century, the epoch of fierce convictions and frantic loves!
How the human instrument vibrated then in all its chords! How
liberal-minded, productive, and active men were! Does not this phrase of
Fénelon apply wonderfully well to that period: "A sight well calculated
to delight the eye?" For, without making any reference to the foreground
of the picture,--beliefs crumbling at their foundation like tottering
mountains, newly discovered worlds, lost worlds brought to light again,
Michael-Angelo beneath his dome, laughing Rabelais, observant
Shakespeare, pensive Montaigne,--where can be found a greater
development in passions, a greater violence in courage, a greater
determination in willpower, in fine, a more complete expansion of
liberty struggling against all native fatalities? And with what a bold
relief the episode stands out in history, and still, how wonderfully
well it fits in, thereby giving a glimpse of the dazzling brightness and
broad horizons of the period. Faces, living faces, pass before your
eyes. You meet them only once; but you think of them long afterwards,
and endeavour to contemplate them in order that they may be impressed
more deeply upon your mind. Was not the type of the old soldiers whose
race disappeared around 1598, at the taking of Vervins, fine and
terrible? It was a type represented by men like Lamouche, Heurtand de
Saint-Offange, and La Tremblaye, who came back holding the heads of his
enemies in his hand; also La Fontenelle, of whom so much has been said.
They were men of iron, whose hearts were no softer than their swords,
and who, attracting hundreds of energies which they directed with their
own, entered towns at night, galloping madly at the heads of their
companies, equipped corsairs, burned villages, and were dealt with like
kings! Who has thought of depicting those violent governors of the
provinces, who slaughtered the people recklessly, committed rapes and
swept in gold, like D'Epernon, an atrocious tyrant in Provence and a
perfumed courtier at the Louvre; like Montluc, who strangled Huguenots
with his own hands, or Baligui, the king of Cambrai, who read Machiavel
in order to copy the Valentinois, and whose wife went to war on
horseback, wearing a helmet and a cuirass.
One of the forgotten men of the period, or at least one of those whom
most historians mention only slightly, is the Duke of Mercoeur, the
intrepid enemy of Henri IV, who defied him longer than Mayenne, the
Ligue, and Philip II. Finally he was disarmed, that is, won over and
appeased (by terms that were such that twenty-three articles of the
treaty were not disclosed); then, not knowing what to do, he enlisted in
the Hungarian army and fought the Turks. One day, with five thousand
men, he attacked a whole army, and, beaten again, returned to France and
died of the fever in Nuremberg, at the age of forty-four.
Saint-Malo put me in mind of him. He always tried to get it, but he
never could succeed in making it his subject or his ally. They wished to
fight on their own account, and to do business through their own
resources, and although they were really _ligueurs_, they spurned the
duke as well as the Béarnais.
When De Fontaines, the governor of the city, informed them of the death
of Henri III, they refused to recognize the King of Navarre. They armed
themselves and erected barricades; De Fontaines intrenched himself in
the castle and everybody kept upon the defensive. Little by little, the
people encroached upon him; first, they requested him to declare that he
was willing to maintain their franchises. De Fontaines complied in the
hope of gaining time. The following year (1589), they chose four
generals who were independent of the governor. A year later, they
obtained permission to stretch chains. De Fontaines acceded to
everything. The king was at Laval and he was waiting for him. The time
was close at hand when he would be able to take revenge for all the
humiliations he had suffered, and all the concessions he had been forced
to make. But he precipitated matters and was discovered. When the people
of Saint-Malo reminded him of his promises, he replied that if the king
presented himself, he (De Fontaines) would let him enter the city. When
they learned this, they decided to act.
The castle had four towers. It was the highest one, La Générale, the one
on which De Fontaines relied the most, which they climbed. These bold
attempts were not infrequent, as proved by the ascension of the cliffs
of Fécamp by Bois-Rosé, and the attack of the Château de Blein, by
Guebriant.
The rebels connived and assembled during several evenings at the place
of a certain man named Frotet, sieur de La Lanbelle; they entered into
an understanding with a Scotch gunner, and one dark night they armed
themselves, went out to the rampart, let themselves down with ropes and
approached the foot of La Générale.
