Chapter 14

We gathered on the heathy moor three kinds of heath, the Cornish among others. The artichoke grows wild in the waste grounds. Wheat, turnips, beetroot, Indian corn, and potatoes, are the chief produce of the land in cultivation. This last vegetable was introduced by the families from Nova Scotia (Acadia), who settled in Belle Isle, after that province was ceded to England by the Treaty of Paris, in 1766. This was several years before Parmentier had extended the use of the potato, or "truffe rouge," as it was first called, over other parts of France. Indian corn was probably also brought in by the Nova Scotians. The leaves are constantly cut during its growth as fodder for the cattle, so that the cob hardly attains a foot in height from the ground. On the left of our road we saw in the distance the village of Bangor, which gives its name to one of the four districts into which Belle Isle is divided. A little south is the fine granite lighthouse, of the stupendous height of 450 feet. We toiled up 255 steps (223 stone and 32 iron) before we gained the lantern, and, though the view was very extensive, we were rejoiced at finding ourselves safe down. One of the guardians had been waylaid, kicked, and beaten, a few evenings before, for some slight grudge. He seemed in great suffering, but had no doctor; the Breton, in his simple confiding faith—that with the Almighty are the issues of life and death, and that illness will end according to His decree—considers the calling in of a medical adviser but an unnecessary expense to his family. From the lighthouse we walked to the sea-shore. Belle Isle is a table-land, surrounded by steep cliffs, averaging 130 feet in height, which can only be descended to the shore in particular places. We walked to the Grotte du Port Coton, where begins the "Mer Sauvage," as it is called, an extent of five to six miles of most picturesque rocks, some elevated from 130 to 160 feet above the level of the sea, jagged and torn into most fantastic forms by the ceaseless dashing of the waters of the Atlantic, which have formed various grottoes in the cliffs. We descended into one of these caverns by a narrow gulley, but could not proceed far, as the tide was entering fast, and would soon have surrounded us, cutting off all means of retreat.

