CHAPTER VI.

MORLAIX—ST. POL—LESNEVEN—LE FOLGOET.

From the quiet of Carhaix and the solemn landscape which surrounds Huelgoet to the bustle of Morlaix, only sixteen miles to the north, seems a rapid transition. If we arrive at Morlaix by railway, we cross a lofty viaduct over a deep ravine, and, far below, see clusters of grey roofs, white houses, rocks and trees, church towers, and factory chimneys. Descending to the town, we find ourselves in the centre of more commercial activity than we have seen since leaving St. Malo. Morlaix is a prosperous town, containing about 15,000 inhabitants, busily engaged in trade. It is built at the confluence of two streams, the Jarlot and the Queffleut, which meet in the centre of the city, and (arched over for some distance in their course) wind down the valley to the sea, six miles away. On either side of this canal-like stream are quays, and rows of houses, old and new, strangely intermixed.

The commercial traveller, the shipper of native products, and the importer of foreign goods is ever busy at Morlaix. But its aspect is still essentially old; its outward characteristics are primitive: weather-worn gables with carved beams, steep streets and rough pavements with open gutters, and, in the centre of the city, a dingy river, with washerwomen on its banks. The sketch gives an exact idea of the scene as enacted every day in the principal street; but the old architecture of Morlaix is best indicated on page 72. A few demolitions take place every year, but, visiting Morlaix for the third time in 1878, we find the most interesting buildings standing and leaning against each other as of old. Tradition is strong in this city, and many new shops preserve over their doors their old signs, the ancient insignia of the trades of the merchants of Morlaix. Some are grotesque figures carved in wood, painted and gilt; there is one little figure, for instance, at the corner of the Rue Notre Dame, “Au Sommeur Breton,” in cocked hat and curled wig, which carries us back in imagination several centuries.

In the “Rue des Nobles,” where the high-pitched roofs and overhanging eaves nearly meet across the street, we may see the actual dwellings of the nobles of Brittany in the fifteenth century, whilst above on the steep hillsides, and all around, are the modern, meaner, and more healthy dwellings of the traders of the nineteenth.

The approach to Morlaix by water in the old days, when at the last turn of the river the pointed gables and towers came into view, must have been very picturesque. Its aspect in 1505, when the nobles received the Queen-Duchess Anne on her pilgrimage through Brittany, and later—when Mary Queen of Scots landed here on her way to Paris to espouse the Dauphin in 1548—we may picture to ourselves, with some regret, as we walk down the new wide Rue de Brest, and see above us the great railway viaduct. It is a strange medley of grey roofs, trees, rocks, towers, factory chimneys, quays lined with stores, precipitous streets, tottering dwellings, and defaced churches (one turned into a granary), arched over by the modern railway viaduct, from the view of which there is no escape, but which, from its very height and solidity, has a certain grandeur of effect. But the old is quite overwhelmed by the new, and even the steep hillsides seem dwarfed by the giant proportions of the viaduct. There is not only more movement, but there is more colour in Morlaix, than we are accustomed to in Brittany; down on the quay, for instance, there are red sashes, and clothing of bright Oriental hues, drying in the wind; and there is a certain Eastern air about the open shops in the old quarters which tells of distant commerce. But the present prosperity of Morlaix is in its tobacco manufactories, in its trade in butter, grain, fruit, &c., and in its position as the natural place of export for the products of a fruitful part of Brittany.

It is well to stay at Morlaix to make sketches of some of the lofty interiors with their carved staircases, some of which are quite unique; and it is well to see it on Sundays, for nowhere shall we see pleasanter faces or a happier and brighter-looking population. On market mornings the country people crowd the _Place_, and, in the morning and in the evening, five or six hundred factory hands, men and women, pass up and down the Rue de Brest. It is a familiar sight, but the neat caps and dark homely attire of the women are again delightful to see. The brightness, style, and vivacity, of the women of Morlaix leave a distinct impression on the mind.

