Over the doorways of the shops hang branches of withered mistletoe. Through the long low windows, which have broad sills, you catch a glimpse of rows and rows of bottles. These are wine-shops—no rarities in a Breton village. Another shop evidently belonged to the church at one time. It still possesses a rounded ecclesiastical doorway, built of solid blocks of stone, and the walls, which were white originally, are stained green with age. The windows, as high as your waist from the ground, have broad stone sills, on which are arranged carrots and onions, coloured sweets in bottles, and packets of tobacco. This shop evidently supplies everything that a human being can desire. Above it you read: 'Café on sert a boire et a manger.'
While we were in Quimperlé there were two musicians making a round of the town. One, with a swarthy face, was blind, and sang a weird song in a minor key, beating a triangle. The other, who looked an Italian, was raggedly dressed in an old fur coat and a faded felt hat. His musical performance was a veritable gymnastic feat. In his hands he held a large concertina, which he played most cleverly; at his back was a drum with automatic sticks and clappers, which he worked with his feet. It was the kind of music one hears at fairs. Wherever we went we heard it, sometimes so near that we could catch the tune, sometimes at a distance, when only the dull boom of the drum was distinguishable.
Whenever I think of Quimperlé this strange music and the spectacle of those two picturesque figures come back to memory. The men are well known in Brittany. They spend their lives travelling from place to place, earning a hard livelihood. When I was at school in Quimper I used to hear the same tune played by the same men outside the convent walls.
THE BLIND PIPER
Quimperlé is a sleepy place, changing very little with the years. In spite of the up-to-date railway-station, moss still grows between the pavings of the streets. The houses have still their picturesque wooden gables; the gardens are laden with fruit-trees; the hills are rich in colour. Flowers that love the damp grow luxuriantly. It is an arcadian country. The place is hostile to work. In this tranquil town, almost voluptuous in its richness of colour and balminess of atmosphere, you lose yourself in laziness. There is not a discordant note, nothing to shock the eye or grate on the senses. Far from the noise of Paris, the stuffy air of the boulevards, the never-ending rattle of the fiacres, and the rasping cries of the camelot, you forget the seething world outside.
In the Rue du Château, the aristocratic quarter, are many spacious domains with doorways surmounted by coats of arms and coronets. Most of them have closed shutters, their masters having disappeared, alienated for ever by the Revolution; but a few great families have returned to their homes. One sees many women about the church, grave and sad and prayerful, who still wear black, clinging to God, the saints, and the priests, as to the only living souvenirs of better times.
In no other place in Finistère was the Revolution so sudden and so terrible as in this little town, and nowhere were the nobility so many and powerful. This old Rue du Château must have rung with furious cries on the day when the federators returned from the fête of the Champs de Mars after the abolition of all titles and the people took the law into their own hands. The Bretons are slow to anger; but when roused they are extremely violent. They not only attacked the living—the nobles in their seignorial hotels—but also they went to the tombs and mutilated the dead with sabre cuts.
In Quimperlé the painter finds pictures at every turn. For example, there are clear sinuous streams crossed by many bridges, not unlike by-canals in Venice. As you look up the river the bank is a jumble of sloping roofs, protruding balconies, single-arched bridges, trees, and clumps of greenery. The houses on either side, gray and turreted, bathe their foundations in the stream. Some have steep garden walls, velvety with green and yellow moss and lichen; others have terraces and jutting stone balconies, almost smothered by trailing vines and clematis, drooping over the gray water. The stream is very shallow, showing clearly the brown and golden bed; and on low stone benches at the edge girls in little close white caps and blue aprons are busily washing with bare round arms. A pretty little maid with jet-black hair is cleaning some pink stuff on a great slab of stone, against a background of gray wall over which convolvulus and nasturtium are trailing; a string of white linen is suspended above her head. This is a delightful picture. It is a gray day, sunless; but the gray is luminous, and the reflections in the water are clear.