France, especially in Brittany, still possesses certain towns completely
outside of the movement which gives to the nineteenth century its
peculiar characteristics. For lack of quick and regular communication
with Paris, scarcely connected by wretched roads with the
sub-prefecture, or the chief city of their own province, these towns
regard the new civilization as a spectacle to be gazed at; it amazes
them, but they never applaud it; and, whether they fear or scoff at it,
they continue faithful to the old manners and customs which have come
down to them. Whoso would travel as a moral archaeologist, observing men
instead of stones, would find images of the time of Louis XV. in many a
village of Provence, of the time of Louis XIV. in the depths of Pitou,
and of still more ancient times in the towns of Brittany. Most of these
towns have fallen from states of splendor never mentioned by historians,
who are always more concerned with facts and dates than with the truer
history of manners and customs. The tradition of this splendor still
lives in the memory of the people,--as in Brittany, where the native
character allows no forgetfulness of things which concern its own land.
Many of these towns were once the capitals of a little feudal State,--a
county or duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, if
the male line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads became
arms; and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate.
For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient times
are beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for the
masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of
which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan. Nowadays
we have _products_, we no longer have _works_. Public buildings,
monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of retrospection;
but the monuments of modern industry are freestone quarries, saltpetre
mines, cotton factories. A few more years and even these old cities will
be transformed and seen no more except in the pages of this iconography.
One of the towns in which may be found the most correct likeness of the
feudal ages is Guerande. The name alone awakens a thousand memories in
the minds of painters, artists, thinkers who have visited the slopes on
which this splendid jewel of feudality lies proudly posed to command the
flux and reflux of the tides and the dunes,--the summit, as it were,
of a triangle, at the corners of which are two other jewels not less
curious: Croisic, and the village of Batz. There are no towns after
Guerande except Vitre in the centre of Brittany, and Avignon in the
south of France, which preserve so intact, to the very middle of our
epoch, the type and form of the middle ages.
Guerande is still encircled with its doughty walls, its moats are
full of water, its battlements entire, its loopholes unencumbered with
vegetation; even ivy has never cast its mantle over the towers, square
or round. The town has three gates, where may be seen the rings of the
portcullises; it is entered by a drawbridge of iron-clamped wood, no
longer raised but which could be raised at will. The mayoralty was
blamed for having, in 1820, planted poplars along the banks of the moat
to shade the promenade. It excused itself on the ground that the long
and beautiful esplanade of the fortifications facing the dunes had been
converted one hundred years earlier into a mall where the inhabitants
took their pleasure beneath the elms.
The houses of the old town have suffered no change; and they have
neither increased nor diminished. None have suffered upon their frontage
from the hammer of the architect, the brush of the plasterer, nor have
they staggered under the weight of added stories. All retain their
primitive characteristics. Some rest on wooden columns which form
arcades under which foot-passengers circulate, the floor planks bending
beneath them, but never breaking. The houses of the merchants are small
and low; their fronts are veneered with slate. Wood, now decaying,
counts for much in the carved material of the window-casings and
the pillars, above which grotesque faces look down, while shapes of
fantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great thought
of Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature. These
relics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those dusky
tones and half-blurred features in which the artistic brush delights.
The streets are what they were four hundred years ago,--with one
exception; population no longer swarms there; the social movement is now
so dead that a traveller wishing to examine the town (as beautiful as
a suit of antique armor) may walk alone, not without sadness, through a
deserted street, where the mullioned windows are plastered up to avoid
the window-tax. This street ends at a postern, flanked with a wall of
masonry, beyond which rises a bouquet of trees planted by the hands
of Breton nature, one of the most luxuriant and fertile vegetations
in France. A painter, a poet would sit there silently, to taste the
quietude which reigns beneath the well-preserved arch of the postern,
where no voice comes from the life of the peaceful city, and where the
landscape is seen in its rich magnificence through the loop-holes of the
casemates once occupied by halberdiers and archers, which are not unlike
the sashes of some belvedere arranged for a point of view.
