Still, in all but four months of the year, there is a brilliancy and softness about the climate of the coast of Brittany which encourages violets, roses, onions, and potatoes to come to maturity at so early a date that the Londoner has ceased to raise the question as to whether or not they may be “best English,” when he sees these products laid out of an early morning in his beloved Covent Garden.
To know a country or its people at its best, one should really take one of its great men for a guide. Hear then what Chateaubriand says of “La Terre Bretonne”:
“This long peninsula, of a wild and savage aspect, has much of singularity about it: its narrow valleys, its non-navigable rivers bathing the feet of its ruined castle-keeps and châteaux, its old abbeys, its thatch-covered houses, and its cattle herded together in its arid pastures. One valley is separated from another by forests of oak, with holly bushes as large as beech-trees, and druidical stones around which sea-birds are for ever circling.
“Of an imagination lively, but nevertheless melancholic, of a humour as flexible as their character is obstinate, the Bretons are distinguished for their piety, and none the less for their bravery, their fidelity, their spirit of independence, and their patriotism. Proud and susceptible, but without ambition and little suited to the affairs of court or state, they care nothing for honours or for rank.”
The picture is not very vivid, but it is wonderfully true, and of this one meets continual evidence in a journey around the coast, from the Bay of St. Michel in the north to Belle Ile or Nantes in the south.
No part of France has a physiognomy more original than Bretagne; none has been marked by nature in a more emphatic manner than this ancient home of the Celts.
“...la terre du granit
Et de l’immense et morne lande.”
It is indeed a land of contrasts, where ancient, mystical, and weird menhirs and dolmens, relics of prehistoric times, are mingled with mediæval monuments and modern forts, arsenals, and viaducts.
The country is by no means unlovely, but it partakes of none of the conventional beauties of other parts. It is not sterile, though it is stern; it is not very fertile, but its product is ample; and it stands as the most westerly point of the mainland of Northern Europe, open to all the wild buffetings of the tempestuous Atlantic which has sculptured its coast-line into such fantastic forms that a shipwrecked mariner must think himself fallen upon the most stern and rock-bound of coasts.
The general aspect of Brittany is green and gray. It is, as the Breton himself says, an austere heath,—the country-side half-effaced in demi-tints, and the sea boisterous and wicked.