There they waited. Soon a rustling sound was heard on the wall, and a
ball of thread was lowered, to which they fastened their rope ladder.
The ladder was then hoisted to the top of the tower and attached to the
end of a culverin which was levelled in an embrasure of the battlement.
Michel Frotet was the first to ascend, and after him came Charles
Anselin, La Blissais and the others. The night was dark and the wind
whistled; they had to climb slowly, to hold their daggers between their
teeth and feel for the rungs of the ladder with their hands and feet.
Suddenly (they were midway between the ground and the top), they felt
themselves going down; the rope had slipped. But they did not utter a
sound; they remained motionless. Their weight had caused the culverin to
tip forward; it stopped on the edge of the embrasure and they slowly
resumed their ascension and arrived one after another on the platform of
the tower.
The sleepy sentinels did not have time to give the alarm. The garrison
was either asleep or playing dice on the drums. A panic seized the
soldiers and they fled to the dungeon. The conspirators pursued them and
attacked them in the hallways, on the staircase, and in the rooms,
crushing them between the doors and slaughtering them mercilessly.
Meanwhile the townspeople arrived to lend assistance; some put up
ladders, and entered the tower without encountering any resistance and
plundered it. La Pérandière, lieutenant of the castle, perceiving La
Blissais, said to him: "This, sir, is a most miserable night." But La
Blissais impressed upon him that this was not the time for conversation.
The Count of Fontaines had not made his appearance. They went in search
of him, and found him lying dead across the threshold of his chamber,
pierced by a shot from an arquebuse that one of the townspeople had
fired at him, as he was about to go out, escorted by a servant bearing a
light. "Instead of rushing to face the danger," says the author of this
account,[5] "he had dressed as leisurely as if he were going to a
wedding, without leaving one shoulder-knot untied."
This outbreak in Saint-Malo, which so greatly harmed the king, did not
in the least benefit the Duke de Mercoeur. He had hoped that the people
would accept a governor from his hands, his son, for example, a mere
child, for that would have meant himself, but they obstinately refused
to listen to it. He sent troops to protect them, but they refused to let
them enter, and the soldiers were compelled to take lodgings outside of
the city.
Still, in spite of all this, they had not become more royalist, for some
time later, having arrested the Marquis of La Noussaie and the Viscount
of Denoual, it cost the former twelve thousand crowns to get out of
prison and the latter two thousand.
Then, fearing that Pont-Brient would interrupt commercial relations with
Dinan and the other cities in the Ligue, they attacked and subjected it.
Presuming that their bishop, who was the temporal master of the city,
might be likely to deprive them of the freedom they had just acquired,
they put him in prison and kept him there for a year.
The conditions at which they finally accepted Henri IV are well-known:
they were to take care of themselves, not be obliged to receive any
garrison, be exempt from taxes for six years, etc.
Situated between Brittany and Normandy, this little people seems to have
the tenacity and granite-like resistance of the former and the impulses
and dash of the latter. Whether they are sailors, writers, or travellers
on foreign seas, their predominant trait is audacity; they have violent
natures which are almost poetical in their brutality, and often narrow
in their obstinacy. There is this resemblance between these two sons of
Saint-Malo, Lamennais and Broussais: they were always equally extreme in
their systems and employed their latter years in fighting what they had
upheld in the earlier part of their life.
In the city itself are little tortuous streets edged with high houses
and dirty fishmongers' shops. There are no carriages or luxuries of any
description; everything is as black and reeking as the hold of a ship. A
sort of musty smell, reminiscent of Newfoundland, salt meat, and long
sea voyages pervades the air.
"The watch and the round are made every night with big English dogs,
which are let loose outside of the city by the man who is in charge of
them, and it is better not to be in their vicinity at that time. But
when morning comes, they are led back to a place in the city where they
shed all their ferocity which, at night, is so great."[6]
Barring the disappearance of this four-legged police which at one time
devoured M. du Mollet, the existence of which is confirmed by a
contemporaneous text, the exterior of things has changed but little, no
doubt, and even the civilized people living in Saint-Malo admit that it
is very much behind the times.
