CHAPTER XIV.

SOUTH OF THE LOIRE

The estuary of the Loire belongs both to Brittany and to the Vendee, though, as a matter-of-fact, the southern bank, opposite Nantes, formed a part of the ancient Pays de Retz, one of the old seigneuries of Bretagne.

It was Henri de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, who was the bitter rival of Mazarin. French historians have told us that when the regency under Anne of Austria began, Mazarin, who had been secretary to the terrible Richelieu, was just coming into his power. He was a subtle, insidious Italian, plodding and patient, but false as a spring-time rainbow. Gondi was bold, liberal, and independent, a mover of men and one able to take advantage of any turn of the wind, a statesman, and a great reformer,--or he would have been had he but full power. It was Cromwell who said that De Retz was the only man in Europe who saw through his plans.

Gondi had entered the church, but he had no talents for it. His life was free, too free even for the times, it would appear, for, though he was ordained cardinal, it was impossible for him to supplant Mazarin in the good graces of the court. As he himself had said that he preferred to be a great leader of a party rather than a partisan of royalty, he was perhaps not so very greatly disappointed that he was not able to supplant the wily Italian successor of Richelieu in the favour of the queen regent. Gondi was able to control the parliament, however, and, for a time, it was unable to carry through anything against his will. Mazarin rose to power at last, barricaded the streets of Paris, and decided to exile Gondi--as being the too popular hero of the people. Gondi knew of the edict, but stuck out to the last, saying: "To-morrow, I, Henri de Gondi, before midday, will be master of Paris." Noon came, and he _was_ master of Paris, but as he was still Archbishop-Coadjutor of Paris his hands were tied in more ways than one, and the plot for his supremacy over Mazarin, "the plunderer," fell through.

The whole neighbouring region south of the Loire opposite Nantes, the ancient Pays de Retz, is unfamiliar to tourists in general, and for that reason it has an unexpected if not a superlative charm. It was the bloodiest of the battle-grounds of the Vendean wars, and, though its monumental remains are not as numerous or as imposingly beautiful as those in many other parts, there is an interest about it all which is as undying as is that of the most ornate or magnificent chateau or fortress-peopled land that ever existed.

Not a corner of this land but has seen bloody warfare in all its grimness and horror, from the days when Clisson was pillaged by the Normans in the ninth century, to the guerilla warfare of the Vendean republicans in the eighteenth century. The advent of the railway has changed much of the aspect of this region and brought a twentieth-century civilization up to the very walls of the ruins of Clisson and Maulevrier, the latter one of the many chateaux of this region which were ruined by the wars of Stofflet, who, at the head of the insurgents, obliged the nobility to follow the peasants in their uprising.

Now and then, in these parts, one comes upon a short length of railway line not unlike that at which our forefathers marvelled. The line may be of narrow gauge or it may not, but almost invariably the two or three so-called carriages are constructed in the style (or lack of style) of the old stage-coach, and they roll along in much the same lumbering fashion. The locomotive itself is a thing to be wondered at. It is a pigmy in size, but it makes the commotion of a modern decapod, or one of those great flyers which pull the Southern Express on the main line via Poitiers and Angouleme, not fifty kilometres away.

There is a little tract of land lying just south of the Loire below Angers which is known as "le Bocage Vendeen." One leaves the Loire at Chalonnes and, by a series of gentle inclines, reaches the plateau where sits the town of Cholet, the very centre of the region, and a town whose almost only industry is the manufacture of pocket-handkerchiefs.

The aspect of the Loire has changed rapidly and given way to a more vigorous and varied topography; but, for all that, Cholet and the surrounding country depend entirely upon the great towns of the Loire for their intercourse with the still greater markets beyond. Like Angers, Cholet and all the neighbouring villages are slate-roofed, with only an occasional red tile to give variety to the otherwise gray and sombre outlook.

_En route_ from Chalonnes one passes Chemille almost the only market-town of any size in the district. It is very curious, with its Romanesque church and its old houses distributed around an amphitheatre, like the _loges_ in an opera-house.

