A Childhood in Brittany Eighty Years Ago

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

"Kerouguet you married and Kerouguet you must remain," and the new cards had to be relinquished.

My mother, with her black hair and blue eyes, had a charming nose of the sort called "un nez Roxalane." It began very straight and fine, but had a flattened little plateau on the tip which we called "la promenade de maman." My memory of her then is of a very active, gay, authoritative young woman, going to balls, paying and receiving visits, and riding out with my father, wearing the sweeping habit of those days and an immense beaver hat and plume.

Quimper is an old town, and the hôtels of the noblesse, all situated in the same quarter and on a steep street, were of blackened, crumbling stone. From portes-cochères one entered the courtyards, and the gardens behind stretched far into the country.

In the courtyard of our hôtel was a stone staircase, with elaborate carvings, like those of the Breton churches, leading to the upper stories, but for use there were inner staircases. My mother's boudoir, the petit salon, the grand salon, the salle-à-manger, and the billiard-room were on the ground floor and gave out upon the garden.

The high walls that ran along the street and surrounded the garden were concealed by plantations of trees, so that one seemed to look out into the country. Flower beds were under the salon-windows, and there were long borders of wild strawberries that had been transplanted from the woods, as my mother was very fond of them. Fruit-trees grew against the walls, and beyond the groves and flower beds and winding gravel paths was an orchard, with apricot-, pear-, and apple-trees, and the clear little river Odel, with its washing-stones, where the laundry-maids beat the household linen in the cold, running water.

It was pleasant to hear the clap-clap-clap on a hot summer day. Is it known that the pretty pied water-wagtail is called la lavandière from its love of water and its manner of beating up and down its tail as our washerwomen wield their wooden beaters?

Beyond the river were the woods where I often rode with my father, and beyond the woods distant ranges of mountains. I looked out at all this from my nursery-windows, with their frame of climbing-roses and heliotrope. Near my window was a great lime-tree of the variety known as American. The vanilla-like scent of its flowers was almost overpowering, and all this fragrance gave my mother a headache, and she had to have her room moved away from the garden to another part of the house. How clearly I see this room of my mother's, with its high, canopied four-poster bed and the pale-gray paper on the walls covered with yellow fleurs-de-lis!

The wall-paper in my father's room was one of the prettiest I have ever seen, black, all bespangled with bright butterflies. Of the grand salon I remember most clearly the high marble mantelpiece, upheld by hounds sitting on their haunches. On this mantelpiece was a huge boule clock, two tall candelabra of Venetian glass, and two figures in vieux Saxe of a marquis and a marquise that filled us with delight. On each side of the fireplace were two Louis XV court chairs—chairs, that is, with only one arm, to admit of the display of the great hoop-skirts of the period. I remember, too, our special delight in the foot-stools, which were of mahogany, shaped rather like gondolas and cushioned in velvet; for we could sit inside them and make them rock up and down.

The houses of the noblesse swarmed with servants; many of them were married, and their children, and even their grandchildren, lived on with our family in patriarchal fashion. Men and maids all wore the costumes of their respective Breton cantons, exceedingly beautiful some of them, stiff with heavy embroideries, the strange caps of the women fluted and ruffled, adorned with lace, rising high above their heads and falling in long lappets upon their shoulders, or perched on their heads like butterflies. These caps were decorated with large gold pins and dangling golden pendants, and these and the materials for the costumes were handed down in the peasants' families from generation to generation. My young nurse Jeannie—there was an old nurse called Gertrude—wore a skirt of bright-blue woolen stuff and a black-cloth bodice opening in a square over a net fichu thickly embroidered with paillettes of every color. Hers was the small flat cap of Quimper, with the odd foolscap excrescence, rather like the horn of a rhinoceros, curving forward over the forehead. Needless to say, the servants did not do their daily work in this fine array; while that went on they were enveloped from head to foot in large aprons.

The servants and the peasants in the Brittany of those days had a pretty custom of always using the thou when addressing their masters or the Deity, thus inverting the usual association of this mode of address; for to each other they said you, and on their lips this was the familiar word, and the thou implied respect. Our servants were of the peasant class, but service altered and civilized them very much, and while no peasant spoke anything but Breton, they talked in an oddly accented French. I remember a pretty example of this in a dear old man who served my little cousin Guénolé du Jacquelot du Bois-Laurel. Guénolé and I, because of some naughtiness, were deprived of strawberries one day at our supper, and the fond old man, grieving over the discomfiture of his little master, said, or, rather chanted, half in condolence, and half in playful consolation: "Oh, le pauvre Guénolé, que tu es désolé!" accenting the o in a very droll fashion.