The only picture we noticed in the church is a large canvas that
represents the battle of Lepante and is dedicated to Nôtre-Dame des
Victoires, who can be seen floating above the clouds. In the foreground,
all Christianity, together with crowned kings and princesses, is
kneeling. The two armies can be seen in the background. The Turks are
being hurled into the sea and the Christians stretch their arms towards
heaven.
The church is ugly, has no ornamentation, and looks almost like a
Protestant house of worship. I noticed very few votive offerings, a fact
that struck me as being rather peculiar in this place of sea perils.
There are no flowers nor candles in the chapels, no bleeding hearts nor
bedecked Virgin, nothing, in fact, of all that which causes M. Michelet
to wax indignant.
Opposite the ramparts, at a stone's throw from the city, rises the
little island of Grand-Bay. There, can be found the tomb of
Chateaubriand; that white spot cut in the rock is the place he has
designated for his body.
We went there one evening when the tide was low and the sun setting in
the west. The water was still trickling over the sand. At the foot of
the island, the dripping sea-weed spread out like the hair of antique
women over a tomb.
The island is deserted; sparse grass grows in spots, mingled here and
there with tufts of purple flowers and nettles. On the summit is a
dilapidated casemate, with a courtyard enclosed by crumbling walls.
Beneath this ruin, and half-way up the hill, is a space about ten feet
square, in the middle of which rises a granite slab surmounted by a
Latin cross. The tomb comprises three pieces: one for the socle, one for
the slab, and another for the cross.
Chateaubriand will rest beneath it, with his head turned towards the
sea; in this grave, built on a rock, his immortality will be like his
life--deserted and surrounded by tempests. The centuries and the
breakers will murmur a long time around his great memory; the breakers
will dash against his tomb during storms, or on summer mornings, when
the white sails unfold and the swallow arrives from across the seas;
they will bring him the melancholy voluptuousness of far-away horizons
and the caressing touch of the sea-breeze. And while time passes and the
waves of his native strand swing back and forth between his cradle and
his grave, the great heart of René, grown cold, will slowly crumble to
dust to the eternal rhythm of this never-ceasing music.
We walked around the tomb and touched it, and looked at it as if it
contained its future host, and sat down beside it on the ground.
The sky was pink, the sea was calm, and there was a lull in the breeze.
Not a ripple broke the motionless surface of ocean on which the setting
sun shed its golden light. Blue near the coast and mingled with the
evening mist, the sea was scarlet everywhere else and deepened into a
dark red line on the horizon. The sun had no rays left; they had fallen
from its face and drowned their brilliancy in the water, on which they
seemed to float. The red disc set slowly, robbing the sky of the pink
tinge it had diffused over it, and while both the sun and the delicate
color were wearing away, the pale blue shades of night crept over the
heavens. Soon the sun touched the ocean and sank into it to the middle.
For a moment it appeared cut in two by the horizon; the upper half
remained firm, while the under one vacillated and lengthened; then it
finally disappeared; and when the reflection died away from the place
where the fiery ball had gone down, it seemed as if a sudden gloom had
spread over the sea.
The shore was dark. The light in one of the windows in a city house,
which a moment before was bright, presently went out. The silence grew
deeper, though sounds could be heard. The breakers dashed against the
rocks and fell back with a roar; long-legged gnats sang in our ears and
disappeared with a buzzing of their transparent wings, and the
indistinct voices of the children bathing at the foot of the ramparts
reached us, mingled with their laughter and screams.
Young boys came out of the water, and, stepping gingerly on the pebbles,
ran up the beach to dress. When they attempted to put on their shirts,
the moist linen clung to their wet shoulders and we could see their
white torsos wriggling with impatience, while their heads and arms
remained concealed and the sleeves flapped in the wind like flags.
A man with his wet hair falling straight around his neck, passed in
front of us. His dripping body shone. Drops trickled from his dark,
curly beard, and he shook his head so as to let the water run out of his
locks. His broad chest was parted by a stubby growth of hair that
extended between his powerful muscles. It heaved with the exertion of
swimming and imparted an even motion to his flat abdomen, which was as
smooth as ivory where it joined the hips. His muscular thighs were set
above slender knees and fine legs ending in arched feet, with short
heels and spread toes. He walked slowly over the beach.