It reminded us of the description in the ’Vicomte de Bragelonne’ of the grotto at Locmaria, which was blown up, and crushed the mousquetaire Porthos, at the moment of his and Aramis’ triumph over the soldiers of the King. So great at times is the fury of the waves, that our guide at the lighthouse told us he had seen on several occasions the spray driven over to Le Palais, nearly five miles distant. Continuing our walk along the cliffs, we came to an enormous mass of rock, standing far out detached from the cliff, and covered with screaming sea-gulls. We again descended by another fissure into a pretty sandy cove, surrounded by the same wild granite rocks; but in most places there is no beach at all. It was now high water, so it was useless to attempt the Grotte des Apothécaires,—the finest, they say, of them all, and we returned to Le Palais well pleased with the remarkably wild coast we had seen. Belle-isle forms now a canton in the department of Morbihan. In ancient days it belonged to the Abbot of Saint-Croix, at Quimperlé, who sold it, in the time of Charles IX., to the Maréchal de Gondi, and, in 1573, it was erected into a Marquisate. (Cardinal de Retz lived here after his escape from the castle of Nantes.) One of his successors, Henri de Gondi, being overwhelmed with debt, sold the island to Nicolas Fouquet, the ill-fated Superintendent of Finance, on whose disgrace, and his being subsequently consigned to the fortress of Pignarol, his grandson, the Marquis de Belle Isle, exchanged it with Louis XV. for the Comté of Gisors, erected into a duchy in 1742. Fouquet built a palace and completed the citadel, for which he employed Vauban. He also projected fortifications to enclose the town, which are now in course of completion by the Emperor, after Vauban’s plans. Several guns had just been landed, the day before we visited the citadel, to see which an order is requisite. Near the citadel is the "Maison centrale des détenus," now only containing a few old men, too feeble for hard labour. We were too tired to walk to look at the celebrated cistern of Vauban, which holds, we were told, above thirty thousand imperial gallons of water. Fouquet’s palace was, it is said, destroyed to complete the line of fortifications. A house was pointed out to us as having formed part of the original building. Some years since, a stone was picked up in the harbour bearing his ambitious device—a squirrel, with the motto, _Quo non ascendum?_ "To where shall I not rise?" The greater number of the population of Belle Isle are employed in the fisheries; of these the sardine and the tunny are the chief. There are large establishments for curing sardines, which are very abundant, and lobsters, taken in the rocks of Belle Isle and the little islands of Houat and Hædic, are sent to London and Paris. The boats go as far as Spain, to the coast of Catalonia, for the tunny fishery, which extends from August to the beginning of October. These fish are taken by lines hung along the sides of the vessel, with a bell attached to each to give notice of a bite. The most esteemed part of the tunny is the underneath, or "panse." The next morning we sailed back to Auray. The nearest point to Belle Isle is Quiberon, only ten miles from Le Palais. From Auray by rail to Quimper, where we took the diligence to Pont l’Abbé, an old town formerly of some importance, in the midst of a fertile, rich country. The costume worn at Pont l’Abbé and along the Bay of Audierne is very singular. The cap, or "bigouden," is composed of two pieces: first, a kind of skull-cap, or serre-tête, fitting tight to the head over the ears, then a little round bit, resembling, the young people said, a "pork-pie" hat, made of starched linen, pinched into a three-cornered peak, the middle peak embroidered and tied on by a piece of tape fastening under the chin; the hair is turned up, "en chignon," over the skull-cap. The body of the dress has a large "pièce" of red or yellow, and sleeves to match. The men wear several very short coats, one over the other, the shortest trimmed with fringe; sometimes sentences are embroidered with coloured woollens round the edge. It was market day; the women were sitting, with distaff and spindle, on each side of the entrance to the Halle. Some of them have short bead-chains with a ring, attached to the left shoulder, to stick their distaffs in when not at work. There was abundance of fruit and vegetables, potatoes, and sardines, which, with bigoudens and other articles of dress, formed the principal commodities for sale. Pont l’Abbé and its Port, Loctudy, carry on an extensive trade with Jersey, and large quantities of potatoes are exported to that island. There were some Jersey merchants at the table-d’hôte.

The church of Pont l’Abbé has only one aisle. There is a fine rose window over the west entrance, of great lightness and richness, with a smaller one at the left; at the east end is another rose window of larger dimensions, the mullions forming geometric patterns, but differing in design from the other. The French architects always took great pains in the decoration of this part of the church, and these wheel windows really rival those of Rouen.

Attached to the church, are the cloisters of the Carmelite convent to which the church formerly belonged, built in the beginning of the fifteenth century by Bertram de Rosmadec, who had so much contributed to the completion of the cathedral at Quimper. The square is surrounded by an interlaced circular arcade, forming trefoiled pointed arches, all in excellent preservation. The access to the cloisters is through the conventual building, now a private house and garden, the proprietor kindly granting us permission.

We drove to Loctudy, on the mouth of the Pont l’Abbé river opposite the little island of Tudy, called after an English saint of that name. Fleeing from the persecutions of the Picts and Scots who desolated his country, he founded here, at the end of the fifth century, a considerable monastery, afterwards destroyed by the Normans.

At Loctudy is a curious Romanesque church, one of the best preserved in Brittany, which dates from the Templars of the twelfth century. It has a nave with aisles going all round the choir, and three round apsidal chapels at the end. The five arches on each side of the nave are horse-shoe shaped, and the choir is surrounded by the same number of high narrow arches, resting on columns with grotesque capitals of complicated design. The three chapels behind are seen through the opening; on one of the capitals is sculptured the cross of the Templars. The whole building is spoiled by whitewash.

“Chevaliers en ce monde cy Ne peuvent vivre sans souci; Ils doivent le peuple defendre, Et leur sang pour la foi espandre.” EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS.

