Chapter III: The Morbihan--Vannes and the “golfe”

The “Golfe” or Bay of Morbihan is one of those great landlocked havens in which the whole Breton coast abounds; its islands are as many as the days of the year, as the natives have it.

Morbihan itself is as much sea as land. The tides rise to a great height along this whole southern coast of Brittany, and in the Bay of Morbihan they have full play.

The metropolis of Lower Morbihan is Vannes, which the railway porters shout out at you, as you descend from the train, as Va-a-a-nnes.

Leaving the station, one threads his way through whole batteries of laundresses, their gull-winged head-dress nodding in rhythm with the beating of their paddles, a most picturesque sight, but a process which works disaster to one’s clothes, destroying pearl buttons, and causing mysterious small holes to appear in the most inconvenient places. An accompaniment of song always goes with these shattering and battering exercises. At Vannes, according to Theodore Botrel, it runs like this:

“Pan! pan! pan!
Ma Doué!
Comme la langue maudite
Marche bien au vieux lavoit.
Pan! pan! pan!
Vite! vite!
Plus vite que le battoir!”

It is the day of the local fair, the chief article of commerce being, it would seem, pigs, as at Limerick. At any rate, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of little porkers, who have just put foot to earth, as their venders tell one; their own voices, too, strident and high pitched, announce the same thing.

Vannes, truth to tell, is not much of a capital, but it is a highly interesting and picturesque old town, with manners and customs quite different from those of any of its neighbours.

The chief characteristics of the place seem to be pointed roofs of red and moss-grown tiles and walls of blue granite. One can almost imagine that Botrel chose it as the scene of the stanza:

“Qui donc chante sous nos fenêtres
Ces mystérieuses chansons?
Ce sont les âmes des ancêtres
Qui reconnaissent leurs maisons!”

There is a blending of the seashore and the open country here which is scarcely found in any other part of France. In some respects it is like Holland, and again it is not, for it lacks the web of canals with which that country is interwoven.

The whole bay--“Le Golfe”--forms a dooryard for Vannes, and a yacht or a boat is as much an appendage of the Vannes household of the better class as a dog or cat.

Vannes, the capital of the Morbihan, is a city of 23,000 souls, and has two great modern, up-to-date hotels. Choose one, and you will “like the other best,” as Rubinstein said to the young pianist, who was to play two of his compositions to the master. He said this, be it recalled, after he had heard only the first one. Not that Vannes hotels are really bad. Oh, no. Truth to tell, they are excellent in their way, but they are unconvincing.

When one is here, in the midst of a new, strange set of conditions of life, he looks for something characteristic about his inn. If he find it, he is content; if he do not, all the smugness and propriety of imported manners and customs in the dinner service will not make him so. The true traveller prefers taking his chances with the native dishes to trifling with Paris culinary fashions at the hands of a Breton peasant-chef,--if that is the exact classification one ought to give the cooks of Vannes.

To enter Vannes by road, one has come down a precipitous descent to the sea-level, and accordingly rises again to an equal height when he leaves, for Vannes is the great tidewater port for the whole of the south coast of Brittany between Lorient and St. Nazaire. The traffic of the bays of Morbihan and Quiberon is considerable, and the ceaseless coming and going of many small steamers and sailing-craft is unlike traffic elsewhere.

The great bay is an inland sea almost surrounded by the jutting peninsulas which terminate on either side of the narrow channel in Pointe de Kerpenhir and Port Navalo. The name is compounded of two Breton words, _mor_ (sea) and _bihan_ (little). The flat tree-grown islands of this little sea make vistas and groups of a unique character, and to learn the bay well by a voyage among them in a flat-bottomed skimming-dish of a craft, or by the more facile motor-launch, is a thoroughly agreeable experience.

The chief of the islands are the Monks Isle and the Ile d’Arz, but the enfolding shores of the mainland, with its little seaside-farmyard villages, have the same characteristics.