In the neighbourhood, in the direction of Brest, are two of the most famous calvaries and churches of the Renaissance, St. Thégonnec and Guimiliau. It is half an hour’s journey by train to the little deserted station of St. Thégonnec, on the railway to Brest, and a mile to the north is the village. There is no one at the station but the station-master, and no communication with the village of St. Thégonnec excepting by a covered cart, which meets the morning train. The fine church, which stands in the midst of a straggling village of dilapidated houses, pigsties, and dirt, is rich in sculpture and gilding in the style of the Renaissance; on the high-altar, on the pulpit, and in the side chapels are elaborate carvings, much overdone with gilding and restoration, but grand in general effect. In the churchyard all is grey, sad-looking, and dilapidated; the ancient calvary, erected in 1610 in dark Kersanton stone, is injured and time-stained; the quaint figures, elaborately carved, representing passages in the history of Christ (dressed in ruffs and gowns of the sixteenth century), are roughly propped up and stuck together, for the benefit of pilgrims who come to the shrine.

The calvary of St. Thégonnec, like most others in Brittany, depicts scenes in the life and Passion of Christ. In the centre is a group of three crosses, representing the scene of the Crucifixion, with figures of the centurion and soldiers, angels, and the Virgin and St. John, and on either side are the two thieves. Below, round the base of the structure, are figures in Breton costume, representing the judgment of Pilate, Christ bearing the cross, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. Some of the figures are remarkable for animation, and, in spite of the state of the monument, appeal more powerfully to the imagination than a group of coloured life-size figures representing the Entombment which is shewn to visitors in the crypt.[5]

Footnote 5:

For a sketch of one of the calvaries, see page 91.

The church and calvary of Guimiliau is in a quiet village a few miles to the south-west, a short drive from St. Thégonnec, crossing the railway. The church dates from the Renaissance, and is rich in carving and decoration; the interior is loaded with ornament, the eastern end being a mass of crude colours and florid decoration. In the south porch is some elaborate carving, and in the organ loft are some bas-reliefs on the oak panels. There is a baptistry of carved oak, consisting of a canopy with allegorical figures, supported on eight spiral pillars, around which are twisted vine leaves, fruit, flowers, and birds. The pulpit, dated 1677, is also a remarkable work of art. But in the churchyard, time-stained and crumbling to decay as usual, is the great object of our visit, a solid stone structure raised upon arches, upon which is a crowd of little carved figures in the costume of the sixteenth century, representing the various scenes of the Passion. There are saints in the niches at the corners, and high above is a crucifix, with the figures of Mary and St. John on either side. This monument dates from 1580, but many of the figures have been restored at a later date.

Altogether the calvaries of St. Thégonnec and Guimiliau, whether regarded from a picturesque or antiquarian point of view, are the most interesting monuments we have yet seen; interesting in their very loneliness, the object of so much thought and labour in the middle ages, left thus neglected and in ruin. The calvaries of Brittany seem little cared for, excepting as curiosities; but once a year, at Easter time, there are religious ceremonies connected with them, when special services are performed, and the various scenes depicted on the monuments are explained to the people. Then is the time to visit St. Thégonnec and Guimiliau, when the people are seen gathered round the sculptured crosses, in the same costumes and in the same attitude of faith as their forefathers.

From the time we left St. Thégonnec station until our return in the evening, after visiting these two calvaries, we have seen few people in the fields or on the roads. The busy city of Morlaix absorbs all available hands, and leaves the country towns almost deserted. When the railway was advanced at an enormous cost through a difficult country to the port of Brest, it was thought, naturally enough, that it would open up traffic _en route_; but here at St. Thégonnec no one comes. “I live,” says the station-master, “in a vast solitude, the monotony of which is only broken by the passing of five or six trains a day; scarcely any one comes near me; a stray tourist or two in the summer, and an occasional visit from a wolf in winter, one of which has killed my favourite dog.” This station-master, whose daughter was being educated at Morlaix, kept a brood of turkeys for distraction; but it was “a lonely life,” as he said, a solitude the more keenly felt because he was connected by a telegraph wire with the headquarters of the administration of the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest. “It was solitude without peace, for at any moment, day or night, the bell might ring.” It is difficult to realise that this is on the main line of railway between Paris and Brest!

