Читать книгу Rambles in Brittany - M. F. Mansfield - Страница 5

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ONE reason for the diversified interests of France and the varying methods of life is the vastly diversified topographical features. “Great plains as large as three Irelands,” said Hamerton, “and yet mountainous districts quite as large as the whole of the British Isles.” This should have served to disabuse British travellers of some false notions regarding France, but many of them still hold to the views which are to be gained by railway journeys across the lowlands of Gaul, forgetting for a moment that well within the confines of France there are fifty mountain peaks above eleven thousand feet high, and that majestic Mont Blanc itself rises on French soil.

Then there are the two thousand miles of seacoast which introduce another element of the population, from the dark-skinned sailor of the Mediterranean to his brother of Finistère, who is brought into the world chiefly to recruit the French navy. The Norman sailorman is a hardy, intrepid navigator even to-day, but he is to a great extent of the longshore and fishing-boat variety, whereas the true Breton is a sailor through and through.

Before now, Brittany has been compared, disparagingly, with Provence, and with some justness perhaps. Provence, however, does not persistently broil under a “fierce, dry heat,” and Brittany is not by any means “a wind and wave swept land, where nothing nourishes itself or grows fat.” Potatoes are even fattening, and Brittany, in all conscience, grows enough of that useful commodity to feed all France. In three things Brittany and Provence more than a little resemble one another. Both preserve, to a very remarkable extent, their ancient language and their old-time manners and customs, though in all three they are quite different one from the other.

The general topographical aspect of the coast of the whole Breton peninsula is stern and wild, whether one encounters the dreary waste of sand, in the midst of which sit Mont St. Michel and Tombelaine, or the cliffs away to the westward, or the bleak and barren Belle Ile en Mer, where Fouquet built his famous stronghold.

On the “Emerald Coast” the sea and sky are often of a true Neapolitan clearness, and, indeed, the climate of the whole peninsula is, even in winter, as mild as many a popularly fashionable Mediterranean resort; but it is not always so bright and sunny; there is a deal of rain in winter, and often a penetrating dampness, whose only brother is the genuine Scotch mist.

Still, in all but four months of the year, there is a brilliancy and softness about the climate of the coast of Brittany which encourages violets, roses, onions, and potatoes to come to maturity at so early a date that the Londoner has ceased to raise the question as to whether or not they may be “best English,” when he sees these products laid out of an early morning in his beloved Covent Garden.

To know a country or its people at its best, one should really take one of its great men for a guide. Hear then what Chateaubriand says of “La Terre Bretonne”:

“This long peninsula, of a wild and savage aspect, has much of singularity about it: its narrow valleys, its non-navigable rivers bathing the feet of its ruined castle-keeps and châteaux, its old abbeys, its thatch-covered houses, and its cattle herded together in its arid pastures. One valley is separated from another by forests of oak, with holly bushes as large as beech-trees, and druidical stones around which sea-birds are for ever circling.

“Of an imagination lively, but nevertheless melancholic, of a humour as flexible as their character is obstinate, the Bretons are distinguished for their piety, and none the less for their bravery, their fidelity, their spirit of independence, and their patriotism. Proud and susceptible, but without ambition and little suited to the affairs of court or state, they care nothing for honours or for rank.”

The picture is not very vivid, but it is wonderfully true, and of this one meets continual evidence in a journey around the coast, from the Bay of St. Michel in the north to Belle Ile or Nantes in the south.

No part of France has a physiognomy more original than Bretagne; none has been marked by nature in a more emphatic manner than this ancient home of the Celts.

“...la terre du granit

Et de l’immense et morne lande.”

It is indeed a land of contrasts, where ancient, mystical, and weird menhirs and dolmens, relics of prehistoric times, are mingled with mediæval monuments and modern forts, arsenals, and viaducts.

The country is by no means unlovely, but it partakes of none of the conventional beauties of other parts. It is not sterile, though it is stern; it is not very fertile, but its product is ample; and it stands as the most westerly point of the mainland of Northern Europe, open to all the wild buffetings of the tempestuous Atlantic which has sculptured its coast-line into such fantastic forms that a shipwrecked mariner must think himself fallen upon the most stern and rock-bound of coasts.

The general aspect of Brittany is green and gray. It is, as the Breton himself says, an austere heath,—the country-side half-effaced in demi-tints, and the sea boisterous and wicked.

This, however, is only one of its moods; to-morrow it may be as brilliantly sunlit as the Bay of Naples, and may have a sea and sky of gold and turquoise. But this mood passes quickly, and again it settles down to a misty softness and mildness of climate that has given its name to one of the five great climatic divisions of France, the Armorican.

The sunsets of Brittany are always glorious. Nowhere on the rim of great ocean’s mirror are there more splendid and grandly scenic effects to be observed. An exceedingly realistic Frenchman once described a sunset in the Bay of Douarnenez as a “bloody apotheosis,” the real aspect of which is readily inferred. Of this Breton Cornouaille, Béranger sang:

“Faisons honte aux hirondelles.

Tu croiras, sur nos essieux,

Que la terre a pris des ailes

Pour passer devant les yeux.”

The country inland is as original as the coast, and both the peasant on shore and the sailor on the sea are Breton to the core. Never has Brittany been called charming or gracious, never lovely or sweet, but always cold, though not so in climate, which is always terrible and austere.

But, for all that, it is delightful, and when one has tired of the stupid gaieties of Switzerland or the Rhine, let him rough it a bit among the low hills and valleys of the Côtes du Nord, or the rocky promontories and inlets of Finistère, or, on the south coast between Quimper and Nantes, on one of those little tidal rivers such as the Aven, and let him learn for himself that there is something new under the sun, even on well-trodden ground.

