SOUTH OF THE LOIRE
The estuary of the Loire belongs both to Brittany and to the Vendee,
though, as a matter-of-fact, the southern bank, opposite Nantes, formed
a part of the ancient Pays de Retz, one of the old seigneuries of
Bretagne.
It was Henri de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, who was the bitter rival of
Mazarin. French historians have told us that when the regency under Anne
of Austria began, Mazarin, who had been secretary to the terrible
Richelieu, was just coming into his power. He was a subtle, insidious
Italian, plodding and patient, but false as a spring-time rainbow. Gondi
was bold, liberal, and independent, a mover of men and one able to take
advantage of any turn of the wind, a statesman, and a great
reformer,--or he would have been had he but full power. It was Cromwell
who said that De Retz was the only man in Europe who saw through his
plans.
Gondi had entered the church, but he had no talents for it. His life
was free, too free even for the times, it would appear, for, though he
was ordained cardinal, it was impossible for him to supplant Mazarin in
the good graces of the court. As he himself had said that he preferred
to be a great leader of a party rather than a partisan of royalty, he
was perhaps not so very greatly disappointed that he was not able to
supplant the wily Italian successor of Richelieu in the favour of the
queen regent. Gondi was able to control the parliament, however, and,
for a time, it was unable to carry through anything against his will.
Mazarin rose to power at last, barricaded the streets of Paris, and
decided to exile Gondi--as being the too popular hero of the people.
Gondi knew of the edict, but stuck out to the last, saying: "To-morrow,
I, Henri de Gondi, before midday, will be master of Paris." Noon came,
and he _was_ master of Paris, but as he was still Archbishop-Coadjutor
of Paris his hands were tied in more ways than one, and the plot for his
supremacy over Mazarin, "the plunderer," fell through.
The whole neighbouring region south of the Loire opposite Nantes, the
ancient Pays de Retz, is unfamiliar to tourists in general, and for that
reason it has an unexpected if not a superlative charm. It was the
bloodiest of the battle-grounds of the Vendean wars, and, though its
monumental remains are not as numerous or as imposingly beautiful as
those in many other parts, there is an interest about it all which is as
undying as is that of the most ornate or magnificent chateau or
fortress-peopled land that ever existed.
Not a corner of this land but has seen bloody warfare in all its
grimness and horror, from the days when Clisson was pillaged by the
Normans in the ninth century, to the guerilla warfare of the Vendean
republicans in the eighteenth century. The advent of the railway has
changed much of the aspect of this region and brought a
twentieth-century civilization up to the very walls of the ruins of
Clisson and Maulevrier, the latter one of the many chateaux of this
region which were ruined by the wars of Stofflet, who, at the head of
the insurgents, obliged the nobility to follow the peasants in their
uprising.
Now and then, in these parts, one comes upon a short length of railway
line not unlike that at which our forefathers marvelled. The line may be
of narrow gauge or it may not, but almost invariably the two or three
so-called carriages are constructed in the style (or lack of style) of
the old stage-coach, and they roll along in much the same lumbering
fashion. The locomotive itself is a thing to be wondered at. It is a
pigmy in size, but it makes the commotion of a modern decapod, or one of
those great flyers which pull the Southern Express on the main line via
Poitiers and Angouleme, not fifty kilometres away.
There is a little tract of land lying just south of the Loire below
Angers which is known as "le Bocage Vendeen." One leaves the Loire at
Chalonnes and, by a series of gentle inclines, reaches the plateau where
sits the town of Cholet, the very centre of the region, and a town whose
almost only industry is the manufacture of pocket-handkerchiefs.
The aspect of the Loire has changed rapidly and given way to a more
vigorous and varied topography; but, for all that, Cholet and the
surrounding country depend entirely upon the great towns of the Loire
for their intercourse with the still greater markets beyond. Like
Angers, Cholet and all the neighbouring villages are slate-roofed, with
only an occasional red tile to give variety to the otherwise gray and
sombre outlook.
_En route_ from Chalonnes one passes Chemille almost the only
market-town of any size in the district. It is very curious, with its
Romanesque church and its old houses distributed around an amphitheatre,
like the _loges_ in an opera-house.
