Chapter II: Nantes to Vannes

Next to Marseilles, Nantes is the finest provincial capital of France. This may be disputed, but it is the opinion of the writer.

Perhaps it is because of the glorious part that the city played in the past to preserve its independence, and the independence of Brittany, succumbing only with the second marriage of Queen Anne; but, for some reason, the links that bind it with the past have never grown rusty, nor have modern cosmopolitan characteristics destroyed the individuality of the Breton.

The situation doubtless has much to do with the air of geniality which pervades the city. When the Loire glistens under the caressing rays of the setting sun, and the roof-tops of the town are all of a reddened gold, Nantes might indeed be even now the mediæval capital that it was before the age of steam and electricity, which sound the only modern notes to be heard here. At night the spectacle is far more dramatic, with the streets and quays lit by countless lamps; the subdued murmur of the workaday world, now all but gone to rest; for an occasional shriek from a locomotive or a wail from the siren of some great steamer dropping down-river with the tide is all that one hears.

There is a forest of masts of shipping, scores upon scores of great chimney-stacks, of ship-houses, of sugar and oil refineries, and along the quay-side streets there are yet sailors and longshoremen hanging about and smoking a finishing pipe, or drinking a last drop of spirit or glass of beer. But all is “drawing in,” and soon all will be hushed in silence, and only the walls and towers of the great castle and the cathedral will keep watch, as they have for five centuries past. This is Nantes, the great trading port. Up in the town blaze forth the great hotels that would do credit to Paris, and yet are so different, and coffee-rooms as splendid and brilliant as any in the capital itself, with the prices of the portions twenty per cent. less.

They keep late hours in this part of Nantes, and night does not actually fall until midnight, when, one by one, up go the coffee-room shutters,--to come down again in the same order between six and seven in the morning. This is not bad for a climate which on the Loire approaches almost Mediterranean mildness. It is a pity that cold and austere England does not rise a little earlier in the morning. London, it is true, sits up late enough, but she makes up for it by dawdling away all the morning up to half-past ten or eleven.

In spite of all its loveliness and gaiety, Nantes is a city more ancient than modern,--this antique Namnêtes, the capital, by preference, of the Dukes of Brittany, and the political rival of Rennes.

The old lanes and crossways of the middle ages have disappeared in making the spacious great streets of our own time, but there is much left to remind one of other days in the old houses and in the ever dominant cathedral and castle.

The Cathedral of St. Pierre is not a masterpiece of itself, but it encloses a treasure that may well be included in that category,--the tomb of Duke Francis II. and Margaret of Foix. The great harmony of this composition, under the half-light of the stained-glass windows, reveals a charm that most mausoleums altogether lack. On a tablet of white marble lie the effigies of the duke and duchess, with two angels kneeling at their heads, and, crouched at their feet, a greyhound, supporting the escutcheon of Brittany. Four statues, at the corners of the pedestal, symbolize Justice, Strength, Temperance, and Prudence. This magnificent tomb is justly counted as Michel Colombe’s finest work.

The castle of Nantes, like that of Angers, is now an arsenal, and accordingly is less interesting than if it were even a shattered ruin. It was the castle of the dukes, and the great lodge, a dainty Renaissance building, with delicately sculptured window-frames and balconies capriciously disposed, gives an idea of the comfort and luxury with which pervasive Duchess Anne surrounded herself in the vivid days when she lived at Nantes. Within the walls of the castle, one might yet see--were one allowed to ramble over it at will--the chambers where the odious Gilles of Laval, the Maréchal de Raiz, Fouquet, the Cardinal de Retz, and the Duchess de Berri were imprisoned during the long years that it served as a cage for the political prisoners of France. Madame de Sévigné sojourned here in 1675, so the sombre and yet gay castle, besides having entertained many of the Kings of France, from Louis XI. onward, has also somewhat of the aspect of a literary shrine.

In the courtyard is a great well with an admirably worked decorative railing in wrought iron, quite worthy to rank with Quintin Matsys’s famous well at Antwerp. The museums of painting and of archaeology, abounding in rare Breton antiquities, give the town prominence among the artistic centres of provincial France. The former contains some fine examples of the work of Philippe de Champaigne, Lancret, Watteau, and Théodore Rousseau among others.

The environs of Nantes are wonderfully picturesque for the artist, but offer little for the amusement of the 125,000 inhabitants of this city of affairs.

