QUIMPER.
Quimper, although it is the centre of the real Brittany, is distinctly
different from it. The elm-tree promenade that follows the winding
river, which has quays and boats, renders the town very pretty and the
big Hôtel de la Préfecture, which alone covers the little western delta,
gives it a thoroughly administrative and French appearance. You are
aware that you are in the _chef-lieu_ of a department, a fact brought
home to you by the latter's division in _arrondissements_, with their
large, medium, and small parishes, its committee of primary instruction,
its saving banks, its town council and other modern inventions, which
rob the cities of local colour, dear to the heart of the innocent
tourist.
With all due deference to the people who pronounce the name of
Quimper-Corentin as the synonyme of all that is ridiculous and
provincial, it is a most delightful place, and well worth other more
respected ones. You will not, it is true, find the charms and riotous
wealth of colouring possessed by Quimperlé; still, I know of few things
that can equal the charming appearance of that alley following the edge
of the river and shaded by the escarpment of a neighbouring mountain,
which casts the dark shadows of its luxuriant foliage over it.
It does not take long to go through cities of this kind, and to know
their most intimate recesses, and sometimes one stumbles across places
that stay one's steps and fill one's heart with gladness.
Small cities, like small apartments, seem warmer and cosier to live in.
But keep this illusion! There are more draughts in such apartments than
in a palace, and a city of this kind is more deadly monotonous than the
desert.
Returning to the hotel by one of those paths we dearly love, that rises
and falls and winds, sometimes through a field, sometimes through grass
and brambles, sometimes along a wall, which are filled in turn with
daisies, pebbles and thistles, a path made for light thoughts and
bantering conversation,--returning, I said, to the city, we heard cries
and plaintive wails issue from under the slated roof of a square
building. It was the slaughter-house.
At that moment I thought of some terrible city, of some frightful and
immense place like Babylon or Babel, filled with cannibals and
slaughter-houses, where they butchered men instead of animals; and I
tried to discover a likeness to human agonies in those bleating and
sobbing voices. I thought of groups of slaves brought there with ropes
around their necks, to be tied to iron rings, and killed in order to
feed their masters, who would eat their flesh from tables of carved
ivory and wipe their lips on fine linen. Would their attitudes be more
dejected, their eyes sadder or their prayers more pitiful?
While we were in Quimper, we went out one day through one side of the
town and came back through the other, after tramping about eight hours.
Our guide was waiting for us under the porch of the hotel. He started in
front of us and we followed. He was a little white-haired man, with a
linen cap and torn shoes, and he wore an old brown coat that was many
sizes too large for him. He stuttered when he spoke, and when he walked
he knocked his knees together; but in spite of all this, he managed to
advance very quickly, with a sort of nervous, almost febrile
perseverance. From time to time, he would pull a leaf off a tree and
clap it over his mouth to cool his lips. His business consists in going
from one place to another, attending to letters and errands. He goes to
Douarnenez, Quimperlé, Brest and even to Rennes, which is forty miles
away (a journey which he accomplished in four days, including going and
coming). His whole ambition, he said, was to return to Rennes once more
during his lifetime. And only for the purpose, mind you, of going back,
of making the trip, and being able to boast of it afterwards. He knows
every road and every _commune_ that has a steeple; he takes short cuts
across the fields, opens gates, and when he passes in front of a farm,
he never fails to greet its owners. Having listened to the birds all his
life, he has learned to imitate their chirpings, and when he walks along
the roads, under the trees, he whistles as his feathered friends do, in
order to charm his solitude.
Our first stop was at Loc-Maria, an ancient monastery, given in olden
times by Conan III to the abbey of Fontevrault; it is situated a quarter
of a mile from the town. This monastery has not been shamefully utilised
like the abbey of poor Robert d'Arbrissel.[2] It is deserted, but has
not been sullied. Its Gothic portal does not re-echo the voices of
jailers, and though there may not be much of it, one experiences neither
disgust nor rebellion. In that little chapel, of a rather severe Romance
style, the only curious thing is a large granite holy-water basin which
stands on the floor and is almost black. It is wide and deep and
represents to perfection the real Catholic holy-water basin, made to
receive the entire body of an infant, and not in the least like those
narrow shells in our churches in which you can only dip your fingers.