On the little passenger steamers, which ply between the islands and the mainland, one meets a queer company of peasant-folk in coifs and round velvet or straw caps, fowls, sheep, goats, and an occasional overgrown calf.

Such of the islands of the bay as are populated, and many of them are, were colonized from the neighbouring country, and the women in particular are physically admirable. They still wear the distinctive costume of the country in a spirit uncontaminated by the electric lights and railways of Vannes. Custom in these isles allows the young women to demand the hand of a likely swain in marriage, and the plan seems to work well. The population seems generally happy, prosperous, and contented. What better is expected as the outcome of marriage?

The climate of all the Morbihan shore is mild and tranquil at all seasons of the year, and one may sit beside the open window of his hotel dining-room throughout the year. The mimosa flowers in winter, and palms, rose-trees, camellias, and fig-trees prosper exceedingly in the open air.

Vannes was the ancient capital of the Veneti, a strong coast tribe of other days which resisted the invasion of Cæsar and triumphed against his fleet a half-century or more before the Christian era.

When finally the Romans came, they made Vannes the centre of six great highways which radiated to Corseul, to Angers, to Hennebont, to Locmariaquer, to Rennes, and to Nantes. From this its importance may be inferred.

Christianity came to Vannes in 465, when St. Perpetus, Metropolitan of Tours, consecrated St. Patern as first bishop. By the sixth century it had become an independent county, but was joined again to the duchy of Brittany in 990. John IV. established his habitual residence at Vannes, and constructed the celebrated Château de l’Hermine, with its constable’s tower so famous in the history of Brittany as the place in which he imprisoned Clisson, releasing him only after the payment of a heavy ransom.

The history of Vannes and the Morbihan is too long and stormy to be even outlined here, but there are still many remains and memories which will serve as a foundation upon which to build the fabric anew.

The port is most interesting, with its varied traffic and its great ships of nearly a thousand tons which thread their way up through the islands of the gulf, bringing lumber, coals, and all the small cargoes of a great coasting port.

At Vannes one may see a huge parti-coloured handkerchief of the _bandanna_ variety waving before a narrow doorway. It is the “shawl,” the sign of the hair-cutter, who will exchange its fellow for your hair, if you be a Breton girl with dark brown tresses, or even an elderly person whose hair is iron-gray. In Lower Brittany, on summer fair-days, the dealer in hair makes a round exceedingly profitable to his establishment, though at each stopping-place it leaves a hundred or more young girls shorn of their crowning glory,--a loss which they successfully cover with their daintily ironed head-dress.

The chief of the sights and shrines of the neighbourhood of Vannes are St. Gildas de Rhuis and the Château of Suscino. The former is revered for its sixth-century monastic foundation of St. Gildas, called the wise, and for some time in the twelfth century governed by the famous Abelard. The ancient abbatial church is now the parish church. It dates from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and is an unusual work in many respects, and rising to a height of grandeur seldom seen outside the larger Breton cities and towns.

The castle of Suscino--or more properly the ruin--is a wonderful thirteenth-century structure on the water’s edge, built by John the Red-haired. It follows the best Gothic traditions of its time, and its crenelated walls and towers, the latter now unroofed, are perfect of their kind. It was captured by Charles of Blois, and retaken by his Montfort rival in 1364. An English garrison occupied it in 1373. Finally it was given by Anne of Brittany to John of Chalons, Prince of Orange, from whom it was taken by Francis I., and he presented it to Frances of Foix, Lady of Châteaubriant, as she then was. The rest of its history is equally varied, and as important as becomes so magnificent a mediæval fortress.

In form the château is an irregular pentagon, perhaps modified from its original plan in 1420. Its orchid machicolations are remarkable both for their beauty and their utility. Seven towers, of which six remain, originally flanked its gates and walls. The new tower is a fine cylindrical keep of the fifteenth century. Over the entrance one still reads a tablet inscription as follows:

ICI EST NÉ
LE DUC ARTHUR III.
LE 24 AOÛT, 1393

North of Vannes are Ploërmel and Josselin, two places which no one should leave out of the itinerary of Brittany. Neither is easily accessible by rail, but both are conveniently reached by road.