To the north, the Erdre winds its way through flat banks, and widens out here and there into a veritable lake.

From Nantes to the ocean the wind blows more strongly and the horizon widens; the great waterway of the Loire has already become practically an arm of the sea, and one breathes its salt air. The aspect of nature now grows more and more melancholy for the seeker after gaiety and life; only the artist will revel in these dull brown and gray riverside and seaside towns, which follow the coast-line from St. Nazaire to Batz, Croisic, and Guérande. It is what the French themselves call a land of grayish twilight, with vast stretches of marsh-land and pebble-strewn sands.

At the extremity of the north bank of the Loire, at the apex of a bend of the coast-line, is the Bay of Croisic and the Batz country.

Like a needle pricking the horizon, the tip of the tower of Croisic marks the location of this sleepy little port in the flat and saline marsh-land round about. South lie the lighthouse and the tower of the ruined church of Bourg de Batz, that little Breton village all but isolated from the mainland itself.

It is the true borderland or frontier between the sea and the land, the one almost imperceptibly mingling with the other. Of it Jean Richepin sang:

“Mirage! Sahara! les Bédouins! Un Émir
Est venu planter là ses innombrables tentes
Dont les cônes dressés en blancheurs éclatantes
Resplendissent parmi les tons bariolés
De tapis d’Orient sur le sol étalés;
Ses cônes dont les tas de sel sur les ladures,
Et ses riches tapis aux brillantes bordures
Ne sont que les Gabiers, les Fares, les Œillets.
On l’évaporement laisse de gros feuillets
Métalliques, moirés flottant d’or et de soir.
Par l’étier et le tour qu’un paludier fossoil
La mer entre, s’épand, s’éparpille en circuits,
Puis arrive aux bassins....”

“The sea sells cheap” say the natives, who are mostly engaged in the salt industry, as one would infer from the foregoing. Competition has cut considerably into the industry of recovering salt from the sea-water, but it is still kept up, and these little Breton coast villages depend upon it, and on fishing, for their sustenance.

St. Nazaire, where the sea first meets the waters of the Loire, is quite new, created but yesterday by the march of progress. Tradition connects the site of this busy port--the seventh in rank among the ports of France--with the ancient Gallo-Roman port of Corbilon. No trace of its former appellation exists since the sixth century, when Gregory of Tours, in the first history of France, mentions the settlement as having been pillaged by a Breton chief, and refers to it as Vic-Saint-Nazaire, which nearly approaches its present name.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the market-town was called Port Nazaire, and was defended by a castle erected by the Dukes of Brittany.

Modern navigation has replaced the old sailing-vessels, and to-day, with its coastwise and foreign trade and its great shipyards, St. Nazaire is a busy, bustling town. The blemish it has, in the eyes of most, will be its general aspect of modernity and its uncompromising, right-angled, straight streets, laid out on a plan which suggests that of Chicago, if one make an allowance for the difference in magnitude. St. Nazaire surpasses Chicago, however, in having a sea front, instead of a lake front, and its hotels are better and cost less. What more should a passing traveller want of a modern city?

Between Nantes and St. Nazaire, on the granite flank of Sillon de Bretagne, sits Savenay, as if its houses were ranged around the steps of an amphitheatre. It has fallen considerably from its proud position of having been the flourishing capital of the district. It still is the largest town, but none of the honours go with its size; decay has fallen upon it, and the hotels are dull, sad places, and even the omnibus from the railway has stopped its journeys.

The town was the site of a terrific conflict in the Vendean wars, and was well-nigh destroyed, and its inhabitants were massacred. Now vineyards grow upon the very soil that a hundred or more years ago covered thousands of corpses. Altogether it is a gruesome memory which Savenay conjures up, if one dare even to think of it.

Between Savenay and Guérande, at an equal distance between the two, are the peat-bogs of Grand Brière. They are the great resources of the country. Would you see them worked? Then come in August, when you are making your way to some seacoast resort of Lower Brittany. For nine days only in the year do the authorities permit the sods to be cut, but everybody takes part therein, you will be told; and enough peat will be gathered, and dried, and pressed into “loaves,” as the Brièrons call them, to warm Nantes for a year.