We engaged a rough kind of vehicle, much like a butcher’s cart, to visit the Torche de Penmarch, a rocky promontory, so called from its fancied resemblance to a horse’s head, forming the southern extremity of the department of Finistère. The Torche is a mass of rocks separated from the mainland by a chasm called the "Saut de Moine," because an Irish saint, named Viaud, jumped across it on his landing. In rough weather, the noise made by the sea dashing against its sides and rushing through the crevices of the rocks, is said to be heard at Quimper, a distance of twenty-one miles. A line of rocks runs all along the coast, marked by a lighthouse at Penmarch; we proceeded to another group of rocks near which M. de Châtellier, a proprietor and antiquary of this country, has built a house for painting and enjoying the scenery. One of our party clambered down to see the "Trou d’Enfer," a tremendously deep hole in the rocks, the bottom covered with a pink sort of sea-weed, and the water as clear as crystal. The whole country is a dreary sandy level, with salt-marshes, over which we passed to the ruined church of St. Fiacre, and close by is that of St. Guenolé, both situated near the sea. The countryman who showed us the church, knelt reverently down at the threshold and put up a short prayer before he entered the sacred building. The general devoutness and strong faith of the Bretons is most impressive and genuine, mixed, no doubt, with great superstition; but, as Wesley says, "Heaven makes allowance for invincible ignorance, and blesses the faith notwithstanding the superstition."

St. Guenolé consists of an unfinished square tower, with crocketed pinnacles and a porch of considerable size, under a large mullioned window of the fifteenth century. On each side of the porch are rude sculptures of ships and fishes, not uncommon in these parts, set there to show the church has been built with the thank-offerings of the fisher population of the district. In our tour we met with several churches with this sign, evidences of the piety of the fishermen; indeed, at Dunkirk, when the church was burned down in the sixteenth century by the French, it was entirely rebuilt by the contribution called "le filet saint," from an ancient custom among the fishermen of having one net so called, the produce of which was set apart for the church.

Towards the lighthouse are the ruins of the old town of Penmarch, much celebrated in the maritime history of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; its commerce extended even to Spain, and the riches of its inhabitants were so surpassingly great, that they drank out of silver cups, and the lords of a manor near the Torche furnished the silk required to line the road traversed by religious processions, their wealth being due to the "viande de carême," that is to say, to the cod fishery. But the discovery of Newfoundland deprived them of this lucrative monopoly, and the ravages of Fontenelle le Ligueur completed their ruin. All now is a scene of desolation. Penmarch has been called the Palmyra of Brittany.

Guy Eder Fontenelle, the Leaguer, who spread terror and devastation throughout Brittany in the sixteenth century, was a member of the Beaumanoir family; the name he adopted was that of one of the family estates. He was born in the Château of Beaumanoir (near Evran), and his elder brother early foresaw his guilty career. He escaped from college and united himself with a set of young men as lawless as himself; they formed themselves into a band, which soon became the dread of all Brittany. They ravaged the whole of Tréguier and Cornouaille, surprised the châteaux of Coëtfrec and others, took the church of Carhaix, which they fortified, and the towns of Paimpol, Lannion, and Landerneau, which they pillaged, Penmarch and Pontcroix, whence they carried off an immense booty and 300 vessels, with which they scoured the seas; and lastly, Douarnenez and the Island of Tristan (in 1595), whence fruitless attempts were made to dislodge them. For three years Fontenelle made this island his head-quarters, issuing from his stronghold to devastate the country. He murdered above fifteen hundred peasants at Plougastel, sank an English ship, without allowing her crew a moment to save themselves, imprisoned and tortured at Douarnenez all who fell into his hands. His victims never survived his cruelties more than three or four days, when their bodies were cast out into the bay to the fishes. These were only a few of his atrocities. As he called himself one of the leaders of the League in Brittany, the Duke de Mercœur, its chief, indignant at the barbarities perpetrated in its name, caused Fontenelle to be imprisoned, but he was liberated on paying a ransom; and, fearing he would give Douarnenez over to the Spaniards, Fontenelle was included in the pacification of Mercœur with Henry IV. But four years later he was implicated in the conspiracy of Biron; on which occasion all his old crimes were raked up against him, and he was condemned to be dragged on a hurdle, and broken alive upon the wheel, which sentence was executed on the Place de Grève at Paris in 1602. In consideration of the illustrious house to whom he belonged, the king granted that in the act of condemnation he should not go by his own name. We next went to see the church of Saint Nonna in the town, the largest of the numerous churches in the parish of Penmarch. Ships are sculptured in front of the tower, as at St. Guenolé. On the left of the porch is a pretty window, the mullions formed by three fleur de lis. In the church is a curious old painting styled, "Procession du vœu de Louis XIII." Portraits of the King, the Dauphin (Louis XIV.), Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Richelieu, are introduced, and a view of the church of St. Nonna is in the background.

