QUIMPERLÉ
Quimperlé is known as the Arcadia of Basse Bretagne, and certainly the
name is well deserved. I have never seen a town so full of trees and
trailing plants and gardens. Every wall is green with moss and gay
with masses of convolvulus and nasturtium. Flowers grow rampant in
Quimperlé, and overrun their boundaries. Every window-sill has its row
of pink ivy-leafed geraniums, climbing down and over the gray stone
wall beneath; every wall has its wreaths of trailing flowers.
There are flights of steps everywhere--favourite caprices of the
primitive architects--divided in the middle by iron railings. Up these
steps all the housewives must go to reach the market. On either side
the houses crowd, one above the other, with their steep garden walls,
sometimes intercepted by iron gateways, and sometimes covered by
blood-red leaves and yellowing vines. Some are houses of the Middle
Ages, and some of the Renaissance period, with sculptured porches and
panes of bottle-glass; a few have terraces at the end of the gardens,
over which clematis climbs. Here and there the sun lights up a corner
of a façade, or shines on the emerald leaves, making them scintillate.
Down the steps a girl in white-winged cap and snowy apron, with pink
ribbon at her neck, carrying a large black two-handled basket, is
coming on her way from market.
Having scaled this long flight of steps, you find yourself face to
face with the old Gothic church of St. Michael, a grayish-pink
building with one great square tower and four turrets. The porch is
sculptured in a rich profusion of graceful details. Here and there
yellow moss grows, and there are clusters of fern in the niches.
Inside, the church was suffused with a purple light shed by the sun
through the stained-glass windows; the ceiling was of infinite blue.
Everything was transformed by the strange purple light. The beautiful
carving round the walls, the host of straight-backed praying-chairs,
and even the green curtain of the confessional boxes, were changed to
royal purple. Only the altar, with its snowy-white cloths and red and
gold ornaments, retained its colour. Jutting forth from the church of
St. Michael are arms or branches connecting it with the village, as
if it were some mother bird protecting the young ones beneath her
wings. Under these wings the houses of the village cluster.
It is five o'clock in the afternoon, the sociable hour, when people
sit outside their cottage doors, knitting, gossiping, watching the
children play, and eating the evening meal. Most of the children, who
are many, are very nearly of the same age. Clusters of fair curly
heads are seen in the road. The youngest, the baby, is generally held
by some old woman, probably the grandmother, who has a shrivelled
yellow face--a very tender guardian.
Over the doorways of the shops hang branches of withered mistletoe.
Through the long low windows, which have broad sills, you catch a
glimpse of rows and rows of bottles. These are wine-shops--no rarities
in a Breton village. Another shop evidently belonged to the church at
one time. It still possesses a rounded ecclesiastical doorway, built
of solid blocks of stone, and the walls, which were white originally,
are stained green with age. The windows, as high as your waist from
the ground, have broad stone sills, on which are arranged carrots and
onions, coloured sweets in bottles, and packets of tobacco. This shop
evidently supplies everything that a human being can desire. Above it
you read: 'Café on sert a boire et a manger.'
While we were in Quimperlé there were two musicians making a round of
the town. One, with a swarthy face, was blind, and sang a weird song
in a minor key, beating a triangle. The other, who looked an Italian,
was raggedly dressed in an old fur coat and a faded felt hat. His
musical performance was a veritable gymnastic feat. In his hands he
held a large concertina, which he played most cleverly; at his back
was a drum with automatic sticks and clappers, which he worked with
his feet. It was the kind of music one hears at fairs. Wherever we
went we heard it, sometimes so near that we could catch the tune,
sometimes at a distance, when only the dull boom of the drum was
distinguishable.
Whenever I think of Quimperlé this strange music and the spectacle of
those two picturesque figures come back to memory. The men are well
known in Brittany. They spend their lives travelling from place to
place, earning a hard livelihood. When I was at school in Quimper I
used to hear the same tune played by the same men outside the convent
walls.
[Illustration: THE BLIND PIPER]
Quimperlé is a sleepy place, changing very little with the years. In
spite of the up-to-date railway-station, moss still grows between the
pavings of the streets. The houses have still their picturesque wooden
gables; the gardens are laden with fruit-trees; the hills are rich in
colour. Flowers that love the damp grow luxuriantly. It is an arcadian
country. The place is hostile to work. In this tranquil town, almost
voluptuous in its richness of colour and balminess of atmosphere, you
lose yourself in laziness. There is not a discordant note, nothing to
shock the eye or grate on the senses. Far from the noise of Paris, the
stuffy air of the boulevards, the never-ending rattle of the fiacres,
and the rasping cries of the camelot, you forget the seething world
outside.
In the Rue du Château, the aristocratic quarter, are many spacious
domains with doorways surmounted by coats of arms and coronets. Most
of them have closed shutters, their masters having disappeared,
alienated for ever by the Revolution; but a few great families have
returned to their homes. One sees many women about the church, grave
and sad and prayerful, who still wear black, clinging to God, the
saints, and the priests, as to the only living souvenirs of better
times.
In no other place in Finistère was the Revolution so sudden and so
terrible as in this little town, and nowhere were the nobility so many
and powerful. This old Rue du Château must have rung with furious
cries on the day when the federators returned from the fête of the
Champs de Mars after the abolition of all titles and the people took
the law into their own hands. The Bretons are slow to anger; but when
roused they are extremely violent. They not only attacked the
living--the nobles in their seignorial hotels--but also they went to
the tombs and mutilated the dead with sabre cuts.
In Quimperlé the painter finds pictures at every turn. For example,
there are clear sinuous streams crossed by many bridges, not unlike
by-canals in Venice. As you look up the river the bank is a jumble of
sloping roofs, protruding balconies, single-arched bridges, trees, and
clumps of greenery. The houses on either side, gray and turreted,
bathe their foundations in the stream. Some have steep garden walls,
velvety with green and yellow moss and lichen; others have terraces
and jutting stone balconies, almost smothered by trailing vines and
clematis, drooping over the gray water. The stream is very shallow,
showing clearly the brown and golden bed; and on low stone benches at
the edge girls in little close white caps and blue aprons are busily
washing with bare round arms. A pretty little maid with jet-black hair
is cleaning some pink stuff on a great slab of stone, against a
background of gray wall over which convolvulus and nasturtium are
trailing; a string of white linen is suspended above her head. This is
a delightful picture. It is a gray day, sunless; but the gray is
luminous, and the reflections in the water are clear.
[Illustration: AT THE FOIRE]