Guérande is a capital not quite so dead and alive as Savenay; it is the possessor of a past of a most momentous and vivid character in its relation to the history of Brittany and of France. To-day, as in other days, the town is avowedly Breton, as characteristically so as any of its size in the province. Much has been sacrificed to the god of progress, but enough of the ancient aspect of the place remains to recall its features of the time of Duguesclin and Clisson, and the Counts of Montfort and of Blois, who proclaimed peace here in 1365. The enormous Saint Michael Gate is a great fortress-gateway, flanked with two cylindrical and conical roofed towers of the time when feudalism ruled Brittany.

“Guérande,” says a Frenchman, “has not unlaced its corselet of stone since the fifteenth century.” To-day, even, it is surrounded by its mediæval ramparts in a manner like no other northern city in France, reminding one of those great walled cities of Aigues Mortes and Carcassonne in Southern Gaul.

This proud belt of machicolated ramparts, ten towers, and four great gates, and its deep, though now herbage-grown, moat is indeed one of the few monuments of the middle ages that remain to us in all their undisturbed splendour.

Guérande is not exactly a deserted village, but its streets are, at midday, as lone and silent as though its population had not been in residence for many months. This is a notable feature in many small French towns during the hour and a half of the midday meal, but nowhere else is it more to be remarked.

The old parish Church of St. Aubin of Guérande has a collection of strangely carved capitals depicting horrible chimerical beasts, and the Chapel of Notre Dame de la Blanche--a fine work of the thirteenth century--is occasionally the scene of a marriage wherein the participants dress themselves in the old-time resplendent costumes. Such an occasion is rare, but should one be fortunate enough to meet with it, he will carry away still another memory of the mediæval flavour still lingering about this somnolent little Breton city.

Seaward beyond Guérande are only Bourg de Batz and Croisic, a gay little maritime city with a fine Gothic church of the highly ornamented species, and many old, high-gabled houses of the variety which one sees frequently in stage settings. There are the local watering-places, too, of the Nantais, Ste. Marguerite and Baule, which have nothing of interest, however, for the traveller who seeks to improve his mind and amuse himself simultaneously. They are undoubtedly of great healthful and economic value to Nantes and St. Nazaire, however, and they do not differ greatly from others of their class elsewhere.

Again returning to the highroad, if one be travelling by road, “_Vous prenez le chemin de Vennes” (Vannes) “par la Roche Bernard qui est aussy celuy de Rhennes et de Rhedon_,” wrote a sixteenth-century chronicler, and the direct road to-day lies the same way. It is known as “National Road” No. 165.

Straight as the crow flies, but now up and now down, like all Breton roadways, this highway runs from Nantes to Quimper, 232 kilometres.

The aspect of the country changes perceptibly as one leaves Savenay on the way to the real Brittany. One crosses the Vilaine by the suspension bridge of La Roche-Bernard, hung so perilously high that the great three-masted coasters may pass beneath. It is unlovely, but convenient, and saves a round of fifty kilometres on the journey, as one goes from Nantes to Vannes, so it may be pardoned.

Northward lies the very ancient town of Châteaubriant, once the centre and life of Breton warfare and political strife. It was an ancient barony of the county of Nantes, and owes its name to the compounding of the word château with that of its original lord, who was named Brient.

The ancient feudal fortress is now a ruin, but the castle built by John of Laval, governor of Brittany under Francis I., still serves the gendarmerie and the sous-préfecture offices. Above the portal of the colonnade one reads this inscription, which gives the date of the completion of the new castle:

DE MAL EN BIEN, DE BIEN MYCVLX
POUR LACHEVER IE DEVINS VIEVLX
1538

Each is most interesting, and so abundantly supplied with the lore of romance and reality, that one can only get his fill of studying it on the spot.

The Church of St. Jean de Béré is a historical monument of almost the first rank, and the remains of the ancient Benedictine convent of St. Saveur date originally from a foundation of Brient I.

On the thirteenth and fourteenth of September of each year, on the plain behind the town, is held the celebrated fair of Béré, one of those great combinations of marketing and merrymaking for which old France was noted, and which have so largely disappeared that to be a part and parcel of one is to have a most agreeable experience. Guibray, near Falaise, in Normandy, the “horse-fair” at Bernay, and the Fair de Béré are the most celebrated in these parts.

It was in the neighbouring forest, as Pontcalec recites in the pages of “The Regent’s Daughter” of Dumas, that he met his adventure with the “sorceress of Savenay.”