This is the very centre of the Bocage, where, in Revolutionary times, the Republican armies so frequently fought with the bands of Vendean fanatics.

The houses of Cholet are well built, but always with that grayness and sadness of tone which does not contribute to either brilliancy of aspect or gaiety of disposition. Save the grand street which traverses the town from east to west, the streets are narrow and uncomfortable; but to make up for all this there are hotels and cafes as attractive and as comfortable as any establishments of the kind to be found in any of the smaller cities of provincial France.

The handkerchief industry is very considerable, no less than six great establishments devoting themselves to the manufacture.

Cholet is one of the greatest cattle markets, if not the greatest, in the land. The farmers of the surrounding country buy _boeufs maigres_ in the southwest and centre of France and transform them into good fat cattle which in every way rival what is known in England as "best English." This is accomplished cheaply and readily by feeding them with cabbage stalks.

On Saturdays, on the Champ de Foire, the aspect is most animated, and any painter who is desirous of emulating Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" (painted at the great cattle market of Bernay, in Normandy) cannot find a better vantage-ground than here, for one may see gathered together nearly all the cattle types of Poitou, the Vendee, Anjou, Bas Maine, and of Bretagne Nantaise.

In earlier days Cholet was far more sad than it is to-day; but there remain practically no souvenirs of its past. The wars of the Vendee left, it is said, but three houses standing when the riot and bloodshed was over. Two of the greatest battles of this furious struggle were fought here.

On the site of the present railroad station Kleber and Moreau fought the royalists, and the heroic Bonchamps received the wound of which he died at St. Florent, just after he had put into execution the order of release for five thousand Republican prisoners. This was on the 17th October, 1793. Five months later Stofflet possessed himself of the town and burned it nearly to the ground. Not much is left to remind one of these eventful times, save the public garden, which was built on the site of the old chateau.

La Moine, a tiny and most picturesque river, still flows under the antique arches of the old bridge, which was held in turn by the Vendeans and the Republicans.

To the west of Cholet runs another line of railway, direct through the heart of the Sevre-Nantaise, one of those _petits pays_ whose old-time identity is now all but lost, even more celebrated in bloody annals than is that region lying to the eastward. Here was a country entirely sacked and impoverished. Mortagne was completely ruined, though it has yet left substantial remains of its fourteenth and fifteenth century chateau. Torfou was the scene of a bloody encounter between the Vendean hordes and Kleber's two thousand _heroiques de Mayence_. The able Vendean chiefs who opposed him, Bonchamps, D'Elbee, and Lescure, captured his artillery and massacred all the wounded.

At the extremity of this line was the stronghold of Clisson, which itself finally succumbed, but later gave birth to a new town to take the place of that which perished in the Vendean convulsion.

Throughout this region, in the valleys of the Moine and the Sevre-Nantaise, the rocks and the verdure and the admirable, though ill preserved, ruins, all combine to produce as unworldly an atmosphere as it is possible to conceive within a short half-hundred kilometres of the busy world-port of Nantes and the great commercial city of Angers. One continually meets with ruins that recall the frightful struggle of Revolutionary times; hence the impression that one gets from a ramble through or about this region is well-nigh unique in all France.

The coast southward, nearly to La Rochelle, is a vast series of shallow gulfs and salt marshes which form weirdly wonderful outlooks for the painter who inclines to vast expanses of sea and sky.

Pornic is a remarkably picturesque little seaside village, where the inflowing and outflowing tides of the Bay of Biscay temper the southern sun and make of it--or would make of it if the tide of fashion had but set that way--a watering-place of the first rank.

It is an entrancing bit of coast-line which extends for a matter of fifty kilometres south of the juncture of the Loire with the ocean, with an aspect at times severe with a waste of sand, and again gracious with verdure and tree-clad and rocky shores.