How beautiful is the human form when it appears in its original freedom,
as it was created in the first day of the world! But where are we to
find it, masked as it is and condemned never to reappear. That great
word, Nature, which humanity has repeated sometimes with idolatry and
sometimes with fear, which philosophers have sounded and poets have
sung, how it is being lost and forgotten! If there are still here and
there in the world, far from the pushing crowd, some hearts which are
tormented by the constant search of beauty, and forever feeling the
hopeless need of expressing what cannot be expressed and doing what can
only be dreamed, it is to Nature, as to the home of the ideal, that they
must turn. But how can they? By what magic will they be able to do so?
Man has cut down the forests, has conquered the seas, and the clouds
that hover over the cities are produced by the smoke that rises from the
chimneys. But, say others, do not his mission and his glory consist in
going forward and attacking the work of God, and encroaching upon it?
Man denies His work, he ruins it, crushes it, even in his own body, of
which he is ashamed and which he conceals like a crime.
Man having thus become the rarest and most difficult thing in the world
to know (I am not speaking of his heart, O moralists!), it follows that
the artist ignores his shape as well as the qualities that render it
beautiful. Where is the poet, nowadays, even amongst the most brilliant,
who knows what a woman is like? Where could the poor fellow ever have
seen any? What has he ever been able to learn about them in the salons;
could he see through the corset and the crinoline?
Better than all the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches those
who study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in a
word, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of their
existence, left the mark of their noble attitudes and pure blood on the
works of the masters. In Juvenal, I can hear confusedly the death-rattles
of the gladiators; Tacitus has sentences that resemble the drapery of a
laticlave, and some of Horace's verses are like the body of a Greek slave,
with supple undulations, and short and long syllables that sound like
crotala.
But why bother about these things? Let us not go so far back, and let us
be satisfied with what is manufactured. What is wanted nowadays is
rather the opposite of nudity, simplicity and truth? Fortune and success
will fall to the lot of those who know how to dress and clothe facts!
The tailor is the king of the century and the fig-leaf is its symbol;
laws, art, politics, all things, appear in tights! Lying freedom, plated
furniture, water-colour pictures, why! the public loves this sort of
thing! So let us give it all it wants and gorge the fool!
CHAPTER XI.
MONT SAINT-MICHEL.
The road from Pontorson to the Mont Saint-Michel is wearying on account
of the sand. Our post-chaise (for we also travel by post-chaise), was
disturbed every now and then by a number of carts filled with the grey
soil which is found in these parts and which is transported to some
place and utilised as manure. They became more numerous as we approached
the sea, and defiled for several miles until we finally saw the deserted
strand whence they came. On this white surface, with its conical heaps
of earth resembling huts, the fluctuating line of carts reminded us of
an emigration of barbarians deserting their native heath.
The empty horizon stretches out, spreads, and finally mingles its
greyish flats with the yellow sand of the beach. The ground becomes
firmer and a salt breeze fans your cheeks; it looks like a vast desert
from which the waters have receded. Long, flat strips of sand,
superposed indefinitely in indistinct planes, ripple like shadows, and
the wind playfully designs huge arabesques on their surfaces. The sea
lies far away, so far, in fact, that its roar cannot be heard, though we
could distinguish a sort of vague, aërial, imperceptible murmur, like
the voice of the solitude, which perhaps was only the effect produced by
the intense silence.
Opposite us rose a large round rock with embattled walls and a church on
its top; enormous counterparts resting on a steep slope support the
sides of the edifice. Rocks and wild shrubs are strewn over the incline.
Half-way up the slope are a few houses, which show above the white line
of the wall and are dominated by the brown church; thus some bright
colours are interspersed between the two plain tints.
The post-chaise drove ahead of us and we followed it, guiding ourselves
by the tracks of the wheels; finally it disappeared in the distance, and
we could distinguish only its hood, which looked like some big crab
crawling over the sand.