“I saw an enormous faggot walking along,” said Pontcalec to his three Breton friends. “This did not surprise me, for our peasants carry such enormous faggots that they quite disappear under their load, but this faggot appeared from behind to move alone.”

A very good description this of what one may see even to-day, not only in this particular forest, but in any other in France. French frugality burns small sticks and twigs that in other lands would be made into a brushwood fire, and who shall not say that this trait, along with many others, does not contribute to the contentment of the French peasant? for he is content, if not amply endowed with this world’s goods; marvellously so as compared with his English, Irish, or Italian brethren. There may be other reasons, but his thrift is the principal one.

Any one seeking change and rest will certainly find what he is looking for at Châteaubriant. It is somnolently dull all through the week and doubly so on Sundays, but, in spite of all this, it is delightful, and a romantic novelist--or even a writer of romantic novels--could hardly find a more inspiring background than the country round about.

There is a legend, too, in connection with the old château that might be worked up into a first-class romance, either for the stage or as a sword and cloak novel. After all, it is not exactly legend either, though it is almost too horrible to appear true. The reader may judge for himself, for here it is:

In the old château lived for a time that unfortunate Frances de Foix whom Francis I. had created Countess de Châteaubriant. To-day much of the luxury with which this mistress of the royal lover had surrounded herself has disappeared, though enough remains, through restoration and preservation, to suggest the very splendid appointments of a former time. The young Frances de Foix, herself of the house that once possessed the crown of Navarre, married the old Count of Laval, who soon brooded himself into a passion of jealousy over the affair of his wife and her princely lover, particularly as it was said that she had gone to visit Francis while he was in prison after his capture at Pavia. “The countess found the king’s prison very dismal,” said the chroniclers of the time. This last act proved too much for the elderly spouse, who speedily “shut up his young wife in a darkened and padded cell, and finally had her cut into pieces by two surgeons,” as the story goes. After this horrible event the murderer fled the country, as might have been expected, in order, say the chroniclers again, “to escape the vengeance of the king.”

Redon, just to the north, is an unattractive place. Most folk know it only as the railway official calls out: “Forty-five minutes’ stop for luncheon, refreshments, and all the rest.”

Very amusing are these railway lunch-rooms seen throughout France. But withal they are most excellently appointed, although the passengers, like their kind the world over, eat as though they had not a minute to lose, and have a good fifteen left on their hands when they have finished their repast.

The meals are usually divided into three categories: the public table at a set price, the table for the aristocracy at three francs, the table with set portions, the frugal repast at half as much, and the service “to order,” which is the most costly of all.

Nothing is of an inferior quality, however, and, as all is served from the same kitchen, it is merely a question as to whether one will have more or less, or whether he will eat it off linen napery, with a napkin to tuck under his right ear,--as is the French commercial traveller’s custom,--or whether he will be satisfied with an oilcloth table-covering. The difference is more apparent than real, for the “frugal repast” at a franc and a half is the three franc meal shorn of its trimmings; you get the same dishes and the same service.

As if to ease the process, a stentorian railway hand puts his head in the door and shouts: “Ten minutes before the Vannes express starts!” and returns again at the end of the allotted time to give a final call: “Into the carriages, gentlemen!” It is much the same the world over, of course, but they are more polite in France, and the food is better of its kind, and much better served, two very appreciable differences.

Redon itself and its great open square, on which are the railway station, the hotels, and the gaunt, lone, dismembered tower of the Church of St. Sauveur, is by no means attractive. The square is bare of trees, and in the summer the sun beats down upon the frequenters of the terrace coffee-rooms of the hotels in a manner which makes one wonder why they do not move off and seek a shady spot elsewhere.

The indifference shown by the natives of certain localities for the pelting sunlight, which makes some of us think of cabbage leaves for our hats and “gin rickeys” for our stomachs, is curious. The Neapolitan prefers to loll about in the blazing Italian sun, and says that no one but an Englishman or a dog ever seeks the shade. The citizen of Redon is like him, and does not care who knows it, and his sunlight, though it comes to earth some hundreds of miles farther north, appears to be of the same caloric value.

Redon was an old monastic foundation of St. Convoïon’s, of the Vannes church. He built the Abbey of St. Sauveur, of which the present church and its lone tower are later additions. The main body of the present edifice dates in part from the time of the foundation, though its fabric was frequently added to and restored up to the twelfth century, from which period it may really be said to date. The central tower of this church is said to be the only Romanesque feature of its class in all Brittany, and is certainly one of the most sturdy anywhere to be seen.

