ON THE STEPS OF THE MILL HOUSE, PONT-AVEN
I love this rough, wild country. How variable it is! You may sit in a wood with the stream at your feet, and all about you will be great hills half-covered with gorse and bracken, and here and there huge blocks of granite, which seem ready to fall any moment.
The Bois d'Amour is a happy hunting-ground of artists. This particular view of the mill at which I gazed so long has been a stock-subject with painters for many years. You never pass without seeing at least one or two men with canvases spread and easels erected, vainly trying to reproduce the beautiful scene. Artists are plentiful in this country. Wherever you may wander within a radius of fifteen miles, you cannot stop at some attractive prospect without hearing an impatient cough behind you, and, turning, find yourself obstructing the view of a person in corduroys and flannel shirt, with a large felt hat, working, pipe aglow, at an enormous canvas. The artists, who are mostly English, are thought very little of by the people about. I once heard a commercial traveller talking of Pont-Aven.
'Pshaw!' he said, 'they are all English and Americans there. Everything is done for the English. At the Hôtel des Voyageurs even the cuisine is English. It is unbearable! At the table the men wear clothes of inconceivable colour and cut. They talk without gestures, very quickly and loudly, and they eat enormously. The young mecs are flat-faced, with long chins, white eye-lashes, and fair hair. Many are taciturn, morose, and dreamy. Occasionally they make jokes, but without energy. They mostly eat without interruption.'
This is the French view, and it is natural. Pont-Aven does not have the right atmosphere for the Frenchman: the Bretons and the English are supreme.
Nothing is more delightful than to spend a summer there. You find yourself in a colony of intelligent men, many of them very clever, as well as pretty young English and American girls, and University students on 'cramming' tours. Picnics and river-parties are organized by the inimitable Mdlle. Julia every day during the summer, and in the evening there is always dancing in the big salon. The hotel is full to overflowing from garret to cellar. Within the last few years Mdlle. Julia has opened another hotel at Porte Manec, by the sea, to which the visitors may transfer themselves whenever they choose, going either by river or by Mdlle. Julia's own omnibus. It is built on the same lines as Mme. Bernhardt's house at Belle Isle, and is situated on a breezy promontory.
The river lies between Pont-Aven and Porte Manec, which is at the mouth of the sea. How beautiful this river is—the dear old browny-gray, moleskin-coloured river, edged with great rocks on which the seaweed clings! On the banks are stretches of gray-green grass bordered by holly-bushes. The scenery changes constantly. Sometimes it is rugged and rocky, now sloping up, now down, now covered with green gorse or a sprinkling of bushes, now with a wilderness of trees. Here and there you will see a cleft in the mountain-side, a little leafy dell which one might fancy the abode of fairies. Silver streams trickle musically over the bare brown rocks, and large red toadstools grow in profusion, the silver cobwebs sparkling with dew in the gorse.
It is delightful in the marvellous autumn weather to take the narrow river-path winding in and out of the very twisty Aven, and wander onwards to your heart's content, with the steep hillside at the back of you and the river running at your feet. You feel as if you could walk on for ever over this mountainous ground, where the heather grows in great purple bunches among huge granite rocks, which, they say, were placed there by the Druids. Down below flows the river—a mere silver ribbon now, in wastes of pinky-purple mud, for it is ebb tide; and now and then you see the battered hulk of a boat lying on its side in the mud. On the hill are lines of fir-trees standing black and straight against the horizon.