The picturesque town of Quimperlé on the rivers Ellé and Isole, from which so many English travellers have been scared, in years gone by, by Murray’s laconic admonition, “No good inn,” is a most pleasant and comfortable resting-place. It is approached on a high level when coming by railway from Quimper, the road from the station winding round the hills down to the Place, where there is the comfortable Hôtel des Voyageurs. On arriving at Quimperlé, the aspect of the people is more cosmopolitan, for we are approaching the borders of the province of Morbihan, and are on the highway between Nantes and Brest.
The people at the station are not numerous, and they are nearly all third-class travellers. The quiet, almost taciturn company consists of a tourist, a sergent de ville, a commercial man of Quimperlé, the same old woman that we meet everywhere on our travels, in the comfortable dark hood and cape of the country, and a peasant-woman taking home her sack of meal, sketched on the opposite page.
Quimperlé contains about 6500 inhabitants, principally occupied in agriculture. It is surrounded by hills covered with orchards and gardens shut in by high walls; an old and sleepy place, full of memories of the past, and with, apparently, little ambition for the future. There is an ancient abbey church, built in the eleventh century, on the plan of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; in the crypt is the tomb of St. Gurloës, one of the early abbots of Quimperlé. The large grey-roofed building on the Place adjoining this church, now used as the Mairie, was formerly a convent of Benedictine nuns; and other buildings, such as the old inn, the Lion d’Or, were originally used by the abbots of St. Croix.
But Quimperlé, in spite of its railway, is a town where grass grows between the paving-stones of its streets; a place which owes much of its attraction to its picturesque site and its ancient buildings, to its market-days, its weddings and fêtes. In the lower town there are some old narrow streets, with most picturesque wooden gables, and there is one dilapidated square, called “the Place of Revolution,” where there would seem little left to destroy.
A painter might well make Quimperlé a centre of operations, for its precincts are little known; the gardens shine with laden fruit-trees, and the hills are rich in colour until late in autumn; and in the evening there is no better place for rest than under the trees on the Place Nationale. Here the people pass to and fro, as in the sketch on the opposite page; there are more women than men to be seen, for the latter are resting from their labours, in the cafés. Beyond, and high above this group, are the houses of the old town, surmounted by the two square Gothic towers, with spires covered with lichen, of the church of St. Michel. Under the trees near the river are women selling sardines and fruit. The position of the bridge over the Ellé is indicated by the man leaning over the stone parapet. The man with the cart has just come in with wood for winter fires.
