MORBIHAN--LORIENT AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
Three towns of Morbihan little known, still less visited by travellers
in Brittany, lie within a comparatively small area just north of the
coast, and their names are Lorient, Hennebont, and Pont Scorff.
The very name Lorient will appeal to many. It suggests the great
trade with the East, in full swing in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, when the town grew up as a necessary part of a vast commerce.
Some of the old-time romantic picturesqueness of the shipping has
disappeared, and the Hotels “Royal Sword” and “White Horse” have given
way to the Hotels “Modern” and “of France,” with electric lights and
sheds for motor-cars, but there is still a distinguishing excellence to
be remarked which makes Lorient a place well worth visiting.
It was in the seventeenth century that an association of Breton
merchants, who were carrying on the trade with the East Indies,
first built their warehouses here. The traffic grew to proportions so
considerable that Louis XIV. ultimately gave letters patent for the
foundation of a new and grander East India Company.
The company erected ship-houses here, and the name Lorient was given to
the settlement, which was fast growing to a prime importance among the
ports of France. An English fleet, under Admiral Lestock, landed some
six or seven thousand men in the bay of Poldu, at twelve kilometres west
of Lorient, and marched upon the town as a revenge for certain attacks
upon British interests in the East.
The English met with no great triumph here, but Louis XV. was
indifferent enough to allow many of the French settlements in the Indies
to be taken, and this led to the rapid decadence of the great East India
Company and its port. Napoleon resuscitated it, as he did many another
decaying institution in France, and developed the industry of the port
to such an extent that Lorient became one of the principal maritime
towns of France. Its past history sounds romantic enough, but there is
little of romance about the life of its streets and wharves to-day;
instead, there is activity not admitting even the thought of romance.
Jangling gongs of tram-cars, the puffing of locomotives, and the
shrieks of the sirens, to say nothing of the accompaniment of belching
chimney-stacks and the sound of the riveting hammers in the great
shipyards, all testify that Lorient is living in the age of progress.
Local sights, outside this marvellous exposition of modern spirit, are
few. There is a municipal museum, containing some good modern pictures,
many of them of Breton subjects, but there are no ecclesiastical or
architectural monuments worthy of remark. The commercial harbour and the
dockyard are decidedly the most interesting features. Within the walls
of the latter is the parade-ground, which serves as a fine promenade
for the population of Lorient when the military band plays on summer
evenings.
The roadstead of Lorient is a great deep-water harbour, which can
shelter the largest ships afloat. It is guarded by six great lights,
one of them in the cupola of the Church of St. Louis. This is one of
the very few instances where a great city church is a mariner’s beacon,
besides performing its other functions on behalf of lost souls.
Opposite Lorient is Port Louis, founded a century before its bigger
sister. Anciently it was known as Blavet, but took its present name in
honour of Louis XIII. Its walls were begun in 1652.
In the immediate neighbourhood of Lorient and Port Louis are many
delightful little seaside places, hardly popular resorts in any sense
of the word, but all the better for that, where one may get such views
of sea and shore and shipping of all ranks as is hardly to be found
elsewhere on the Breton coast.
Up the little river Blavet, at the head of deep-sea navigation, is
Hennebont, a most delightfully disposed little place, which has been
called the pearl of the Blavet. Like most of the tidal rivers of France,
the Blavet, on its lower reaches, offers about the most paintable of all
landscapes imaginable. This, with the Auray, the Aven, the Scorff, and
the Elle, would prove a sketching-ground quite inexhaustible, in the
variety of its moods, to the artist of an average length of life.
[Illustration: <u>_Hennebont_</u>]
Hennebont, which has eight thousand or more inhabitants and a delightful
inn, electric-lighted though it be, is divided into the new town and the
fortified town. It sits beside the river’s bank, and crosses on a bridge
of three arches. Above, the river dwindles to a mere rivulet, but below
the incoming tides will bring craft of a tonnage of three hundred
or more straight to the heart of the town. A tonnage of three hundred
does not mean much to the travellers by twenty-thousand-ton steamships,
but assuredly when one sees one of these little craft, with their three
slender square-rigged masts, by the soft light of the full moon, in the
little Breton port of Hennebont, it looks like the phantom ship, whose
masts and spars “cross the moon like prison bars.”
Hennebont derives its name from the Breton words for old bridge. The
first lord of the place, Huelin of Hennebont, lived in 1037. The
fortified town was, of course, the earlier foundation, the new town only
coming into existence in the sixteenth century, when the great Church of
Our Lady of Paradise was still in the open country.
Trade follows the flag, but habitations follow the church, and so, when
this great Gothic edifice was built in 1513-30, it began to draw the
houses of the city dwellers around it, and now the fortified town is
practically non-existent except as a quarter.
This church is a wonder-work of its kind, considering its great size,
its graceful lines, and its ornamental Gothic spire, rising to a height
which must approximate three hundred feet.
The ancient ramparts of the old fortified town appear here and there
along the river-bank, in the well-preserved gateway which one passes
on the left after leaving the river on the way to the church, and in
yet another fragment--a great circular tower--in the courtyard of the
aforesaid excellent Hôtel de France.
The old castle of Hennebont, of which something more than fragments
still remain, saw the death of Comte Charles of Blois, who, escaping
from his dungeon in one of the towers of the old Louvre at Paris, came
here in 1345. One may read in Froissart of the defence of Hennebont by
Jeanne of Montfort in 1342.
There are many old gabled houses at Hennebont, most fantastic in form,
one of which, bearing the inscription, “LE LEVIC, 1600,” is
perhaps the most ancient of any built without the walls of the fortified
town.
The great fortified gateway, which gives access to the old citadel, is
a fine ogival work flanked by two massive machicolated towers. This old
district is quite the most curious and unworldly feature of this little
city by the Blavet.
It is a veritable town of the middle ages, yet unspoiled and quite as it
was in the olden days, when its sturdy walls gave protection against
the invader, and its great gates opened only upon the orders of the
governor.
In suburban Hennebont, scarce a kilometre away, on the left bank of
the Blavet, are to be seen the remains of the old Abbaye de la Joie,
a famous establishment of the monks of the Cistercian order. It was
founded in the thirteenth century by Blanche of Champagne, wife of John
the Red-haired. One still sees her statue in wood and bronze, but the
conventual buildings themselves have come to base uses, and are now a
horse-breeding establishment.
Pont Scorff, so far as its situation is concerned, resembles Hennebont.
It spans the tiny river Scorff, and the views along the banks are in
every way equally delightful with those on the Blavet. Pont Scorff,
however, has not the magnitude or the antiquity of Hennebont, and its
two parts are known as the upper town and the lower town.
The most ancient building here is the Chapel of St. John of the old
commandery of St. John du Faouët; it dates at least from the thirteenth
century. There is a fine Renaissance house in the little public square,
called the House of the Princes. It is richly decorated and has a fine
series of dormer windows and a row of pilasters bearing the symbols of
the Rohan family. There is another ancient house, formerly belonging,
it is believed, to the Templars. The parish Church of St. Albin dates
only from 1610, and is in no way a remarkable work.
The Chapel of Notre Dame de Kergornet, a fifteenth-century edifice near
by, is a place of pilgrimage for the Breton nurses, that great race of
foster-mothers who care for the thousands of Parisian children in the
Bois, or the gardens of the Tuileries, or the Luxembourg.
From this point, as one journeys westward, he leaves pretty much all
France behind him. The modern Department of Finistère, the “Land’s
End” of the French, is all that lies between him and the vast heaving
Atlantic.