Ploërmel has a railway connection with the line to Brest by way of Rennes, and another with the line to Brest by way of Vannes, but Josselin is off the beaten track, and one makes his way from Ploërmel by omnibus or in a carriage.

Ploërmel and its “pardon” have inspired an opera, one of Meyerbeer’s most celebrated scores, known to English music lovers as “Dinorah,” but in French called “The Pardon of Ploërmel.” The town owes its name to an anchorite who, in the sixth century, retired here to a hermitage.

The history of Ploërmel during the middle ages was stormy. It was here that the edict expelling the Jews from Brittany was issued in 1240. In 1273 the Comte de Richemont--upon his return from the Crusades--founded at Ploërmel the first Carmelite convent known to France. This ancient convent, situated without the walls, escaped from the disasters which caused the city to be burned in 1347. The Calvinists came in time to have a temple here, in which they held two synods of their church.

To-day Ploërmel is a sleepy, old-world town, with two good inns, and not much except the fragmentary reminders of old walls and buildings to remind one of the parts played in other days.

The Church of St. Armel, a reconstruction of 1511-1602, is in parts highly decorated with stone sculptures and strange images, recalling, says an ingenious, but profane, Frenchman, the “pleasantries of Rabelais.” Of course he refers to the players on the bagpipes, the man sewing up the mouth of his wife, and the wife tearing off her husband’s cap. Certainly these quaint figures are not born of religious symbolism, unless, by chance, that the symbolism of the religious builders of Ploërmel differs greatly from that of others elsewhere.

There are still remains of Ploërmel’s old city walls dating from the fifteenth century, and also a fragment of a tower.

Near by, on the road to Josselin, is a simple granite shaft perpetuating the famous “Battle of the Thirty,” celebrated in history.

According to Froissart, Robert of Beaumanoir, chatelain of Josselin, one day provoked an English captain--Bromborough--who was encamped at Ploërmel, and challenged him to battle; thirty of his men against thirty Frenchmen. At the first attack four Frenchmen and two English fell. Then the combat began again with swords, battle-axes, and lances. Eight English only finally remained, including Bromborough himself; all the others were killed or taken prisoners and led away to the dungeons of the Château de Josselin.

Froissart writes elsewhere of this same engagement: “Twenty-two years after the battle of the thirty, I saw at the table of King Charles of France one of the combatants, a knight called Yvain Charnel. His face showed that the battle had been hot, for it was scarred all over.”

This wayside column or pyramid just off the route bears the following inscription:

À LA MEMOIRE PERPETUELLE
DE LA BATAILLE DES TRANTE
QUE MGR LE MARÉCHAL DE BEAU MANOIR
A GAIGNÉE DANS CE LIEU L’AN 1530

Josselin is now chief town of a commune of 2,500 inhabitants; it has a fine mediæval château yet inhabitable, two ecclesiastical monuments of more than unusual excellence, and a rather shaky and ill-situated inn (Hôtel de France), which makes up in the abundance and excellence of its fare for what it lacks in the way of electric lights and modern sanitary arrangements.

The first houses of Josselin were grouped around a miraculous effigy of the Virgin, known as Notre Dame du Roncier, because it was found beneath a blackberry-bush. To-day Notre Dame du Roncier, the church and the chapel and its statue of the Virgin, are venerated highly by the faithful who make the pilgrimage to the shrine on the Monday and Tuesday of Pentecost and on the eighth of September, the birthday of the Virgin, when the remains of her ancient statue are shown. This effigy was broken and burned in the Revolutionary fury of 1793, but a modern replica was crowned, in the Chapel Notre Dame du Roncier, in 1868. The settlement which grew up around the shrine was surrounded by a protecting wall by the Count of Guéthénoc in 1008, and in 1030 it was given the name of Josselin, after his son.