Here and there a swift current of water compelled us to move farther up
the beach. Or we would suddenly come upon pools of slime with ragged
edges framed in sand.
Beside us walked two priests who were also going to the Mont Saint-Michel.
As they were afraid of soiling their new cassocks, they gathered them
up around their legs when they jumped over the little streams. Their
silver buckles were grey with mud, and their wet shoes gaped and threw
water at every step they took.
Meantime the Mount was growing larger. With one sweep of the eye we were
able to take in the whole panorama, and could see distinctly the tiles
on the roofs, the bunches of nettles on the rocks, and, a little higher,
the green shutters of a small window that looks out into the governor's
garden.
The first door, which is narrow and pointed, opens on a sort of pebble
road leading to the ocean; on the worn shield over the second door,
undulating lines carved in the stone seem to represent water; on both
sides of the doors are enormous cannons composed of iron bars connected
by similar circular bands. One of them has retained a cannon-ball in its
mouth; they were taken from the English in 1423, by Louis d'Estouteville,
and have remained here four hundred years.
Five or six houses built opposite one another compose the street; then
the line breaks, and they continue down the slopes and stairs leading to
the castle, in a sort of haphazard fashion.
In order to reach the castle, you first go up to the curtain, the wall
of which shuts out the view of the ocean from the houses below. Grass
grows between the cracked stones and the battlements. The rampart
continues around the whole island and is elevated by successive
platforms. When you have passed the watch-house, which is situated
between the two towers, you see a little straight flight of steps; when
you climb them, the roofs of the houses, with their dilapidated
chimneys, gradually grow lower and lower. You can see the washing hung
out to dry on poles fastened to the garret-windows, or a tiny garden
baking in the sun between the roof of one house and the ground-floor of
another, with its parched leeks drooping their leaves over the grey
soil; but the other side of the rock, the side that faces the ocean, is
barren and deserted, and so steep that the shrubs that grow there have a
hard time to remain where they are and look as if they were about to
topple over every minute.
When you are standing up there, enjoying as much space as the human eye
can possibly encompass and looking at the ocean and the horizon of the
coast, which forms an immense bluish curve, or at the wall of La
Merveille with its thirty-six huge counterparts upreared on a
perpendicular cliff, a laugh of admiration parts your lips, and you
suddenly hear the sharp noise of the weaving-looms. The people
manufacture linen, and the shrill sound of the shuttles produces a very
lively racket.
Between two slender towers, which represent the uplifted barrels of two
cannons, is the entrance to the castle, a long, arched hallway, at the
end of which is a flight of stone steps. The middle of the hall is
always dark, being insufficiently lighted by two skylights one of which
is at the bottom of the hall and the other at the top, between the
interval of the drawbridge; it is like a subterranean vault.
The guard-room is at the head of the stairs as you enter. The voice of
the sergeants and the clicking of the guns re-echoed along the walls.
They were beating a drum.
Meanwhile a _garde-chiourme_ returned with our passports, which M. le
gouverneur had wished to see; then he motioned us to follow him; he
opened doors, drew bolts, and led us through a maze of halls, vaults and
staircases. Really, one can lose oneself in this labyrinth, for a single
visit does not enable you to understand the complicated plan of these
combined buildings, where a fortress, a church, an abbey, a prison and a
dungeon, are mingled, and where you can find every style of
architecture, from the Romance of the eleventh century to the
bewildering Gothic of the sixteenth. We could catch only a glimpse of
the knights' hall, which has been converted into a loom-room and is for
this reason barred to the public. We saw only four rows of columns
supporting a ceiling ornamented with salient mouldings; they were
decorated with clover leaves. The monastery is built over this hall, at
an altitude of two hundred feet above the sea level. It is composed of a
quadrangular gallery formed by a triple line of small granite, tufa, or
stucco columns. Acanthus, thistles, ivy, and oak-leaves wind around
their caps; between each mitred ogive is a cut-out rose; this gallery is
the place where the prisoners take the air.
The cap of the _garde-chiourme_ now passes along these walls where, in
olden times, passed the shaved heads of industrious friars; and the
wooden shoes of the prisoners click on the slabs that used to be swept
by the trailing robes of monks and trodden by their heavy leather
sandals.
