Brittany

by Dorothy Menpes

One house has an outside staircase of chocolate-coloured wood, spirally built, with carved balustrades. On one of the landings an old woman is sitting. She has brought out a chair and placed it in the sunniest corner. She is very old, and wears the snowiest of white caps on her gray hair; her wrinkled pink hands, with their red worsted cuffs, are working busily at her knitting; and every now and then she glances curiously through the banisters into the street below, like a little bright bird.

There are white houses striped with brown crossbars, each with its little shallow balcony. Above, the white plaster has nearly all fallen away, revealing the beautiful old original primrose-yellow.

Curiosity shops are abundant everywhere, dim and rich in colour with the reds and deep tones of old polished wood, the blue of china, and the glistening yellow of brass. Ancient houses there are, with scarcely any windows: the few that one does see are heavily furnished with massive iron-nailed shutters or grated with rusty red iron; the doorways are of heaviest oak, crowned with coats of arms sculptured in stone. Large families of dirty children now live in these lordly domains.

One longs in Vitré, above all other places, to paint, or, rather, to etch. Vitré is made for the etcher; endless and wondrous are the subjects for his needle. Here, in a markedly time-worn street, are a dozen or more pictures awaiting him—a doorway aged and blackened alternately by the action of the sun and by that of the rain, and carved in figures and symbols sculptured in stone, through which one catches glimpses of a courtyard wherein two men are shoeing a horse; then, again, there is an obscure shop, so calm and tranquil that one asks one's self if business can ever be carried on there. As you peer into the darkness, packets of candles, rope, and sugar are faintly discernible, also dried fish and bladders of lard suspended from the ceiling; in a far corner is an old woman in a white cap—all this in deepest shadow. Above, the clear yellow autumn sunlight shines in a perfect blaze upon the primrose-coloured walls, crossed with beams of blackest wood, making the slates on the pointed roofs scintillate, and touching the windows here and there with a golden light.

IN CHURCH

Side by side with this wonderful old house, the glories of which it is impossible to describe in mere words, a new one has been built—not in a modern style, but striving to imitate the fine old structures in this very ancient street. The contrast, did it not grate on one's senses, would be laughable. Stucco is pressed into the service to represent the original old stone, and varnished deal takes the place of oak beams with their purple bloom gathered through the ages. The blocks of stone round the doors and windows have been laboriously hewn, now large, now small, and placed artistically and carelessly zigzag, pointed with new black cement. This terrible house is interesting if only to illustrate what age can do to beautify and modernity to destroy.

Madonnas, crucifixes, pictures of saints in glass cases, and statuettes of the Virgin, meet you at every turn in Vitré, for the inhabitants are proverbially a religious people. A superstitious yet guilty conscience would have a trying time in Vitré. In entering a shop, St. Joseph peers down upon you from a niche above the portal; at every street corner, in every market, and in all kinds of quaint and unexpected places, saints and angels look out at you.

The beautiful old cathedral, Nôtre Dame de Vitré, is one of the purest remaining productions of the decadent Gothic art in Brittany, and one of the finest. Several times the grand old edifice has been enlarged and altered, and the changes in art can be traced through different additions as in the pages of a book. It is a comparatively low building, the roof of which is covered by a forest of points or spires, and at the apex of each point is a stone cross. In fact, the characteristics of this building are its points: the windows are shaped in carved points, and so are the ornamentations on the projecting buttresses. The western door, very finely carved and led up to by a flight of rounded steps, is of the Renaissance period. In colouring, the cathedral is gray, blackened here and there, but not much stained by damp or lichen, except the tower, which seems to be of an earlier date. The stained-glass windows, seen from the outside, are of a dim, rich colouring; and on one of the outside walls has been built an exterior stone pulpit, ornamented with graceful points, approached from the church by a slit in the wall. It was constructed to combat the Calvinistic party, so powerful in Vitré at one time. One can easily imagine the seething crowd in the square below—the sea of pale, passionate, upturned faces. It must have presented much the same picture then as it does now, this cathedral square in Vitré—save for the people;—for there are still standing, facing the pulpit, and not a hundred paces from it, a row of ancient houses that existed in those very riotous times. Every line of those once stately domains slants at a different angle now, albeit they were originally built in a solid style—square-fronted and with pointed roofs, the upper stories projecting over the pavement, with arcades beneath. Some are painted white, with gray woodwork; others yellow, with brown wood supports. Outside one of the houses, once a butcher's shop, hangs a boar's head, facing the stone pulpit. What scenes that old animal must have witnessed in his time, gazing so passively with those glassy brown eyes! If only it could speak!