Chapter V: 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.

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.