Chapter XI: Rennes and Beyond

Rennes was once a great provincial capital, as great politically, perhaps, as Rouen, but it has not a tithe of the fascination or wealth of attraction of the Norman metropolis, and never had. Its Cathedral of St. Pierre is a cold, unfeeling thing, and its eighteenth-century town hall, its great military barracks, and its palace of a university are in no way great or lovable architectural monuments. As an offset against the mediocrity, is the somewhat bare exterior of the court-house, built in 1618 for the Breton Parliament, and furnished now, as then, in most luxurious fashion.

The Salle des Pas-Perdus is a vast apartment, most delightfully planned and decorated, and of the Grand Parliamentary Chamber the same may be said. Above the floor of this chamber are still to be seen the tribunes where the dames of other days, of the days of Madame de Sévigné, assisted at the sessions.

The town hall contains a library of eighty thousand volumes, of which one hundred or more are first editions, and six hundred manuscripts.

The museums of the university palace are exceedingly rich in treasure, and are in every way worthy of a great provincial capital.

For the rest, Rennes is a most ordinary, uninteresting town, though it does possess two mediæval monuments of remark: the Porte Mordelaise, a historic souvenir of the military architecture of the middle ages, and Church of Our Lady, the ancient chapel and cloister of an eleventh-century monastery founded by the Bishop St. Mélaine.

There are many fine old Renaissance houses scattered here and there about the town, but the general aspect is modern, and mediocre at that. Rennes would have been called by century-ago travellers “a well-built town,” and such it certainly is, as becomes the ancient capital of the duchy of Brittany.

In later days it is mostly known to the general reader as the scene of the famous Dreyfus trial, and its only liveliness comes from the officers of the tenth army corps, who, of a summer’s night, frequent the coffee-rooms opposite the court-house or the theatre, or promenade in the Thabor and the flower-garden, the old gardens of the Benedictine convent.

Just previous to the Revolution, there were stirring times in Rennes, when a marshal of France commanded the troops camped within the city. The discontent of the people had arisen from two distinct causes, the price of bread and the abolition of its ancient parliament. The former seems a good enough excuse, but the latter is inexplicable, except, perhaps, as the snuffing out of an ancient source of local pride. It was to Rennes that Père Caussin, the father confessor of Louis XIII., was sent by Richelieu, when he proved himself incapable of becoming the tool of the cardinal. The prison of state at Rennes was a terrible place in those days, but the true churchman preferred it to exile as a missionary in the wilds.

All this and much more of political history made Rennes a famous centre in times past, but to-day it is so much like a bad imitation of Paris, that in desperation the stranger within the gates finally takes his departure for more idyllic parts, with the vow that never again will he seek to learn of present-day Brittany from the cafés and boulevards of Rennes.

One other comment may be made on the unloveliness of Rennes as a place of temporary sojourn; and that is on its cab-drivers. The driver of a fiacre in the average Breton large town is like his fellows of Paris. He drives with a loose rein, and rushes helter-skelter down narrow streets with never a care for other traffic, or for foot-passengers, save a shouted, “_He, la-bas!_” which is so sudden and unforeseen that it is quite useless as a warning. There have been those who have said that the hoot of an automobile’s horn would drive even the “_sense of traffic_”--a new sense recently discovered by the Parisian medical journals--from out of the brain of even the most careful of persons! This is as naught compared to the Breton cab-driver’s stentorian “_He, la-bas!_”

As one comes to the open country again, he leaves all these distractions behind, and revels in nature, and if he be travelling by road, in the stubbornness of cows and sheep and the aggressiveness of geese and ducks, all road-users like himself.

Westward of Rennes, twenty kilometres by road, is Montfort-sur-Meu, a charming small town, situated upon the banks of two tiny rivers. Its origin dates back to an ancient eleventh-century fortress, which remains to-day in the form of a great cylindrical machicolated tower. The Seigneury of Montfort, since the fifteenth century, has passed successively, by marriage or by heritage, through the houses of Laval, Rieux, Coligny, and La Trémouille.

Next is Montauban, with a fine, moss-grown ruin of a château, dating from the fifteenth century; the town itself numbers three thousand inhabitants, but it does not look it.

St. Méen, a dozen kilometres farther on, was born of a monastery founded in the tenth century by a holy man of its name. It was destroyed and rebuilt many times in the years to follow, but its old abbatial church still exists, one tower coifed by a dome, and another smaller and flat. But no one comes here to see this fine old monkish relic but the farming folk from round about, though St. Méen is a town of three thousand souls and an idyllic artists’ sketching-ground. No colony of painters has yet settled here, leaving it a wholly new field to exploit by any painter looking for new worlds to conquer.

Loudéac and Pontivy, the one in the Côtes du Nord, and the other in the Morbihan, are two characteristically Breton towns bearing no relation whatever to the outside world. It seems doubtful indeed if the inhabitants of these two centres are aware that there is any outside world, so taken up are they with their own little affairs.

Loudéac has some six thousand inhabitants, but it has no apparent industries to hold all these people together, and it seems as if they had simply grouped themselves at the crossing of five great routes and built a town. Its foundation does not go very far back into antiquity; its parish church is only 150 years old, but the Chapel of Notre Dame Vertus dates from the thirteenth century.

In October, November, and December are held great cider-apple markets, which, from their magnitude, would seem to be the chief source of income of the population.