On our way home we passed, on the left, at Kerscaven, two menhirs, one curiously furrowed and shaped like a half-opened fan.

We had a pretty drive from Pont l’Abbé, with occasional views of the Bay of Audierne, extending from Penmarch to the Pointe du Raz. Midway the horse, going down a steep hill, fell, and we all found ourselves upon the road, but happily unhurt. We met numbers of peasants returning from the fair at Pontcroix; and our driver, a butcher by trade, coolly stopped the vehicle, to discourse with them on the price of stock, and to handle the sheep they had bought. Our drive was enlivened with occasional peeps of the Bay of Audierne till we reached the little port of that name, the view of which is very pretty. Audierne is approached by a bridge across the river or estuary. At its entrance is a lighthouse, and on the right a sandy bay, with bathing-machines in the season.

The town consists of three streets of cut granite houses, with the name of the builder and the date of their construction inscribed over the door. Fishing is the occupation of the inhabitants, and the table-d’hôte at our comfortable, clean, little inn was plentifully supplied with magnificent john dorys, large red mullet, langoustes, and fish of every description.

From Audierne we took a carriage to visit the Pointe du Raz, a promontory so famous for its rocks and wrecks. We went through a treeless country; near a pretty bay, on the left, is the chapel of Notre Dame-de-Bon-Voyage, destined chiefly for sailors, after which the country becomes more wild, barren, and cheerless. We passed over a bridge which no Breton would dare to cross at night, for fear of being flung by the spirits into the river. According to their belief, a hare appears on the bridge, and terrifies the horses, who throw their rider, and the traveller is dragged by the phantom into the muddy river, where he is kept till morning’s dawn, when he is allowed to pursue his way, exhausted with cold, and half dead with fright. They are very superstitious here, as in all Cornouaille. A writer says, "every nation of the earth has its superstitions and absurdities, but Brittany has those of all other nations united." An old woman in a village hard by, said our driver, has never been seen inside the walls of a church; the people say she has sold herself to the evil one, and no one dares go near or speak to her.

On the left is the pretty steeple of the church of Plogoff, situated on an eminence, and dedicated to Saint Collédoc, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century, contemporary of King Arthur, and associated with many of the doings of Queen Guinevre and the knights of the Round Table. Lescoff is the last village we passed through before—after driving over a barren plain—we arrived at the lighthouse, built thirty years back at the Pointe.

We walked thence to the Pointe, a gigantic and magnificent mass of rocks, eighty feet above the level of the sea. We met with a good-natured woman, who led the young people over the rocks to look down the "Enfer de Plogoff." They had a slippery scramble to reach the hole, a kind of tunnel through which the sea rushes with great violence, so much more terrible than that of Penmarch, that the noise has been compared to the distant roaring of some thousands of wild beasts issuing from the depths of a forest. In the mean time, we remained seated on the bank enjoying the view. On the south lay the Bay of Audierne, extending in the form of a crescent, the promontories of Penmarch and Raz forming the extreme points. The currents, and the numerous rocks of the bay, render it a dangerous coast, formerly peopled by barbarous wreckers, who despoiled the shipwrecked mariners as our Cornish men of old. Opposite the Raz, about seven miles distant, is the Island of Sein, and to the right, the Baie des Trépassés. The island of Sein was anciently the seat of an oracle, interpreted by nine Druidesses, who were versed in every art and science. Moreover, they appear to have been accomplished needlewomen; for a Breton chronicler, giving an account of the coronation of an early king (Erech) at Nantes, describes his mantle as embroidered by these priestesses with figures of Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music. Their skill in divination caused them to be associated with the fairies; and Morgan—_i.e._ "born of the sea"—one of these priestesses, who lived in the first century of the Christian era, was famous among the British fairies.