There is no stranger or more suggestive contrast for the traveller in Brittany than to leave Morlaix on a summer’s morning and drive twelve miles in a north-westerly direction to St. Pol de Léon. It takes only three hours, but in that short journey we pass, as it were, from life to death, from the commercial activity of to-day to a stillness which belongs to the past. The passage is from wharves and warehouses, from crowded factories and the shrieking of steam, to open country, hill and dale, to the sea. In Morlaix the monuments are to commerce, in St. Pol de Léon to the church; in Morlaix there is activity and a certain amount of civilisation, in St. Pol de Léon, by contrast, there is stillness, poverty, and degradation. Our last view of Morlaix is of a stupendous railway viaduct, of comfortable villas and trim gardens; our first view of St. Pol de Léon across the open land is of three noble church spires standing out sharply against the sky. Ancient stone crosses and images of saints in glass cases are passed as usual on the roadside, before we approach Léon, “the Holy City,” which five centuries ago, when Morlaix was unknown, was an important bishopric and the centre of great ecclesiastical wealth. To-day its aspect is poor and dreary, even in sunshine; grey and cold in colour, and generally dirty.

But the cathedral with its spires and the tower of the church of Notre Dame de Creizker (nearly 400 feet high) are the absorbing points of interest, the reason of our journey to St. Pol.

The inhabitants, numbering about 7000, are principally agricultural, or are employed at the port; fishermen and knitting women, reserved and dignified in manner, living rough homely lives, disdaining many of the modern ways of Morlaix, but having a keen eye to commerce, which they carry on actively with far-away places, including Norway and Greenland.

As we saunter up the rough, ill-paved streets of the cathedral square, the men come out of the cafés and _débits de tabac_, and give us a rough but not unkindly greeting, as in the sketch. The principal occupation of our three friends is to cultivate potatoes, cabbages, onions, asparagus, and other vegetables for foreign markets; for this part of Brittany forms one vast market-garden, whence the cities of Western Europe are supplied. The inhabitants who live in the cathedral square have grown up in perpetual wonderment (expressed in their faces) at the summer procession of pilgrims to St. Pol de Léon; pilgrims in strange costumes, who dispense sous to their children, inquire for the keys of the tower of the Creizker, and then mount several hundred feet above them in the wind.

The cathedral dedicated to St. Pol is a fine example of early Gothic architecture, noble in proportions, rich in carving and sombre in colour, the dark green Kersanton stone giving a fine effect to the interior, in which some white-robed nuns are generally to be seen on their knees. The nave is thirteenth-century work, there is some florid carving on the south porch, and a fine rose window; above are two towers, with lofty lancet windows, and spires which remind us of churches in Normandy.

But the spire of Notre Dame de Creizker—literally, “Our Lady of the Middle Town”—which is higher than the cathedral towers, is the most interesting object in St. Pol; the central point round which the lives of the Léonnais radiate, a landmark seen far and wide by land and sea. This spire, built in the fourteenth century, in the reign of John IV., Duke of Brittany, is supposed to be the work of an English architect. The tower is of granite, richly ornamented with a projecting cornice, and its spire is pierced through to the sky. The beauty and magnificence of the churches of St. Pol de Léon are out of all proportion to the present importance—or unimportance—of the place. The inhabitants have little sympathy with the art of the sixteenth century, or with the Druidical remains they find in their fields, but they welcome travellers gladly in the nineteenth.

It is a wide plain round about St. Pol, from which the Gothic spires seem to reach to heaven, and where a human figure, standing in a field, points upwards with strange emphasis against the sky; a district peopled by classic-looking market gardeners, whose children walk in groves of cabbages five feet high, and play at hide and seek in their shadows.

Three miles north of St. Pol is the little sea-port of Roscoff, historically interesting as the landing-place of the child princess Mary Queen of Scots, who passed through Roscoff on her way to Nantes in 1548. There are the ruins of a chapel founded by her, still standing on the seashore; in the church, with its open belfry tower, are some curious alabaster reliefs; and in the neighbourhood, in a convent garden, is a gigantic fig-tree, said to be two centuries old. Roscoff is now used as a bathing-place, and there is a constant passing to and fro in summer between this port and a little island three miles farther north, the Île de Batz, where a hardy population of fishermen and women ply their dangerous trade, with hardly any communication with the shore in winter. It is almost worth while to cross to the Île de Batz to see the “Druidesses,” as the women of the island are called, assembling on Sundays in their island church; and it might be worth while for a painter to make a longer stay in this neighbourhood, to make studies (if only for colour) of some of the curious figures to be seen in such out-of-the-way corners as Roscoff. Here is one of an old man with long hair and semi-nautical aspect, who sits in the evening on a stone seat in front of the cottage which he owns, facing the sea; a poor man to outward appearance, but an owner of the soil; his face is screwed and weather-worn, his clothes are patched in various shades of brown; his blouse is of a dark and greasy tinge; his working life has been spent in the fields or down at the port, but his final cause is undoubtedly to smoke; he has coloured by degrees, like a good old pipe, and his sabots have caught the true meerschaum tinge; he has smouldered at Roscoff for many years, and seems ready for burning, stacked against the wall like the fagots collected for winter fires. There is no difficulty in making a sketch, for this rich-toned “owner of the soil” of Finistère has a perfect contempt for strangers, and is as immovable as the gurgoyle sketched on the preceding page.