It is impossible to walk about the place without thinking at every step
of the habits and usages of long-past times; the very stones tell
of them; the ideas of the middle ages are still there with all their
ancient superstitions. If, by chance, a gendarme passes you, with his
silver-laced hat, his presence is an anachronism against which your
sense of fitness protests; but nothing is so rare as to meet a being or
an object of the present time. There is even very little of the clothing
of the day; and that little the inhabitants adapt in a way to their
immutable customs, their unchangeable physiognomies. The public square
is filled with Breton costumes, which artists flock to draw; these stand
out in wonderful relief upon the scene around them. The whiteness of the
linen worn by the _paludiers_ (the name given to men who gather salt in
the salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the blues and browns of the
peasantry and the original and sacredly preserved jewelry of the
women. These two classes, and that of the sailors in their jerkins and
varnished leather caps are as distinct from one another as the castes
of India, and still recognize the distance that parts them from the
bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the clergy. All lines are clearly marked;
there the revolutionary level found the masses too rugged and too hard
to plane; its instrument would have been notched, if not broken. The
character of immutability which science gives to zoological species is
found in Breton human nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830,
Guerande is still a town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic,
silent, self-contained,--a place where modern ideas have little access.
Its geographical position explains this phenomenon. The pretty town
overlooks a salt-marsh, the product of which is called throughout
Brittany the Guerande salt, to which many Bretons attribute the
excellence of their butter and their sardines. It is connected with
the rest of France by two roads only: that coming from Savenay, the
arrondissement to which it belongs, which stops at Saint-Nazaire; and a
second road, leading from Vannes, which connects it with the Morbihan.
The arrondissement road establishes communication by land, and from
Saint-Nazaire by water, with Nantes. The land road is used only by
government; the more rapid and more frequented way being by water from
Saint-Nazaire. Now, between this village and Guerande is a distance
of eighteen miles, which the mail-coach does not serve, and for good
reason; not three coach passengers a year would pass over it.
These, and other obstacles, little fitted to encourage travellers, still
exist. In the first place, government is slow in its proceedings;
and next, the inhabitants of the region put up readily enough with
difficulties which separate them from the rest of France. Guerande,
therefore, being at the extreme end of the continent, leads nowhere,
and no one comes there. Glad to be ignored, she thinks and cares about
herself only. The immense product of her salt-marshes, which pays a
tax of not less than a million to the Treasury, is chiefly managed at
Croisic, a peninsular village which communicates with Guerande over
quicksands, which efface during the night the tracks made by day, and
also by boats which cross the arm of the sea that makes the port of
Croisic.
This fascinating little town is therefore the Herculaneum of feudality,
less its winding sheet of lava. It is afoot, but not living; it has no
other ground of existence except that it has not been demolished. If
you reach Guerande from Croisic, after crossing a dreary landscape of
salt-marshes, you will experience a strong sensation at sight of that
vast fortification, which is still as good as ever. If you come to it by
Saint-Nazaire, the picturesqueness of its position and the naive
grace of its environs will please you no less. The country immediately
surrounding it is ravishing; the hedges are full of flowers,
honeysuckles, roses, box, and many enchanting plants. It is like an
English garden, designed by some great architect. This rich, coy nature,
so untrodden, with all the grace of a bunch of violets or a lily of the
valley in the glade of a forest, is framed by an African desert banked
by the ocean,--a desert without a tree, an herb, a bird; where, on sunny
days, the laboring _paludiers_, clothed in white and scattered among
those melancholy swamps where the salt is made, remind us of Arabs in
their burrows.
Thus Guerande bears no resemblance to any other place in France.
The town produces somewhat the same effect upon the mind as a
sleeping-draught upon the body. It is silent as Venice. There is no
other public conveyance than the springless wagon of a carrier
who carries travellers, merchandise, and occasionally letters from
Saint-Nazaire to Guerande and _vice versa_. Bernus, the carrier, was,
in 1829, the factotum of this large community. He went and came when he
pleased; all the country knew him; and he did the errands of all. The
arrival of a carriage in Guerande, that of a lady or some invalid going
to Croisic for sea-bathing (thought to have greater virtue among
those rocks than at Boulogne or Dieppe) is still an immense event. The
peasants come in on horseback, most of them with commodities for barter
in sacks. They are induced to do so (and so are the _paludiers_) by the
necessity of purchasing the jewels distinctive of their caste which
are given to all Breton brides, and the white linen, or cloth for their
clothing.
For a circuit ten miles round, Guerande is always GUERANDE,--the
illustrious town where the famous treaty was signed in 1365, the key
of the coast, which may boast, not less than the village of Batz, of
a splendor now lost in the night of time. The jewels, linen, cloth,
ribbon, and hats are made elsewhere, but to those who buy them they are
from Guerande and nowhere else. All artists, and even certain bourgeois,
who come to Guerande feel, as they do at Venice, a desire (soon
forgotten) to end their days amid its peace and silence, walking in fine
weather along the beautiful mall which surrounds the town from gate to
gate on the side toward the sea. Sometimes the image of this town arises
in the temple of memory; she enters, crowned with her towers, clasped
with her girdle; her flower-strewn robe floats onward, the golden mantle
of her dunes enfolds her, the fragrant breath of her briony paths,
filled with the flowers of each passing season, exhales at every step;
she fills your mind, she calls to you like some enchanting woman whom
you have met in other climes and whose presence still lingers in a fold
of your heart.