With its clear water rendered more limpid by the contrast of a greenish
bed, the vegetation which has grown all around it during the religious
calm of centuries, its crumbling angles, and its great mass of bronzed
stone, it looks like one of those hollowed rocks which contain salt
water.
After we had inspected the chapel carefully, we walked to the river,
crossed it in a boat, and plunged into the country.
It is absolutely deserted and strangely empty. Trees, bushes, sea-rushes,
tamarisks, and heather grow on the edge of the ditches. We came to broad
stretches of land, but we did not see a soul anywhere. The sky was bleak
and a fine rain moistened the atmosphere and spread a grey veil over the
country. The paths we chose were hollow and shaded by clusters of
foliage, the branches of which, uniting, drooped over our heads and
almost prevented us from walking erect. The light that filtered through
the dome of leaves was greenish, and as dim as on a winter evening. But
farther away, it was brilliant, and played around the edges of the leaves
and accentuated their delicate pinking. Later we reached the top of a
barren slope, which was flat and smooth, and without a blade of grass to
relieve the monotony of its colour. Sometimes, however, we came upon a
long avenue of beech-trees with moss growing around the foot of their
thick, shining trunks. There were wagon-tracks in these avenues, as if
to indicate the presence of a neighbouring castle that we might see at
any moment; but they ended abruptly in a stretch of flat land that
continued between two valleys, through which it would spread its green
maze furrowed by the capricious meanderings of hedges, spotted here and
there by a grove, brightened by clumps of sea-rushes, or by some field
bordering the meadows which rose slowly to meet the hills and lost
themselves in the horizon. Above these hills, far away in the mist,
stretched the blue surface of the ocean.
The birds are either absent or they do not sing; the leaves are thick,
the grass deadens one's footfalls, and the country gazes at you like
some melancholy countenance. It looks as if it had been created
expressly to harbour ruined lives and shattered hopes, and to foster
their bitterness beneath its weeping sky, to the low rustling of the
trees and the heather. On winter nights, when the fox creeps stealthily
over the dry leaves, when the tiles fall from the pigeon-house and the
reeds bend in the marshes, when the beech-trees stoop in the wind, and
the wolf ambles over the moonlit snow, while one is alone by the dying
embers listening to the wind howl in the empty hallways, how charming it
must be to let one's heart dwell on its most cherished despairs and long
forgotten loves!
We spied a hovel with a Gothic portal; further on was an old wall with
an ogive door; a leafless bush swayed there in the breeze. In the
courtyard the ground is covered with heather, violets, and pebbles; you
walk in, look around and go out again. This place is called "The temple
of the false gods," and used to be, it is thought, a commandery of
Templars.
Our guide started again and we followed him. Presently a steeple rose
among the trees; we crossed a stubble-field, climbed to the top of a
ditch and caught a glimpse of a few of dwellings: the village of
Pomelin. A rough road constitutes the main street and the village
consists of several houses separated by yards. What tranquillity! or
rather what forlornness! The thresholds are deserted; the yards are
empty.
Where are the inhabitants? One would think that they had all left the
village to lie in wait behind the furze-bushes to catch a glimpse of the
_Blues_ who are about to pass through the ravine.
The church is poor and perfectly bare. No beautiful painted saints, no
pictures on the walls or on the roof, no hanging lamp oscillating at the
end of a long, straight cord. In a corner of the choir, a wick was
burning in a glass filled with oil. Round wooden pillars hold up the
roof, the blue paint of which has been freshened recently. The bright
light of the fields, filtering through the green foliage which covers
the roof of the church, shines through the white window-panes. The door,
a little wooden door that closes with a latch, was open; a flight of
birds came in, chirping and beating their wings against the walls; they
fluttered for awhile beneath the vault and around the altar, two or
three alighted upon the holy-water basin, to moisten their beaks, and
then all flew away as suddenly as they had come.
