A TALE OF
BRITTANY
[Illustration]
A TALE OF
BRITTANY
(MON FRÈRE YVES)
BY
PIERRE LOTI
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
W. P. BAINES
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Chapter LI
Chapter LII
Chapter LIII
Chapter LIV
Chapter LV
Chapter LVI
Chapter LVII
Chapter LVIII
Chapter LIX
Chapter LX
Chapter LXI
Chapter LXII
Chapter LXIII
Chapter LXIV
Chapter LXV
Chapter LXVI
Chapter LXVII
Chapter LXVIII
Chapter LXIX
Chapter LXX
Chapter LXXI
Chapter LXXII
Chapter LXXIII
Chapter LXXIV
Chapter LXXV
Chapter LXXVI
Chapter LXXVII
Chapter LXXVIII
Chapter LXXIX
Chapter LXXX
Chapter LXXXI
Chapter LXXXII
Chapter LXXXIII
Chapter LXXXIV
Chapter LXXXV
Chapter LXXXVI
Chapter LXXXVII
Chapter LXXXVIII
Chapter LXXXIX
Chapter XC
Chapter XCI
Chapter XCII
Chapter XCIII
Chapter XCIV
Chapter XCV
Chapter XCVI
Chapter XCVII
Chapter XCVIII
Chapter XCIX
Chapter C
Chapter CI
Chapter CII
DEDICATION
To ALPHONSE DAUDET
Here is a little tale which I wish to dedicate to you. Accept it, I
pray, with my affection.
It has been urged against my books that there is always in them too much
of the trouble of love. This time there is only a little love and that
an honest love and it comes only towards the end.
It was you who gave me the idea of writing the life story of a sailor
and of putting into it the immense monotony of the sea.
It may be that this book will make me enemies, although I have touched
as lightly as possible on the regulations of the service. But you who
love everything connected with the sea, even the wind and the fog and
the great waves--yes, and the brave and simple sailors--you, assuredly,
will understand me. And in that I shall find my recompense.
PIERRE LOTI.
A TALE OF BRITTANY
CHAPTER I
The pay-book of my brother Yves differs in no wise from the pay-book of
all other sailors.
It is covered with a yellow-coloured parchment paper and, as it has
travelled much about the sea, in many a ship's locker, it is absolutely
wanting in freshness.
In large letters on the cover appears:
KERMADEC, 2091. P.
Kermadec is his family name; 2091, his number in the army of the sea;
and P., the initial letter of Paimpol, the port at which he was
enrolled.
Opening the book, one finds, on the first page, the following
description:
"Kermadec (Yves-Marie), son of Yves-Marie and Jeanne Danveoch. Born 28
August, 1851, at Saint Pol-de-Léon (Finistère). Height 5 ft. 11
inches. Hair brown, eyebrows brown, eyes brown, nose ordinary, chin
ordinary, forehead ordinary, face oval.
"Distinctive marks: tattooed on the left breast with an anchor and, on
the right wrist, with a bracelet in the form of a fish."
These tattooings were still the fashion, some ten years ago, for your
true sailor. Executed on board the _Flore_ by a friend in an hour of
idleness, they became an object of mortification for Yves, who many a
time had tortured himself in an effort to obliterate them. The idea that
he was marked in this indelible manner, and that he might be recognized
always and everywhere by these little blue designs was to him absolutely
insupportable.
Turning over the page one comes across a series of printed leaves
setting out, in a clear and concise form, all the shortcomings to which
sailors are subject, with, opposite them, the tariff of the penalties
incurred--from insignificant irregularities which may be expiated by a
few nights in irons to the dire rebellions which are punished by death.
Unhappily this quotidian reading has never sufficed to inspire the
salutary awe which it should, either in sailors in general, or in my
poor Yves in particular.
Follow several pages of manuscript containing the names of ships, with
blue stamp impressions, figures and dates. The quartermasters, men of
taste as they are, have decorated this part of the book with elegant
flourishes. It is here that particulars of his voyages are set out and
details of the pay he has received.
The first years, in which he earned fifteen francs a month, ten of which
he saved for his mother; years passed in the onrush of the wind, in
which he lived half naked at the top of those great oscillating shafts
which are the masts of ships; years in which he wandered without a care
in the world over the changing desert of the sea; then the more troubled
years in which love was born and took shape in the virgin and untutored
heart--to be translated into brutal orgies or into dreams naïvely pure
according to the hazard of the places to which the wind drove him,
according to the hazard of the women thrown into his arms; terrible
awakenings of the heart and senses, wild excesses, and then the return
to the ascetic life of the ocean, to the sequestration on the floating
monastery; all this may be divined behind these figures and these names
and dates which accumulate, year by year, in the poor little pay-book of
a sailor. A whole poem of strange adventures and sufferings lies within
its yellow pages.