Monastery of St. Melaine, Rennes
Just previous to the Revolution, there were stirring times in Rennes, when a marshal of France commanded the troops camped within the city. The discontent of the people had arisen from two distinct causes, the price of bread and the abolition of its ancient parliament. The former seems a good enough excuse, but the latter is inexplicable, except, perhaps, as the snuffing out of an ancient source of local pride. It was to Rennes that Père Caussin, the father confessor of Louis XIII., was sent by Richelieu, when he proved himself incapable of becoming the tool of the cardinal. The prison of state at Rennes was a terrible place in those days, but the true churchman preferred it to exile as a missionary in the wilds.
All this and much more of political history made Rennes a famous centre in times past, but to-day it is so much like a bad imitation of Paris, that in desperation the stranger within the gates finally takes his departure for more idyllic parts, with the vow that never again will he seek to learn of present-day Brittany from the cafés and boulevards of Rennes.
One other comment may be made on the unloveliness of Rennes as a place of temporary sojourn; and that is on its cab-drivers. The driver of a fiacre in the average Breton large town is like his fellows of Paris. He drives with a loose rein, and rushes helter-skelter down narrow streets with never a care for other traffic, or for foot-passengers, save a shouted, “He, la-bas!” which is so sudden and unforeseen that it is quite useless as a warning. There have been those who have said that the hoot of an automobile’s horn would drive even the “sense of traffic”—a new sense recently discovered by the Parisian medical journals—from out of the brain of even the most careful of persons! This is as naught compared to the Breton cab-driver’s stentorian “He, la-bas!”
As one comes to the open country again, he leaves all these distractions behind, and revels in nature, and if he be travelling by road, in the stubbornness of cows and sheep and the aggressiveness of geese and ducks, all road-users like himself.
Westward of Rennes, twenty kilometres by road, is Montfort-sur-Meu, a charming small town, situated upon the banks of two tiny rivers. Its origin dates back to an ancient eleventh-century fortress, which remains to-day in the form of a great cylindrical machicolated tower. The Seigneury of Montfort, since the fifteenth century, has passed successively, by marriage or by heritage, through the houses of Laval, Rieux, Coligny, and La Trémouille.