This is the very centre of the Bocage, where, in Revolutionary times,
the Republican armies so frequently fought with the bands of Vendean
fanatics.
The houses of Cholet are well built, but always with that grayness and
sadness of tone which does not contribute to either brilliancy of aspect
or gaiety of disposition. Save the grand street which traverses the town
from east to west, the streets are narrow and uncomfortable; but to make
up for all this there are hotels and cafes as attractive and as
comfortable as any establishments of the kind to be found in any of the
smaller cities of provincial France.
The handkerchief industry is very considerable, no less than six great
establishments devoting themselves to the manufacture.
Cholet is one of the greatest cattle markets, if not the greatest, in
the land. The farmers of the surrounding country buy _boeufs maigres_ in
the southwest and centre of France and transform them into good fat
cattle which in every way rival what is known in England as "best
English." This is accomplished cheaply and readily by feeding them with
cabbage stalks.
On Saturdays, on the Champ de Foire, the aspect is most animated, and
any painter who is desirous of emulating Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair"
(painted at the great cattle market of Bernay, in Normandy) cannot find
a better vantage-ground than here, for one may see gathered together
nearly all the cattle types of Poitou, the Vendee, Anjou, Bas Maine, and
of Bretagne Nantaise.
In earlier days Cholet was far more sad than it is to-day; but there
remain practically no souvenirs of its past. The wars of the Vendee
left, it is said, but three houses standing when the riot and bloodshed
was over. Two of the greatest battles of this furious struggle were
fought here.
On the site of the present railroad station Kleber and Moreau fought the
royalists, and the heroic Bonchamps received the wound of which he died
at St. Florent, just after he had put into execution the order of
release for five thousand Republican prisoners. This was on the 17th
October, 1793. Five months later Stofflet possessed himself of the town
and burned it nearly to the ground. Not much is left to remind one of
these eventful times, save the public garden, which was built on the
site of the old chateau.
[Illustration: _Donjon of the Chateau de Clisson_]
La Moine, a tiny and most picturesque river, still flows under the
antique arches of the old bridge, which was held in turn by the Vendeans
and the Republicans.
To the west of Cholet runs another line of railway, direct through the
heart of the Sevre-Nantaise, one of those _petits pays_ whose old-time
identity is now all but lost, even more celebrated in bloody annals than
is that region lying to the eastward. Here was a country entirely sacked
and impoverished. Mortagne was completely ruined, though it has yet left
substantial remains of its fourteenth and fifteenth century chateau.
Torfou was the scene of a bloody encounter between the Vendean hordes
and Kleber's two thousand _heroiques de Mayence_. The able Vendean
chiefs who opposed him, Bonchamps, D'Elbee, and Lescure, captured his
artillery and massacred all the wounded.
At the extremity of this line was the stronghold of Clisson, which
itself finally succumbed, but later gave birth to a new town to take the
place of that which perished in the Vendean convulsion.
Throughout this region, in the valleys of the Moine and the
Sevre-Nantaise, the rocks and the verdure and the admirable, though ill
preserved, ruins, all combine to produce as unworldly an atmosphere as
it is possible to conceive within a short half-hundred kilometres of the
busy world-port of Nantes and the great commercial city of Angers. One
continually meets with ruins that recall the frightful struggle of
Revolutionary times; hence the impression that one gets from a ramble
through or about this region is well-nigh unique in all France.
The coast southward, nearly to La Rochelle, is a vast series of shallow
gulfs and salt marshes which form weirdly wonderful outlooks for the
painter who inclines to vast expanses of sea and sky.
Pornic is a remarkably picturesque little seaside village, where the
inflowing and outflowing tides of the Bay of Biscay temper the southern
sun and make of it--or would make of it if the tide of fashion had but
set that way--a watering-place of the first rank.
It is an entrancing bit of coast-line which extends for a matter of
fifty kilometres south of the juncture of the Loire with the ocean, with
an aspect at times severe with a waste of sand, and again gracious with
verdure and tree-clad and rocky shores.