Near the church of Guerande stands a mansion which is to the town what
the town is to the region, an exact image of the past, the symbol of a
grand thing destroyed,--a poem, in short. This mansion belongs to the
noblest family of the province; to the du Guaisnics, who, in the times
of the du Guesclins, were as superior to the latter in antiquity and
fortune as the Trojans were to the Romans. The Guaisqlains (the name
is also spelled in the olden time du Glaicquin), from which comes du
Guesclin, issued from the du Guaisnics.
Old as the granite of Brittany, the Guaisnics are neither Frenchmen
nor Gauls,--they are Bretons; or, to be more exact, they are Celts.
Formerly, they must have been Druids, gathering mistletoe in the sacred
forests and sacrificing men upon their dolmens. Useless to say what they
were! To-day this race, equal to the Rohans without having deigned to
make themselves princes, a race which was powerful before the ancestors
of Hugues Capet were ever heard of, this family, pure of all alloy,
possesses two thousand francs a year, its mansion in Guerande, and the
little castle of Guaisnic. All the lands belonging to the barony of
Guaisnic, the first in Brittany, are pledged to farmers, and bring
in sixty thousand francs a year, in spite of ignorant culture. The du
Gaisnics remain the owners of these lands although they receive none of
the revenues, for the reason that for the last two hundred years they
have been unable to pay off the money advanced upon them. They are in
the position of the crown of France towards its _engagistes_ (tenants
of crown-lands) before the year 1789. Where and when could the barons
obtain the million their farmers have advanced to them? Before 1789 the
tenure of the fiefs subject to the castle of Guaisnic was still worth
fifty thousand francs a year; but a vote of the National Assembly
suppressed the seigneurs’ dues levied on inheritance.
In such a situation this family--of absolutely no account in France, and
which would be a subject of laughter in Paris, were it known there--is
to Guerande the whole of Brittany. In Guerande the Baron du Guaisnic
is one of the great barons of France, a man above whom there is but
one man,--the King of France, once elected ruler. To-day the name of du
Guaisnic, full of Breton significances (the roots of which will be found
explained in “The Chouans”) has been subjected to the same alteration
which disfigures that of du Guaisqlain. The tax-gatherer now writes the
name, as do the rest of the world, du Guenic.
At the end of a silent, damp, and gloomy lane may be seen the arch of
a door, or rather gate, high enough and wide enough to admit a man
on horseback,--a circumstance which proves of itself that when this
building was erected carriages did not exist. The arch, supported by two
jambs, is of granite. The gate, of oak, rugged as the bark of the tree
itself, is studded with enormous nails placed in geometric figures.
The arch is semicircular. On it are carved the arms of the Guaisnics
as clean-cut and clear as though the sculptor had just laid down his
chisel. This escutcheon would delight a lover of the heraldic art by a
simplicity which proves the pride and the antiquity of the family. It is
as it was in the days when the crusaders of the Christian world invented
these symbols by which to recognize each other; the Guaisnics have never
had it quartered; it is always itself, like that of the house of France,
which connoisseurs find inescutcheoned in the shields of many of the old
families. Here it is, such as you may see it still at Guerande: Gules,
a hand proper gonfaloned ermine, with a sword argent in pale, and the
terrible motto, FAC. Is not that a grand and noble thing? The circlet of
a baronial coronet surmounts this simple escutcheon, the vertical lines
of which, used in carving to represent gules, are clear as ever. The
artist has given I know not what proud, chivalrous turn to the hand.
With what vigor it holds the sword which served but recently the present
family!
If you go to Guerande after reading this history you cannot fail to
quiver when you see that blazon. Yes, the most confirmed republican
would be moved by the fidelity, the nobleness, the grandeur hidden in
the depths of that dark lane. The du Guaisnics did well yesterday, and
they are ready to do well to-morrow. To DO is the motto of chivalry.
“You did well in the battle” was the praise of the Connetable _par
excellence_, the great du Guesclin who drove the English for a time from
France. The depth of this carving, which has been protected from the
weather by the projecting edges of the arch, is in keeping with the
moral depth of the motto in the soul of this family. To those who know
the Guaisnics this fact is touching.
