One can have no conception of the energy of these early builders, fighting heroically against difficulties such as we of the present day do not experience. They overcame problems of balance and expressed their own imaginations. Common masons with stone and brick and wood accomplished marvellous and audacious examples of architecture. They sought symmetry as well as the beautifying of their homes, covering them with ornamentations and sculpture in wood and stone. Without architects, without plans or designs, these men simply followed their own initiative, and the result has been absolute marvels of carpentry and stone-work, such as have withstood the onslaught of time and held their own.
When you first arrive at Vitré, at the crowded, bustling station, surrounded by the most modern of houses and hotels, and faced by the newest of fountains, disappointment is acute. If you were to leave Vitré next morning, never having penetrated into the town, you would carry away a very feeble and uninteresting impression; but, having entered the town, and discovered those grand old streets—the Baudrarie, the Poterie, and the Nôtre Dame, among many others—poet, painter, sculptor, man of business or of letters, whoever you may be, you cannot fail to be astonished, overwhelmed, and delighted. A quiet old-world air pervades the streets; no clatter and rattle of horses' hoofs disturbs their serenity; no busy people, hurrying to and fro, fill the pathways. Handcarts are the only vehicles, and the inhabitants take life quietly. Often for the space of a whole minute you will find yourself quite alone in a street, save for a hen and chickens that are picking up scraps from the gutter.
In these little old blackened streets, ever so narrow, into which the sun rarely penetrates except to touch the upper stories with golden rays, there are houses of every conceivable shape—there are houses of three stories, each story projecting over the other; houses so old that paint and plaster will stay on them no longer; houses with pointed roofs; houses with square roofs thrust forward into the street, spotted by yellow moss; houses the façades of which are covered with scaly gray tiles, glistening in the sun like a knight's armour. These are placed in various patterns according to the taste and fantasy of the architect: sometimes they are cut round, sometimes square, and sometimes they are placed like the scales of a fish. There are houses, whose upper stories, advancing into the middle of the street, are kept up by granite pillars, forming an arcade underneath, and looking like hunchbacked men; there are the houses of the humble artisans and the houses of the proud noblemen; houses plain and simple in architecture; houses smothered with carvings in wood and stone of angels and saints and two-headed monsters—houses of every shape and kind imaginable. In a certain zigzag, tortuous street the buildings are one mass of angles and sloping lines, one house leaning against another,—noble ruins of the ages. The plaster is falling from the walls; the slates are slipping from the roofs; and the wood is becoming worm-eaten.
It is four o'clock on a warm autumn afternoon; the sun is shining on one side of this narrow street, burnishing gray roofs to silver, resting lovingly on the little balconies, with their pendent washing and red pots of geranium. The men are returning from their work and the children from their schools; the workaday hours are ended, and the houses teem with life. A woman is standing in a square sculptured doorway trying to teach her little white-faced fluffy-haired baby to say 'Ma! ma!' This he positively refuses to do; but he gurgles and chuckles at intervals, at which his mother shakes him and calls him 'petit gamin.'
PREPARING THE MID-DAY MEAL
All Bretons love the sun; they are like little children in their simple joy of it. A workman passing says to a girl leaning out of a low latticed window:
'C'est bon le soleil?'
'Mais oui: c'est pour cela que j'y suis,' she answers.