It is not an unusual thing to see birds in the Breton churches; many
live there and fasten their nests to the stones of the nave; they are
never disturbed. When it rains, they all gather in the church, but as
soon as the sun pierces the clouds and the rain-spouts dry up, they
repair to the trees again. So that during the storm two frail creatures
often enter the blessed house of God together; man to pray and allay his
fears, and the bird to wait until the rain stops and to warm the naked
bodies of its frightened young.
A peculiar charm pervades these churches. It is not their poverty that
moves us, because even when they are empty, they appear to be inhabited.
Is it not, then, their modesty that appeals to us? For, with their
unpretentious steeples, and their low roofs hiding under the trees, they
seem to shrink and humiliate themselves in the sight of God. They have
not been upreared through a spirit of pride, nor through the pious fancy
of some mighty man on his death-bed. On the contrary, we feel that it is
the simple impression of a need, the ingenuous cry of an appetite, and,
like the shepherd's bed of dried leaves, it is the retreat the soul has
built for itself where it comes to rest when it is tired. These village
churches represent better than their city sisters the distinctive
features of the places where they are built, and they seem to
participate more directly in the life of the people who, from father to
son, come to kneel at the same place and on the same stone slab. Every
day, every Sunday, when they enter and when they leave, do they not see
the graves of their parents, are these not near them while they pray,
and does it not seem to them as if the church was only a larger family
circle from which the loved ones have not altogether departed? These
places of worship thus have a harmonious sense, and the life of these
people is influenced by it from the baptismal font to the grave. It is
not the same with us, because we have relegated eternity to the
outskirts of the city, have banished our dead to the faubourgs and laid
them to rest in the carpenter's quarter, near the soda factories and
night-soil magazines.
About three o'clock in the afternoon, we arrived at the chapel of
Kerfeunteun, near the entrance to Quimper. At the upper end of the
chapel is a fine glass window of the sixteenth century, representing the
genealogical tree of the Holy Trinity. Jacob forms the trunk, and the
top is figured by the Cross surmounted by the Eternal Father with a
tiara on His head. On each side, the square steeple represents a
quadrilateral pierced by a long straight window. This steeple does not
rest squarely on the roof, but instead, by means of a slender basis, the
narrow sides of which almost touch, it forms an obtuse angle near the
ridge of the roof. In Brittany, almost every church has a steeple of
this kind.
Before returning to the city, we made a détour in order to visit the
chapel of _La Mère-Dieu_. As it is usually closed, our guide summoned
the custodian, and the latter accompanied us with his little niece, who
stopped along the road to pick flowers. The young man walked in front of
us. His slender and flexible figure was encased in a jacket of light
blue cloth, and the three velvet streamers of his black hat, which was
carefully placed on the back of his head, over his knotted hair, hung
down his back.
At the bottom of a valley, or rather a ravine, can be seen the church of
_La Mère-Dieu_, veiled by thick foliage. In this place, amid the silence
of all these trees and because of its little Gothic portal (which
appears to be of the thirteenth century, but which, in reality, is of
the sixteenth), the church reminds one of the discreet chapels mentioned
in old novels and old melodies, where they knighted the page starting
for the Holy Land, one morning when the stars were dim and the lark
trilled, while the mistress of the castle slipped her white hand through
the bars of the iron gate and wept when he kissed her goodbye.
We entered the church. The young custodian took off his hat and knelt on
the floor. His thick, blond hair uncoiled and fell around his shoulders.
It clung a moment to the coarse cloth of his jacket, and then, little by
little, it separated and spread like the hair of a woman. It was parted
in the middle and hung on both sides over his shoulders and neck. The
golden mass rippled with light every time he moved his head bent in
prayer.
The little girl kneeled beside him and let her flowers fall to the
ground. For the first time in my life, I understood the beauty of a
man's locks and the fascination they may have for bare and playful arms.
A strange progress, indeed, is that which consists in curtailing
everywhere the grand superfetations nature has bestowed upon us, so that
whenever we discover them in all their virgin splendour, they are a
revelation to us.