Next is Montauban, with a fine, moss-grown ruin of a château, dating from the fifteenth century; the town itself numbers three thousand inhabitants, but it does not look it.
St. Méen, a dozen kilometres farther on, was born of a monastery founded in the tenth century by a holy man of its name. It was destroyed and rebuilt many times in the years to follow, but its old abbatial church still exists, one tower coifed by a dome, and another smaller and flat. But no one comes here to see this fine old monkish relic but the farming folk from round about, though St. Méen is a town of three thousand souls and an idyllic artists’ sketching-ground. No colony of painters has yet settled here, leaving it a wholly new field to exploit by any painter looking for new worlds to conquer.
Loudéac and Pontivy, the one in the Côtes du Nord, and the other in the Morbihan, are two characteristically Breton towns bearing no relation whatever to the outside world. It seems doubtful indeed if the inhabitants of these two centres are aware that there is any outside world, so taken up are they with their own little affairs.
Loudéac has some six thousand inhabitants, but it has no apparent industries to hold all these people together, and it seems as if they had simply grouped themselves at the crossing of five great routes and built a town. Its foundation does not go very far back into antiquity; its parish church is only 150 years old, but the Chapel of Notre Dame Vertus dates from the thirteenth century.
In October, November, and December are held great cider-apple markets, which, from their magnitude, would seem to be the chief source of income of the population.
The ancient slogan of Pontivy, born of Revolutionary times, was “Freedom or Death,” which is not far different from the battle-cry of socialists the world over to-day. The condition of the inhabitants of Pontivy, however, does not differ from most folk elsewhere, and the frowning walls of its old castle ironically point to the fact that the time has not yet come when a successful social revolution can be steered through the breakers ahead—not even in France, where indeed there are even more advanced ideas on the subject than in Germany itself.
The memory of this event, though the “Treaty of Pontivy” was sent broadcast through all the communes of France, has quite died out, and the serenity of a little Breton market-town long ago settled upon Pontivy, with nothing but a dim memory existing to neutralize the admiration one is bound to have for the town’s wonderfully picturesque castle. It is a grand ruin with crumbled roof and walls, but its outlines are as clear as ever they were, and if it has not the magnitude or magnificence of many others of its class, it looks far more imposing, and forms an exquisite stage setting for any mediæval romance one is able to conjure up. The history of Pontivy and its castle is this:
The town owes its origin to a monastery built here in the seventh century by St. Ivy, an English monk. The castle, however, was a foundation of seven hundred years later, by John of Rohan, in 1485. At the creation of the duchy of Rohan, in 1663, Pontivy became the first seat of this jurisdiction.
At the Revolution the famous Pontivy treaty mentioned came into being, with the result that in 1802 a consuls’ decree prescribed the construction of a vast barrack at Pontivy, and the canalization of the river Blavet, upon which it sits, down to the sea.
Napoleon, however, by a decree given at Milan, sought to create a new town south of the present city, whose name should be Napoleonville. All this because Pontivy had declared for the rights of man. When the Revolutionists sought power Pontivy had every chance, but with Napoleon his desire was to efface it.