The church has a Gothic choir and a Romance nave, and the two
architectures seem to vie with each other in majesty and elegance. In
the choir, the arches of the windows are pointed, and are as lofty as
the aspirations of love; in the nave, the arcades open their semi-circles
roundly, and columns as straight as the trunk of a palm-tree mount along
the walls. They rest on square pedestals, are crowned with acanthus
leaves, and continue in powerful mouldings that curve beneath the
ceiling and help support it.
It was noon. The bright daylight poured in through the open door and
rippled over the dark sides of the building.
The nave, which is separated from the choir by a green curtain, is
filled with tables and benches, for it is used also as a dining-hall.
When mass is celebrated, the curtain is drawn and the condemned men may
be present at divine service without removing their elbows from the
table. It is a novel idea.
In order to enlarge the platform by twelve yards on the western side of
the church, the latter itself has been curtailed; but as it was
necessary to reconstruct some sort of entrance, one architect closed the
nave by a façade in Greek style; then, perhaps, feeling remorseful, or
desiring (a presumption which will be accepted more readily), to
embellish his work still further, he afterwards added some columns
"which imitate fairly well the architecture of the eleventh century,"
says the notice. Let us be silent and bow our heads. Each of the arts
has its own particular leprosy, its mortal ignominy that eats its face
away. Painting has the family group, music the ballad, literature the
criticism, and architecture the architect.
The prisoners were walking around the platform, one after another,
silent, with folded arms, and in the beautiful order we had the
opportunity to admire at Fontevrault. They were the patients of the
hospital ward taking the air.
Tottering along with the file was one who lifted his feet higher than
the rest and clung to the coat of the man ahead of him. He was blind.
Poor, miserable wretch! God prevents him from seeing and his fellow-men
forbid him to speak!
The following day, when the tide had again receded from the beach, we
left the Mount under a broiling sun which heated the hood of the carriage
and made the horses sweat. They only walked; the harness creaked and the
wheels sank deep into the sand. At the end of the beach, when grass
appeared again, I put my eye to the little window that is in the back of
every carriage, and bade goodbye to Mont Saint-Michel.
CHAPTER XII.
COMBOURG.
A letter from the Viscount Vésin was to gain us entrance to the castle.
So as soon as we arrived, we called on the steward, M. Corvesier. They
ushered us into a large kitchen where a young lady in black, marked by
smallpox and wearing horn spectacles over her prominent eyes, was
stemming currants. The kettle was on the fire and they were crushing
sugar with bottles. It was evident that we were intruding. After several
minutes had elapsed, we were informed that M. Corvesier was confined to
his bed with a fever and was very sorry that he could not be of any
service to us, but sent us his regards. In the meantime, his clerk, who
had just come in from an errand, and who was lunching on a glass of
cider and a piece of buttered bread, offered to show us the castle. He
put his napkin down, sucked his teeth, lighted his pipe, took a bunch of
keys from the wall and started ahead of us through the village.
After following a long wall, we entered through an old door into a
silent farm-yard. Silica here and there shows through the beaten ground,
on which grows a little grass soiled by manure. There was nobody around
and the stable was empty. In the barns some chickens were roosting on
the poles of the wagons, with their heads under their wings. Around the
buildings, the sound of our footsteps was deadened by the dust
accumulated from the straw in the lofts.
Four large towers connected by curtains showed battlements beneath their
pointed roofs; the openings in the towers, like those in the main part
of the castle, are small, irregular windows, which form uneven black
squares on the grey stones. A broad stoop, comprising about thirty
steps, reaches to the first floor, which has become the ground-floor of
the interior apartments, since the trenches have been filled up.
The yellow wall-flower does not grow here, but instead, one finds
nettles and lentisks, greenish moss and lichens. To the left, next to
the turret, is a cluster of chestnut-trees reaching up to the roof and
shading it.
After the key had been turned in the lock and the door pushed open with
kicks, we entered a dark hallway filled with boards and ladders and
wheelbarrows.