The gate when open gives a vista into a somewhat vast court-yard, on the
right of which are the stables, on the left the kitchen and offices.
The house is build of freestone from cellar to garret. The facade on the
court-yard has a portico with a double range of steps, the wall of which
is covered with vestiges of carvings now effaced by time, but in
which the eye of an antiquary can still make out in the centre of the
principal mass the Hand bearing the sword. The granite steps are now
disjointed, grasses have forced their way with little flowers and mosses
through the fissures between the stones which centuries have displaced
without however lessening their solidity. The door of the house must
have had a charming character. As far as the relics of the old designs
allow us to judge, it was done by an artist of the great Venetian school
of the thirteenth century. Here is a mixture, still visible, of the
Byzantine and the Saracenic. It is crowned with a circular pediment,
now wreathed with vegetation,--a bouquet, rose, brown, yellow, or blue,
according to the season. The door, of oak, nail-studded, gives entrance
to a noble hall, at the end of which is another door, opening upon
another portico which leads to the garden.
This hall is marvellously well preserved. The panelled wainscot, about
three feet high, is of chestnut. A magnificent Spanish leather with
figures in relief, the gilding now peeled off or reddened, covers the
walls. The ceiling is of wooden boards artistically joined and painted
and gilded. The gold is scarcely noticeable; it is in the same condition
as that of the Cordova leather, but a few red flowers and the green
foliage can be distinguished. Perhaps a thorough cleaning might bring
out paintings like those discovered on the plank ceilings of Tristan’s
house at Tours. If so, it would prove that those planks were placed or
restored in the reign of Louis XI. The chimney-piece is enormous, of
carved stone, and within it are gigantic andirons in wrought-iron of
precious workmanship. It could hold a cart-load of wood. The furniture
of this hall is wholly of oak, each article bearing upon it the arms of
the family. Three English guns equally suitable for chase or war, three
sabres, two game-bags, the utensils of a huntsman and a fisherman hang
from nails upon the wall.
On one side is a dining-room, which connects with the kitchen by a door
cut through a corner tower. This tower corresponds in the design of the
facade toward the court-yard with another tower at the opposite corner,
in which is a spiral staircase leading to the two upper stories.
The dining-room is hung with tapestries of the fourteenth century; the
style and the orthography of the inscription on the banderols beneath
each figure prove their age, but being, as they are, in the naive
language of the _fabliaux_, it is impossible to transcribe them here.
These tapestries, well preserved in those parts where light has scarcely
penetrated, are framed in bands of oak now black as ebony. The ceiling
has projecting rafters enriched with foliage which is varied for each
rafter; the space between them is filled with planks painted blue, on
which twine garlands of golden flowers. Two old buffers face each other;
on their shelves, rubbed with Breton persistency by Mariotte the cook,
can be seen, as in the days when kings were as poor in 1200 as the
du Guaisnics are in 1830, four old goblets, an ancient embossed
soup-tureen, and two salt-cellars, all of silver; also many pewter
plates and many pitchers of gray and blue pottery, bearing arabesque
designs and the arms of the du Guaisnics, covered by hinged pewter lids.
The chimney-piece is modernized. Its condition proves that the family
has lived in this room for the last century. It is of carved stone in
the style of the Louis XV. period, and is ornamented with a mirror, let
in to the back with gilt beaded moulding. This anachronism, to which the
family is indifferent, would grieve a poet. On the mantel-shelf, covered
with red velvet, is a tall clock of tortoise-shell inlaid with brass,
flanked on each side with a silver candelabrum of singular design. A
large square table, with solid legs, fills the centre of this room;
the chairs are of turned wood covered with tapestry. On a round table
supported by a single leg made in the shape of a vine-shoot, which
stands before a window looking into the garden, is a lamp of an odd
kind. This lamp has a common glass globe, about the size of an ostrich
egg, which is fastened into a candle-stick by a glass tube. Through a
hole at the top of the globe issues a wick which passes through a sort
of reed of brass, drawing the nut-oil held in the globe through its own
length coiled like a tape-worm in a surgeon’s phial. The windows which
look into the garden, like those that look upon the court-yard, are
mullioned in stone with hexagonal leaded panes, and are draped by
curtains, with heavy valances and stout cords, of an ancient stuff
of crimson silk with gold reflections, called in former days either
brocatelle or small brocade.
On each of the two upper stories of the house there are but two rooms.