Let us now turn westward in the direction of Lesneven and Le Folgoet, to see one of the finest churches in Finistère. There are two roads to Lesneven, of which we would recommend the traveller to take the one to the north, near the sea. The country is for the most part dreary in aspect, but there are some curious wayside crosses on the route. There are a few fields of buckwheat, corn, and rye, banked up by high hedges, and skirted by pollard trees. It is one of those drives which should be taken leisurely by the antiquary or the archæologist; a route where there is little to remind us of the present, and much to bring before us the habits of the past. Every monument we pass on the road, every hovel at the roadside, and nearly every peasant in the fields, is of the pattern of a past age.

As we skirt these quiet shores of northern Finistère, we may listen for a moment to a story just five hundred years old, a story that every Breton peasant that we pass on the road knows by heart: how a poor idiot named Salaun, who lived in the neighbourhood of Lesneven for forty years, and begged for his bread in the name of the Virgin, uttering only the words, “Ave Maria,” was found dead by a fountain and buried on the spot; how a white lily grew upon his grave, with the words, “Ave Maria,” inscribed upon the leaves; and how John of Blois, then fighting for the dukedom of Brittany, hearing of the “miracle,” vowed that, if successful in battle, he would erect a church to Notre Dame de Folgoet, _i.e._ “Fool of the Wood.”

The church was completed by his son, John V., about 1420. It was built like most of the churches and monuments of Finistère, of the dark Kersanton stone found near St. Pol de Léon, and at the village of Kersanton, near Brest. The church consists of a lofty nave and aisles under one roof, with a long projecting transept on the south side. The great beauty of the church is in its carving, that on the south porch being perhaps the finest. The great west door, now falling into ruin, is elaborately ornamented with wreaths of the vine and other devices, and above it is a bas-relief representing the Nativity and the Adoration of the Shepherds. In the beautiful south porch, which is supposed to have been added by the Queen-Duchess Anne, are the arms of Brittany and figures of the twelve apostles in niches, and round its roof are traces of a richly carved parapet. In the interior there are five altars, with carved figures of angels, birds, and flowers; and on the rood-loft, between the choir and nave, supported upon elaborately carved pillars, is some open tracery cut in stone, in good preservation. There is a fine rose window, as at St. Pol de Léon.

The spring, or Fool’s Well, is under the high-altar, and the water flows into a basin _outside_ the church. It is here that the sick and needy come and kneel before a statue of Our Lady set in a Gothic niche, and bathe their limbs in the water of the miraculous well; a retired spot, where, at all hours of the day, peasants are to be found on their knees in prayer.

We have given but slight descriptions of the churches of St. Pol de Léon and Le Folgoet, but enough to indicate that here at least the traveller will be rewarded for going out of the beaten track, and that in Brittany, owing to the wonderful durability of the Kersanton stone, we can still see the handwork and judge of the skill of the sculptors of the fourteenth century.

The church of Le Folgoet stands, as guide-books tell us, on “a silent spot, unvisited save on certain festivals, and removed a mile and a half from any town.” We find it the centre of a tumult impossible to describe. There is a large horse-fair being held, which has collected a crowd almost equal to that at Carhaix; but here there is more variety in the costume of the men, the red Phrygian caps and sashes lighting up the crowd with unusual colour. It is a scene strangely in contrast with the quiet of the cathedral, where under its cool arcades men are kneeling, whip in hand; they have come to pray for a special blessing from St. Cornély, the patron saint of cattle.

The men, in light canvas trousers and blue jerseys, standing on the left in the picture of the fair, are horse dealers and agents for the government, who attend every cattle fair and market throughout the country. The men on the right, watching a horse being trotted out, are thoroughly characteristic figures, portraits of well-to-do Breton farmers and dealers.

The boy on the horse is a good example of the Breton _gamin_, or hanger-on at fairs, who trots out the horses with untiring energy, and with a freedom and grace of limb delightful to behold.