The great Bay of Bourgneuf and its enfolding peninsula of Noirmoutier
form an artist's sketching-ground that is not yet overrun with mere
dabblers in paint and pencil, and is accordingly charming.
The Bay of Bourgneuf has most of the characteristics of the Morbihan,
without that severity and sternness which impress one so deeply when on
the shores of the great Breton inland sea.
The little town of Bourgneuf-en-Retz, with its little port of Colletis,
is by no means a city of any artistic worth; indeed it is nearly bare of
most of those things which attract travellers who are lovers of old or
historic shrines; but it is a delightful stopping-place for all that,
provided one does not want to go farther afield, to the very tip of the
Vendean "land's end" at Noirmoutier across the bay.
Three times a day a steamer makes the journey to the little island town
which is a favourite place of pilgrimage for the Nantais during the
summer months. Once it was not even an island, but a peninsula, and not
so very long ago either. The alluvial deposits of the Loire made it in
the first place, and the sea, backing in from the north, made a strait
which just barely separates it to-day from the mainland.
On this out-of-the-way little island there are still some remains of
prehistoric monuments, the dolmen of Chiron-Tardiveau, the menhirs of
Pinaizeaux and Pierre-Levee, and some others. In the speech of the
inhabitants the isle is known as Noirmoutier, a contraction of "_Nigrum
Monasterium_," a name derived from the monastery founded here in the
seventh century by St. Philibert.
In the town is an old chateau, the ancient fortress-refuge of the Abbe
of Her. It is a great square structure flanked at the angles with little
towers, of which two are roofed, one uncovered, and the fourth
surmounted by a heliograph for communicating with the Ile de Yeu and the
Pointe de Chenoulin. The view from the heights of these chateau towers
is fascinating beyond compare, particularly at sundown on a summer's
evening, when the golden rays of the sinking sun burnish the coast of
the Vendee and cast lingering shadows from the roof-tops and walls of
the town below. To the northwest one sees the Ilot du Pilier, with its
lighthouse and its tiny coast-guard fortress; to the north is clearly
seen Pornic and the neighbouring coasts of the Pays de Retz and of
Bouin with its encircling dikes,--all reminiscent of a little Holland.
To the south is the narrow neck of Fromentin, the jagged Marguerites,
which lift their fangs wholly above the surface of the sea only at low
water, and the towering cliffs of the Ile de Yeu, which rise above the
mists.
Just south of the Loire, between Nantes and Bourgneuf, is the Lac de
Grand-Lieu, in connection with which one may hear a new rendering of an
old legend. At one time, it is said, it was bordered by a city, whose
inhabitants, for their vices, brought down the vengeance of heaven upon
them, even though they cried out to the powers on high to avert the
threatened flood which rose up out of the lake and overflowed the banks
and swallowed the city and all evidences of its past. In this last lies
the flaw in the legend; but, like the history of Sodom, of the Ville
d'Ys in Bretagne, and of Ars in Dauphine, tradition has kept it alive.
This wicked place of the Loire valley was called _Herbauge_ or
_Herbadilla_, and, from St. Philibert at the southern extremity of the
lake, one looks out to-day on a considerable extent of shallow water,
which is as murderous-looking and as uncanny as a swamp of the
Everglades.
From the central basin flow two tiny rivers, the Ognon and the Boulogne,
which are charming enough in their way, as also is the route by highroad
from Nantes, but the gray monotonous lake, across which the wind
whistles in a veritable tempest for more than six months of the year, is
most depressing.
There are various hamlets, with some pretence at advanced civilization
about them, scattered around the borders of the lake, St. Leger, St.
Mars, St. Aignan, St. Lumine, Bouaye, and La Chevroliere; but in the
whole number you will not get a daily paper that is less than
forty-eight hours old, and nothing but the most stale news of happenings
in the outside world ever dribbles through. St. Philibert is the
metropolis of these parts, and it has no competitors for the honour.
At the entrance of the Ognon is the little village of Passay, built at
the foot of a low cliff which dominates all this part of the lake. It is
a picturesque little village of low houses and red roofs, with a little
sandy beach in the foreground, through which little rivulets of soft
water trickle and go to make up the greater body.