The first is the bedroom of the head of the family, the second is that
of the children. Guests were lodged in chambers beneath the roof.
The servants slept above the kitchens and stables. The pointed roof,
protected with lead at its angles and edges, has a noble pointed window
on each side, one looking down upon the court-yard, the other on the
garden. These windows, rising almost to the level of the roof, have
slender, delicate casings, the carvings of which have crumbled under the
salty vapors of the atmosphere. Above the arch of each window with its
crossbars of stone, still grinds, as it turns, the vane of a noble.
Let us not forget a precious detail, full of naivete, which will be of
value in the eyes of an archaeologist. The tower in which the spiral
staircase goes up is placed at the corner of a great gable wall in which
there is no window. The staircase comes down to a little arched door,
opening upon a gravelled yard which separates the house from the
stables. This tower is repeated on the garden side by another of five
sides, ending in a cupola in which is a bell-turret, instead of being
roofed, like the sister-tower, with a pepper-pot. This is how those
charming architects varied the symmetry of their sky-lines. These
towers are connected on the level of the first floor by a stone gallery,
supported by what we must call brackets, each ending in a grotesque
human head. This gallery has a balustrade of exquisite workmanship. From
the gable above depends a stone dais like those that crown the statues
of saints at the portal of churches. Can you not see a woman walking in
the morning along this balcony and gazing over Guerande at the sunshine,
where it gilds the sands and shimmers on the breast of Ocean? Do you not
admire that gable wall flanked at its angles with those varied towers?
The opposite gable of the Guaisnic mansion adjoins the next house.
The harmony so carefully sought by the architects of those days is
maintained in the facade looking on the court-yard by the tower which
communicates between the dining-room and the kitchen, and is the same as
the staircase tower, except that it stops at the first upper story and
its summit is a small open dome, beneath which stands a now blackened
statue of Saint Calyste.
The garden is magnificent for so old a place. It covers half an acre of
ground, its walls are all espaliered, and the space within is divided
into squares for vegetables, bordered with cordons of fruit-trees, which
the man-of-all-work, named Gasselin, takes care of in the intervals of
grooming the horses. At the farther end of the garden is a grotto with
a seat in it; in the middle, a sun-dial; the paths are gravelled. The
facade on the garden side has no towers corresponding to those on the
court-yard; but a slender spiral column rises from the ground to the
roof, which must in former days have borne the banner of the family, for
at its summit may still be seen an iron socket, from which a few weak
plants are straggling. This detail, in harmony with the vestiges of
sculpture, proves to a practised eye that the mansion was built by a
Venetian architect. The graceful staff is like a signature revealing
Venice, chivalry, and the exquisite delicacy of the thirteenth century.
If any doubts remained on this point, a feature of the ornamentation
would dissipate them. The trefoils of the hotel du Guaisnic have four
leaves instead of three. This difference plainly indicates the Venetian
school depraved by its commerce with the East, where the semi-Saracenic
architects, careless of the great Catholic thought, give four leaves to
clover, while Christian art is faithful to the Trinity. In this respect
Venetian art becomes heretical.
If this ancient dwelling attracts your imagination, you may perhaps ask
yourself why such miracles of art are not renewed in the present day.
Because to-day mansions are sold, pulled down, and the ground they stood
on turned into streets. No one can be sure that the next generation will
possess the paternal dwelling; homes are no more than inns; whereas
in former times when a dwelling was built men worked, or thought they
worked, for a family in perpetuity. Hence the grandeur of these houses.
Faith in self, as well as faith in God, did prodigies.
As for the arrangement of the upper rooms they may be imagined after
this description of the ground-floor, and after reading an account of
the manners, customs, and physiognomy of the family. For the last fifty
years the du Guaisnics have received their friends in the two rooms just
described, in which, as in the court-yard and the external accessories
of the building, the spirit, grace, and candor of the old and noble
Brittany still survives. Without the topography and description of the
town, and without this minute depicting of the house, the surprising
figures of the family might be less understood. Therefore the frames
have preceded the portraits. Every one is aware that things influence
beings. There are public buildings whose effect is visible upon the
persons living in their neighborhood. It would be difficult indeed to be
irreligious in the shadow of a cathedral like that of Bourges. When the
soul is everywhere reminded of its destiny by surrounding images, it
is less easy to fail of it. Such was the thought of our immediate
grandfathers, abandoned by a generation which was soon to have no signs
and no distinctions, and whose manners and morals were to change every
decade. If you do not now expect to find the Baron du Guaisnic sword in
hand, all here written would be falsehood.