This passage led into a little yard enclosed by the thick interior walls
of the castle. It was lighted from the top like a prison yard. In the
corners, drops of humidity dripped from the stones. We opened another
door. It led into a large, empty, sonorous hall; the floor was cracked
in a hundred places, but there was fresh paint on the wainscoting.
The green forest opposite sheds a vivid reflection on the white walls,
through the large windows of the castle. There is a lake and underneath
the windows were clusters of lilacs, petunia-blossoms and acacias, which
have grown pell-mell in the former parterre, and cover the hill that
slopes gradually to the road, following the banks of the lake and then
continuing through the woods.
The great, deserted hall, where the child who afterwards wrote _René_,
used to sit and gaze out of the windows, was silent. The clerk smoked
his pipe and expectorated on the floor. His dog, which had followed him,
hunted for mice, and its nails clicked on the pavement.
We walked up the winding stairs. Moss covers the worn stone steps.
Sometimes a ray of light, passing through a crack in the walls, strikes
a green blade and makes it gleam in the dark like a star.
We wandered through the halls, through the towers, and over the narrow
curtain with its gaping machicolations, which attract the eye
irresistibly to the abyss below.
On the second floor is a small room which looks out into the inside
courtyard and has a massive oak door that closes with a latch. The beams
of the ceiling (you can touch them), are rotten from age; the
whitewashed walls show their lattice-work and are covered with big
spots; the window-panes are obscured by cobwebs and their frames are
buried in dust. This used to be Chateaubriand's room. It faces the West,
towards the setting sun.
We continued; when we passed in front of a window or a loop-hole, we
warmed ourselves in the warm air coming from without, and this sudden
transition rendered the ruins all the more melancholy and cheerless. The
floors of the apartments are rotting away, and daylight enters through
the fireplaces along the blackened slab where rain has left long green
streaks. The golden flowers on the drawing-room ceiling are falling off,
and the shield that surmounts the mantelpiece is broken into bits. While
we were looking around, a flight of birds entered, flew around for a few
minutes and passed out through the chimney.
In the evening, we went to the lake. The meadow has encroached upon it
and will soon cover it entirely, and wheat will grow in the place of
pond-lilies. Night was falling. The castle, flanked by its four turrets
and framed by masses of green foliage, cast a dark shadow over the
village. The setting sun made the great mass appear black; the dying
rays touched the surface of the lake and then melted in the mist on the
purplish top of the silent forest.
We sat down at the foot of an oak and opened _René_. We faced the lake
where he had often watched the nimble swallow on the bending reeds; we
sat in the shadow of the forest where he had often pursued rainbows over
the dripping hills; we harkened to the rustling of the leaves and the
whisperings of the water that had added their murmur to the sad melody
of his youth. As the darkness gathered on the pages of the book, the
bitterness of its words went to our hearts, and we experienced a
sensation of mingled melancholy and sweetness.
A wagon passed in the road, and the wheels sank in the deep tracks. A
smell of new-mown hay pervaded the air. The frogs were croaking in the
marshes. We went back.
The sky was heavy and a storm raged all night. The front of a
neighbouring house was illumined and flared like a bonfire at every
flash of lightning. Gasping, and tired of tossing on my bed, I arose,
lighted a candle, opened the window and leaned out.
The night was dark, and as silent as slumber. The lighted candle threw
my huge shadow on the opposite wall. From time to time a flash of
lightning blinded me.
I thought of the man whose early life was spent here and who filled half
a century with the clamouring of his grief.
I thought of him first in these quiet streets, playing with the village
boys and looking for nests in the church-steeple and in the woods. I
imagined him in his little room, leaning his elbows on the table, and
watching the rain beating on the window-panes and the clouds passing
above the curtain, while his dreams flew away. I thought of the bitter
loneliness of youth, with its intoxications, its nausea, and its bursts
of love that sicken the heart. Is it not here that our own grief was
nourished, is this not the very Golgotha where the genius that fed us
suffered its anguish?
Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills which
future great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to see
the spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it had
retained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there.
His room! his room! his childhood's poor little room! It was here that
he was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamoured
for birth: Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the soft
breeze of Florida, Velléda running through the woods in the moonlight,
Cymodocée protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, and
frail Amélie and pale René!