Truth to tell, Brittany is not nearly so well known to English-speaking folk as it should be. There is a fringe of semi-invalid, semi-society loiterers centred around St. Malo, and enlivened in the summer months by the advent of a little world of literary and artistic folk from Paris. Then there is an artist colony or two in Lower Brittany, where the visitors work hard, dress uncouthly, and live cheaply for four or five months of the year. At Nantes there is the overflow of tourists of convention from the châteaux district of Touraine, and up and down the length and breadth of Brittany, from Mont St. Michel to St. Nazaire, and from Dol to Brest, are to be found occasional wanderers on bicycles or in motor-cars.

The great mass, however, is herded around the conventionally “gay” five o’clock resorts of Dinard, Paramé, and St. Malo, and in by far the greater area of the province the seeker for pleasure and true edification is far more rare than is popularly supposed. The occasional rather wretched hotel has hitherto kept the fastidious away, and the terrific hobnails of the Breton wooden shoe have all but driven travellers in motor-cars and bicycle riders to despair. Both these deterrents, real and fancied, are disappearing, however. The hygienic bedrooms of the Touring Club are found here and there, and the peasants, or, at least, some of them, now wear a sort of cast-iron sole apparently clamped or riveted to the wooden shoe; at least there are no big, pointed, mushroom-headed tacks to drop out, point uppermost, in dry weather.

The topographical aspect of Brittany is largely due to the two great zones of granite formation which come together at their western extremities,—the mountains of Alençon and the jutting rocks that come to the surface from Poitou northward.

In general, the whole aspect of Brittany echoes the words of Brizeaux, the Lorient poet:

“O terre de granit, recouverte de chênes.”

One would hardly call Brittany mountainous, but its elevations are notable, nevertheless, in that they rise, for the most part, abruptly from the dead level of the ocean. Inland, the topography takes on more of the nature of a rolling moorland, with granite cropping out here and there in the elevations. The following quatrain describes it exactly:

“À MON PAYS

“O ma chère Bretagne,

Que j’aime tes halliers,

Tes verdoyants graniers,

Et ta noire montagne.”

—Corbinais.

The greatest altitudes in Brittany are: The Sillon de Bretagne (near Savenay), eighty-nine metres; La Motte (Montagnes Noires between Quimper and Brest), 289 metres; Menez Hom (Montagnes Noires), 330 metres; Mont St. Michel (Montagne d’Arrée), 391 metres.

The Breton rivers are not great rivers as the waterways of the world go, although they are important indeed to the country which they irrigate. Chief among them are the Vilaine, navigable to Rennes, the Rance, the Odet, the Aulne, and of course the Loire, which flanks the southern boundary of the old province nearly up to its juncture with the Mayenne, and continues its navigable length in Brittany up to, and a trifle beyond, the town of the same name. The Couesnon, flowing northward into the vast Bay of Mont St. Michel, forms the northeastern boundary separating Brittany from Normandy.

The great length of irregular coast-line accounts for the continuation of the generally severe and stern aspect of the interior, the sombre granite cliffs jutting far out into the open, half-enclosing great bays and forming promontories and headlands which are characteristically Breton and nothing else. They might resemble those of the Greek mainland and archipelago were they but environed with the life and languor of the South, but, as it is, they are Breton through and through, and their people have all their hopes and sympathies wrapped up in the occupations of a colder clime.

The old territorial limits of the Province of Brittany embraced a small tract south of the Loire, known as Le Rais, or the Retz country.

Here is Clisson, the feudal castle and estate so constantly recurring in French history. Pornic, Paimbœuf, and the Lac de Grande Lieu also lie southward of the Loire in this old appanage, but, in the main, Breton history was played on the Armorican peninsula north of the Loire.

The height of the tides on the Breton coast varies considerably. All this is caused by the flow of the North Sea and the Straits of Calais meeting the current coming directly from the Atlantic, so that in some instances the flood-tide rises to a height of from fifty to sixty feet above “dead water,” as the French call it.

The immense Bay of Mont St. Michel, at low water, is a stretch of bare sand more than three hundred square kilometres in extent, but it is completely covered and converted into a great tranquil gulf by the rising tide.

Croisic

At Croisic, at the mouth of the Loire, there is a 5.16 metre rise of the tide, which around the Breton coast-line varies as follows:

Port Navalo, Morbihan	4.72
Lorient	4.60
Concarneau	4.68
Douarnenez	6.16
Brest	6.42
Ouessant	6.38
Roscoff	8.22
Ile Brehat	9.90
St. Malo	11.44
Iles Chausey	11.74
Mont St. Michel	12.30

The aspect of the region round about Dol, in the north, is that of a little Holland, with its flats and windmills and its cultivated ground protected from the sea by a rim of downs and dikes. It is not so very great an expanse that follows these outlines, but the likeness is one to be remarked. To the westward lie the jutting rocks and capes, beyond which are the isolated islands of Ouessant and its fellows, and all around the coast extend landlocked bays and harbours sheltering the great fishing ports of Douarnenez and Concarneau and the commercial ports of St. Malo, Morlaix, Brest, Lorient, and Vannes.

From a military and strategic point of view the whole northwest coast of France, from the mouth of the Loire through Brittany and Normandy, is exceedingly well protected, with a great port and base of supplies both at Brest in Brittany and at Cherbourg in Normandy.

Forts Minden, Ville Martin, and Penthièvre, Port Louis, Lorient, and Brest, and the Forts du Pilier, Le Palais, Lacroix, Cezon, and Château du Taureau, with St. Malo and Fort des Rimains, protect the whole Breton seashore in practically unassailable fashion, though there are still the sea fights at Ouessant, in 1778 and 1794, and The Hogue in 1692, to say nothing of the land engagements at Quiberon in 1795, to remember.