Gustave Brion, with his “Bretons à la Porte d’une Eglise”; Yan Dargent, with his “Sauvetage à Guisseny,” and Jules Noel, with his “Danse Bretonne,” and various landscapes of Brest, Quimper, Auray, and Douarnenez, are on the list of names of those who made the Breton region famous in the mid-nineteenth century.
Since then, the followers in their footsteps have been almost too many to number.
Most folk call to mind with very slight appreciable effort such masterpieces as Jules Breton’s “Retraite aux Flambeaux” and “Plantation d’un Calvaire,” now in the museum at Lille, and Charles Cottet’s “Bateaux de Pêche à Camaret” in the Luxembourg gallery.
In addition, there have been innumerable “great pictures” painted by English and American artists whose very names form too long a list to catalogue here.
CHAPTER III.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE PROVINCE
ONE reason for the diversified interests of France and the varying methods of life is the vastly diversified topographical features. “Great plains as large as three Irelands,” said Hamerton, “and yet mountainous districts quite as large as the whole of the British Isles.” This should have served to disabuse British travellers of some false notions regarding France, but many of them still hold to the views which are to be gained by railway journeys across the lowlands of Gaul, forgetting for a moment that well within the confines of France there are fifty mountain peaks above eleven thousand feet high, and that majestic Mont Blanc itself rises on French soil.
Then there are the two thousand miles of seacoast which introduce another element of the population, from the dark-skinned sailor of the Mediterranean to his brother of Finistère, who is brought into the world chiefly to recruit the French navy. The Norman sailorman is a hardy, intrepid navigator even to-day, but he is to a great extent of the longshore and fishing-boat variety, whereas the true Breton is a sailor through and through.
Before now, Brittany has been compared, disparagingly, with Provence, and with some justness perhaps. Provence, however, does not persistently broil under a “fierce, dry heat,” and Brittany is not by any means “a wind and wave swept land, where nothing nourishes itself or grows fat.” Potatoes are even fattening, and Brittany, in all conscience, grows enough of that useful commodity to feed all France. In three things Brittany and Provence more than a little resemble one another. Both preserve, to a very remarkable extent, their ancient language and their old-time manners and customs, though in all three they are quite different one from the other.
The general topographical aspect of the coast of the whole Breton peninsula is stern and wild, whether one encounters the dreary waste of sand, in the midst of which sit Mont St. Michel and Tombelaine, or the cliffs away to the westward, or the bleak and barren Belle Ile en Mer, where Fouquet built his famous stronghold.
On the “Emerald Coast” the sea and sky are often of a true Neapolitan clearness, and, indeed, the climate of the whole peninsula is, even in winter, as mild as many a popularly fashionable Mediterranean resort; but it is not always so bright and sunny; there is a deal of rain in winter, and often a penetrating dampness, whose only brother is the genuine Scotch mist.