Another remarkable feature is a chapel, the walls loopholed and machicolated, and built by the Abbé Yves in the fifteenth century; to-day it serves as the sacristy.

The high altar, a rich and imposing affair, was the gift of the great Richelieu when he was in possession of the revenues of the abbey. The city was surrounded by a fortification or wall by the Abbot John of Treal in 1364, and in 1422 John V., Count of Brittany, established a mint here.

Questembert, westward toward Vannes, is a town of four thousand or so inhabitants, and has many interesting old houses, but otherwise is devoid of attractions either for the lover of architectural monuments or for worshippers at religious or other shrines. It is, however, the place for holding many local fairs or markets of considerable magnitude, where one may make practically his first acquaintance with the Breton peasant, becoiffed and beribboned as he, or she, only is on native heath.

Rochefort-en-Terre is also a chief place; as its population numbers less than seven hundred souls, it cannot be considered as even a local metropolis. Its situation and its fine, though not stupendously remarkable, architectural glories make up for what it lacks in the way of population. It sits high on a hillside dominating the little river Arz, a confluent of the Vilaine. Its name is due to the founder of a château built here in the thirteenth century and destroyed by the Catholic Leaguers in 1594, though it was afterwards rebuilt and again destroyed, this time by Revolutionary firebrands, in 1793. The ruins of this château are to-day very satisfactory indeed as ruins, though they include few or none of the architectural details with which the work must once have been endowed. The lower courses of the walls are there, remains of five towers, and an ancient well, with a curb of sculptured granite.

The ancient collegiate Church of Notre Dame de la Tronchaye is an ecclesiastical monument of high rank, for a town like Rochefort-en-Terre, and is an altogether lovable old shrine, with admirable sculptures in stone and some curious wooden statues, in the interior, said originally to have been those of Claude of Rieux and Suzanne of Bourbon, Lord and Lady de Rochefort. These statues are now converted into a St. Joseph and a Virgin. This may or may not have been a sacrilege; it certainly was a desecration. The ancient city gates remain, and there are numerous fifteenth and sixteenth century houses.

The country round about Rochefort-en-Terre was brought into vogue by the landscape-painter, Pelouze, some years ago, and other artists have followed in his wake, making an over growing artist colony in the summer-time. Studies and sketches decorate the dining-room of the Hôtel Lecadre in a surprising number; at least surprising to one who comes upon this unassuming little town and its excellent, before named, little hotel while journeying to Finistère.

Still going toward Vannes one passes Elven, near which is the Manoir of Kerlean, the family estate of _the_ Descartes. The birth certificate of the Descartes is in the records in the mayor’s office.

Three kilometres to the north are the remains of the ancient fortress of Largoet, whose tower, known as the Tour d’Elven, dates from the fifteenth century. This tower has been called the most beautiful castle keep in all Brittany, and so it is if one take into consideration its moss-and-ivy-grown walls and its general eerie aspect heightened perceptibly if seen by moonlight. This high, majestic tower of a feudal castle, whose other members have practically disappeared, is also a literary shrine of high rank, inasmuch as Octave Feuillet has placed here some of the most moving scenes in his “Story of a Poor Young Man.” Perhaps this true romance is not so well known to the present generation as to a former, but it should be, and accordingly the clue is here given, and it should have a double significance so far as travellers in Brittany are concerned.

One enters Vannes, if it be a holiday or a Sunday, amid a gaiety and uproar that is apparently inexplicable. To be sure Vannes is the metropolis of the Morbihan, but one does not look for such continuous gaiety on the part of a people supposed to be wholly devout and not very rich, as possessors of this world’s goods count their gains. Devoutness need not necessarily mean glumness, and so as it all seems, around Vannes at least, to be for the general good, one is not sorry to have his first introduction to a great Breton town in a way so pleasant.

Really it is a sort of small gaiety, and strictly local, which goes on here. There is nothing of the riotous order, but it is all very gay, nevertheless.

The simple folk of the Morbihan, who have crowded into Vannes for the day, are as interested and amused with a hurdy-gurdy Punch and Judy show, a travelling circus, or a merry-go-round as if they were the latest distractions of Paris. Meanwhile one seeks his hotel, and there comes another surprise.