The great Bay of Bourgneuf and its enfolding peninsula of Noirmoutier form an artist's sketching-ground that is not yet overrun with mere dabblers in paint and pencil, and is accordingly charming.

The Bay of Bourgneuf has most of the characteristics of the Morbihan, without that severity and sternness which impress one so deeply when on the shores of the great Breton inland sea.

The little town of Bourgneuf-en-Retz, with its little port of Colletis, is by no means a city of any artistic worth; indeed it is nearly bare of most of those things which attract travellers who are lovers of old or historic shrines; but it is a delightful stopping-place for all that, provided one does not want to go farther afield, to the very tip of the Vendean "land's end" at Noirmoutier across the bay.

Three times a day a steamer makes the journey to the little island town which is a favourite place of pilgrimage for the Nantais during the summer months. Once it was not even an island, but a peninsula, and not so very long ago either. The alluvial deposits of the Loire made it in the first place, and the sea, backing in from the north, made a strait which just barely separates it to-day from the mainland.

On this out-of-the-way little island there are still some remains of prehistoric monuments, the dolmen of Chiron-Tardiveau, the menhirs of Pinaizeaux and Pierre-Levee, and some others. In the speech of the inhabitants the isle is known as Noirmoutier, a contraction of "_Nigrum Monasterium_," a name derived from the monastery founded here in the seventh century by St. Philibert.

In the town is an old chateau, the ancient fortress-refuge of the Abbe of Her. It is a great square structure flanked at the angles with little towers, of which two are roofed, one uncovered, and the fourth surmounted by a heliograph for communicating with the Ile de Yeu and the Pointe de Chenoulin. The view from the heights of these chateau towers is fascinating beyond compare, particularly at sundown on a summer's evening, when the golden rays of the sinking sun burnish the coast of the Vendee and cast lingering shadows from the roof-tops and walls of the town below. To the northwest one sees the Ilot du Pilier, with its lighthouse and its tiny coast-guard fortress; to the north is clearly seen Pornic and the neighbouring coasts of the Pays de Retz and of Bouin with its encircling dikes,--all reminiscent of a little Holland. To the south is the narrow neck of Fromentin, the jagged Marguerites, which lift their fangs wholly above the surface of the sea only at low water, and the towering cliffs of the Ile de Yeu, which rise above the mists.

Just south of the Loire, between Nantes and Bourgneuf, is the Lac de Grand-Lieu, in connection with which one may hear a new rendering of an old legend. At one time, it is said, it was bordered by a city, whose inhabitants, for their vices, brought down the vengeance of heaven upon them, even though they cried out to the powers on high to avert the threatened flood which rose up out of the lake and overflowed the banks and swallowed the city and all evidences of its past. In this last lies the flaw in the legend; but, like the history of Sodom, of the Ville d'Ys in Bretagne, and of Ars in Dauphine, tradition has kept it alive.

This wicked place of the Loire valley was called _Herbauge_ or _Herbadilla_, and, from St. Philibert at the southern extremity of the lake, one looks out to-day on a considerable extent of shallow water, which is as murderous-looking and as uncanny as a swamp of the Everglades.

From the central basin flow two tiny rivers, the Ognon and the Boulogne, which are charming enough in their way, as also is the route by highroad from Nantes, but the gray monotonous lake, across which the wind whistles in a veritable tempest for more than six months of the year, is most depressing.

There are various hamlets, with some pretence at advanced civilization about them, scattered around the borders of the lake, St. Leger, St. Mars, St. Aignan, St. Lumine, Bouaye, and La Chevroliere; but in the whole number you will not get a daily paper that is less than forty-eight hours old, and nothing but the most stale news of happenings in the outside world ever dribbles through. St. Philibert is the metropolis of these parts, and it has no competitors for the honour.

At the entrance of the Ognon is the little village of Passay, built at the foot of a low cliff which dominates all this part of the lake. It is a picturesque little village of low houses and red roofs, with a little sandy beach in the foreground, through which little rivulets of soft water trickle and go to make up the greater body.