“Avec succès cultivait la magie, Morgan de plus, était assez jolie.”

Chateaubriand celebrates Velleda, the last of the Druidesses of Sein, tall in stature, her eyes blue, with long fair floating hair, dressed in a short black tunic, without sleeves, bearing a golden sickle suspended from a brazen girdle, and crowned with a branch of oak. Here King Arthur was brought by Merlin to recover of his wounds. The inhabitants of the island were celebrated for their ferocity as wreckers.

The passage between the island and the point or Bec du Raz—"qu’aucun n’a passé sans mal ou sans crainte"—is very dangerous, owing to the number of rocks and the violence of the currents; hence the well-known prayer of the Breton sailor, "Mon Dieu, secourez-moi pour traverser le Raz, car mon navire est petit et la mer est grande." Having no wish to run the risk of being detained at the island by rough weather, we did not attempt the passage.

The Baie des Trépassés, over which we looked on the right, is so called from the Celtic legend that the Druids embarked in this bay after their death, to be buried in the island of Sein:—

“Autrefois, un esprit venait, d’une voix forte; Appeler chaque nuit un pêcheur sur sa porte; Arrivé dans la baie, on trouvait un bateau Si lourd et si chargé de morts qu’il faisait eau, Et pourtant il fallait, malgré vent et marée, Les mener jusqu’à Sein, jusqu’à l’île sacrée.” BRIZEUX.

The bay also derives its name from the numerous shipwrecks that have taken place on its rocks, and from the number of corpses that have been floated there by the currents from ships foundered in the gulf comprised between the entrance of Brest, the Ouëssant Islands, and Sein. The whole extent of the coast of Brittany is one long wall of rocks, placed as it were to protect it from the inroads of the sea and from foreign invasion. Heaped one over the other, they resemble the bastions of a citadel, the advanced rocks extending out to sea, jutting up in every direction in endless reefs. Or its line of coast may be compared to the jagged teeth of a comb, with a second line of defence in the rocks further out to sea.

On the desolate shore of the Baie des Trépassés is a piece of water, the étang de Laoual, site of the city of Is—submerged by Divine vengeance, according to popular tradition, in the fifth century—a place of great commerce, arts, riches, and also of luxury. Gradlon, or Grallo, the king, alone attempted to stem the torrent. Built in the vast basin which now forms the Bay of Douarnenez, it was protected from the ocean by a strong dyke, the sluices only admitting sufficient water to supply the town. King Gradlon kept the silver key (which opened, at the same time, the great sluice and the city gates) suspended round his neck. His palace was of marble, cedar, and gold; in the midst of a brilliant Court sat enthroned his daughter Dahut, a princess who "had made a crown of her vices, and had taken for her pages the seven capital sins." Taking advantage of the sleep of her father, Dahut one night stole the silver key, and instead of opening the city gate, by mistake unlocked the sluices. The King was awakened by St. Guenolé, who commanded him to flee, as the torrent was reaching the palace. He mounted his horse, taking his worthless daughter behind him. The torrent was gaining upon him fast, when a voice from behind called out, "Throw the demon thou carriest into the sea, if thou dost not desire to perish." Dahut felt her strength failing her; the hands that convulsively grasped her father’s waist relaxed their hold; she rolled into the water, disappeared, and the torrent immediately stopped its course. The King reached Quimper safe and sound, and that town became afterwards the capital of Cornouaille.