One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead,
never to return. Now he is lost in the whirl of Paris and mingles with
his fellow-men; and then he feels an impulse to travel and he starts
off.
I can see him leaning over the side of the ship, I can see him looking
for a new world and weeping over the country he has left. He lands; he
listens to the waterfalls and the songs of the Natchez; he watches the
flowing rivers and the bright scales of the snakes and the eyes of the
savages. He allows his soul to be fascinated by the languor of the
Savannah. They tell each other of their native melancholy and he
exhausts its pleasures as he exhausted those of love. He returns,
writes, and everyone is carried away by the charm of his magnificent
style with its royal sweep and its supple, coloured, undulating phrase,
as stormy as the winds that sweep over virgin forests, as brilliant as
the neck of a humming-bird, and as soft as the light of the moon shining
through the windows of a chapel.
He travels again; this time he goes to ancient shores; he sits down at
Thermoplyæ and cries: Leonidas! Leonidas! visits the tomb of Achilles,
Lacedæmon, and Carthage, and, like the sleepy shepherd who raises his
head to watch the passing caravans, all those great places awake when he
passes through them.
Banished, exiled, laden with honours, this man who had starved in the
streets will dine at the table of kings; he will be an ambassador and a
minister, will try to save the tottering monarchy, and after seeing the
ruin of all his beliefs, he will witness his own glorification as if he
were already counted among the dead.
Born during the decline of one period and at the dawn of another, he was
to be its transition and the guardian of its memories and hopes. He was
the embalmer of Catholicism and the proclaimer of liberty. Although he
was a man of old traditions and illusions, he was constitutional in
politics and revolutionary in literature. Religious by instinct and
education, it is he, who, in advance of everyone else, in advance of
Byron, gave vent to the most savage pride and frightful despair.
He was an artist, and had this in common with the artists of the
eighteenth century: he was always hampered by narrow laws which,
however, were always broken by the power of his genius. As a man, he
shared the misery of his fellow-men of the nineteenth century. He had
the same turbulent preoccupations and futile gravity. Not satisfied with
being great, he wished to appear grandiose, and it seems that this
conceited mania did not in the least efface his real grandeur. He
certainly does not belong to the race of dreamers who have made no
incursion into life, masters with calm brows who have had neither
period, nor country nor family. But this man cannot be separated from
the passions of his time; they made him what he was, and he in turn
created a number of them. Perhaps the future will not give him credit
for his heroic stubbornness and no doubt it will be the episodes of his
books that will immortalise their titles with the names of the causes
they upheld.
I stayed at the window enjoying the night and feeling with delight the
cold morning air on my lids. Little by little the day dawned; the wick
of the candle grew longer and longer and its flame slowly faded away.
The roof of the market appeared in the distance and a cock crowed; the
storm had passed; a few drops of water remained in the dust of the road
and made large round spots on it. As I was very tired, I went back to
bed and slept.
We felt very sad on leaving Combourg, and besides, the end of our
journey was at hand. Soon this delightful trip which we had enjoyed for
three months would be over. The return, like the leave-taking, produces
an anticipated sadness, which gives one a proof of the insipid life we
lead.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Gustave Flaubert was twenty-six years old when he started
on this journey. He travelled on foot and was accompanied by M. Maxime
Ducamp. When they returned, they wrote an account of their journey. It
is by far the most important of the unpublished writings, for in it the
author gives his personal genius full sway and it abounds in picturesque
descriptions and historical reflections.]
[Footnote 2: Founder of the abbey of Fontevrault, in 1099.]
[Footnote 3: He strangled his mistress whose mutilated body was found
floating in a sack on a pond. (See _Causes Célèbres_.)]
[Footnote 4: A contraction of Poulbeuzanneval, the swamp where the beast
was drowned.]
[Footnote 5: Josselin Frotet, sieur de La Lanbelle, at whose place the
rebels congregated before the escalade. (Note on the manuscript of
G.F.)]
[Footnote 6: D'Argentré, _Hist. de Bretagne_. p. 62.]
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