In the thirteenth century, the county of Porhoet, in which Josselin was situated, passed to the house of Fougères, and its affairs were varied and involved until Peter of Valois, Count of Alençon, sold it to the Constable Oliver of Clisson, whose daughter brought it in marriage to the Rohans, to whose descendants it still belongs.

In the Church of Our Lady of the Blackberry-bush is a remarkable tomb placed in the Chapel of St. Marguerite--the former oratory of the constable--to Oliver of Clisson and Marguerite of Rohan.

The castle rests on a rocky foundation beside the river Oust, and its front is most imposing. Three towers with conical roofs flank the riverside, and are an expression of the best fortress-château building of its era (twelfth century), severe and gaunt in every line, and yet beautifully planned. The interior court takes on quite a different aspect, that of the “_architecture civile_” of the third ogival period, when Renaissance forms and details had crept in, almost destroying Gothic lines.

The window openings of the two stories have an admirable decorative effect, as beautiful as those of Blois and very nearly equalling those of Chambord.

An open gallery above the windows is a charming additional interpolation, and between each window is carved “A Plus,” the device of the distinguished family of the Rohans, who built this part of the structure. A keep and some later walls and parapets were added by Clisson somewhere about the year 1400, but most of them disappeared in 1629, when the château ceased to be a stronghold of the League.

In the main it is a twelfth and thirteenth century structure which is so admirably preserved to-day. One may visit the interior, through the courtesy of the family in residence, and, though it may be somewhat disconcerting to walk through these historic apartments of another day and see such modern innovations as electric bells and other appurtenances of a late civilization, the experience is, after all, a peep behind the curtain, and this the up-to-date motor-car tourist always appreciates highly.

The great hall, the library, with its magnificent chimneypiece and its cipher, “A Plus,” carved in stone, and the dining-room ornamented with a modern equestrian statue of Clisson, by Fremiet, are the chief apartments shown.

In the court within the walls is an ancient well surrounded by an elaborate forged iron railing.

One takes the road again, by the way of Locminé and Baud, for Auray, the most dainty and charming of all Breton market-towns, passing through a delightfully picturesque country of rolling hills and deep valleys and fir forests, studded here and there with lakelets.

Locminé, which derives its name from _Locmenec’h_ (monk’s cell), was the site of a monastery founded in the sixth century by St. Colomban. It was burned by the Normans in the ninth century, after the pleasant custom of these invaders, and reëstablished in 1006 by Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, as a priory attached to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuis.

In the present church of Locminé is a chapel dedicated to St. Colomban, containing a painting representing scenes from the life of the saint; others are carried out in the coloured glass of the windows.

One reads the following,--a supplication on behalf of the dangerous madmen who at one time occupied two cells beneath the pavement:

“St. Colomban, patron of Locminé, pray for us!
St. Colomban, help of idiots, pray for us!”

Behind the church is an elaborate ossuary dating from Renaissance times, when these adjuncts to burial-grounds were so plentifully scattered over Brittany.

Baud has an enormous parish church of the time of Louis XIV., with a fine Gothic arcade and a great crucifix standing beside the outer wall. Aside from this, there is not much else here to attract one, unless he be a pilgrim affected with disease of the eye. If he be, and if he bathe in the “Fontaine de la clarté,” and the fates be propitious, and he be not too far gone otherwise, and everything else be as it should, he will be cured forthwith--perhaps.

It is unkind to scoff at these miraculous fountains scattered here and there over the world, of course, but one has seen so many individual cases that were not benefited, and heard of so many that were, that one may be justified in a little skepticism.

To Auray is twenty kilometres by a road which gently rolls down a matter of 150 metres of elevation until it reaches sea-level at the little market-town seaport known in Breton as Alre.