“The room where she wrote them,” said Master Lewis.
“They must be very wonderful letters, I should think,” said Tommy, “to make a traveller take all that trouble.”
“They are,” said Master Lewis. “Lord Macaulay says, ‘Among modern works I only know two perfect ones; they are Pascal’s Provincial Letters, and the Letters of Madame de Sévigné.’”
The Class was now in Brittany, a province old and poor, whose very charm is its simplicity and quaintness. Normandy smiles; Brittany wears a sombre aspect everywhere. Normandy is a bed of flowers; Brittany seems to be a bed of stone. Here and there may be seen a church buried in greenery, but the landscape is one of heath, fern, and broom.
The people are as peculiar as the country. Their costumes are odd, some of them even wear goat-skins. Many of them lead a sea-faring life; it is the Bretons who chiefly man the French navy.
They cling to old legends and superstitions with great fondness; the wild country abounds with wonder-stories. Nearly all of these stories are striking from their very improbability. They relate to an imaginary period when the Apostles travelled in Brittany, or to men and women who were transformed during some part of their lives into animals, especially into wolves. The story-telling beggars furnish much of the fiction to the unread people.
Those legends which are the chief favorites are undoubtedly very old. The Class listened to several of them at their hotel at St. Malo. Some of them begin in a way that at once arrests attention; as the following story of the
OLD WOMAN’S COW.
When St. Peter and St. John were visiting the poor in Brittany they stopped one day to rest at a farm-house among the trees, where they met a little old woman who kindly brought them a pitcher of cool water.
After the saints had drunk, the old woman told them the story of her hard life. She had seen better days, she said; her husband had once owned a cow, but he had lost it, and he now was only a laborer on the place.