The ancient slogan of Pontivy, born of Revolutionary times, was “Freedom or Death,” which is not far different from the battle-cry of socialists the world over to-day. The condition of the inhabitants of Pontivy, however, does not differ from most folk elsewhere, and the frowning walls of its old castle ironically point to the fact that the time has not yet come when a successful social revolution can be steered through the breakers ahead--not even in France, where indeed there are even more advanced ideas on the subject than in Germany itself.

The memory of this event, though the “Treaty of Pontivy” was sent broadcast through all the communes of France, has quite died out, and the serenity of a little Breton market-town long ago settled upon Pontivy, with nothing but a dim memory existing to neutralize the admiration one is bound to have for the town’s wonderfully picturesque castle. It is a grand ruin with crumbled roof and walls, but its outlines are as clear as ever they were, and if it has not the magnitude or magnificence of many others of its class, it looks far more imposing, and forms an exquisite stage setting for any mediæval romance one is able to conjure up. The history of Pontivy and its castle is this:

The town owes its origin to a monastery built here in the seventh century by St. Ivy, an English monk. The castle, however, was a foundation of seven hundred years later, by John of Rohan, in 1485. At the creation of the duchy of Rohan, in 1663, Pontivy became the first seat of this jurisdiction.

At the Revolution the famous Pontivy treaty mentioned came into being, with the result that in 1802 a consuls’ decree prescribed the construction of a vast barrack at Pontivy, and the canalization of the river Blavet, upon which it sits, down to the sea.

Napoleon, however, by a decree given at Milan, sought to create a new town south of the present city, whose name should be Napoleonville. All this because Pontivy had declared for the rights of man. When the Revolutionists sought power Pontivy had every chance, but with Napoleon his desire was to efface it.

Pontivy is distinctly Breton in every aspect; its manners, customs, and above all its costumes. Decidedly one’s itinerary in Brittany should be made to include it.

Rostrenen is a delightful old town banked high upon a hillside some six hundred feet above the valley. The old-time collegiate church is a thirteenth-century foundation, which, though restored in our day, has all the loveliness of the era of its foundation well preserved.

Like the church at Josselin it is called Our Lady of the Blackberry-bush, from a miraculous Virgin found beneath a blackberry-bush. The great day of pilgrimage to this shrine is the fifteenth of August.

Carhaix is a little Breton town now all but shorn of its former importance, though its breed of cattle is prized above all others in Brittany,--as if that were enough to keep its memory alive. Anciently Carhaix was the capital of the Vorganium, whose peoples took an active part in the wars against Cæsar. Seven Roman ways centred here, and there are yet to be seen the remains of an ancient Roman aqueduct.

Vorganium ultimately lost its rank, and was made a part of the realm of Cornouaille founded by King Grollo, who gave Carhaix its present name--then Ker-Ahès.

Carhaix is the birthplace of La Tour d’Auvergne, “the first Grenadier of France.” His career was almost legendary, and after his famous infernal column which went up against the Spaniards in the Pyrenees, he retired to the city of his birth, and took up the study of the Celtic tongue. In 1796, when the Terror broke out, at the age of fifty-two, he took the haversack and cartridge-box of a simple soldier, to replace the son of an old friend who had been drawn by conscription. He would never advance a single grade, but remained in the ranks from this time forward, and was killed at the battle of Oberhausen in Bavaria. His heart is enshrined in the Hôtel des Invalides at Paris, having been brought there and buried with great pomp in 1904.

Carhaix has a real novelty in its horse-market, held before the Church of St. Trémeur. There is nothing actually profane or sacrilegious about this perhaps; but yet again, perhaps there is. Certainly it is incongruous to see a long string of horses tethered to the very church door-knob itself, with the breeders seated back against the church wall smoking tobacco and eating and drinking.

Huelgoat is in the very heart of Finistère. It is as typical in the manners and customs of these parts as is Pont l’Abbé in Cornouaille or Auray in Morbihan. It has one of the finest sites given to a town in all Brittany, and abounds in quaintness and beauty.

There are various ecclesiastical monuments and religious shrines in and near the town, of which the guide-books tell, and all are well worth visiting.

The market-place of Huelgoat does not differ greatly from other market-places in Brittany. The costumes are brilliant in magpie colours,--if white coifs flashing in the sunlight can be said to make colour,--and the little life and the little affairs of the peasant people scintillate and fluctuate from day to day as if they were the most serious and momentous things in all the world.

Above, on the right, rises the quaint bell-tower of the sixteenth-century church, not beautiful of itself, perhaps, but grouping wonderfully with the moving foreground.

Huelgoat is a great place for ducks, evidently, for ducks big, little, and of all colours of the rainbow are apparently the chief and staple article of trade. What the value may be to-day, as compared with what it was last market-day, no one can prognosticate. Two francs is certainly not much for a nice fat duck, just waiting to be plucked and garnished with green peas, but two francs for a brace is cheaper still, and two francs for a whole flock or bevy, or whatever formation ducks group themselves in, is a still better bargain, and on occasions you may buy a whole duck and drake family--father and mother and two or three youngsters--for a matter of _une pièce_, which is the Breton’s way of counting a hundred sous or five francs.

From Huelgoat the highroad branches to Morlaix in the northwest, and Landerneau, directly to the west, when one comes once more on the national road, running westward from Alençon by way of Fougères and the north to Brest.