Rambles in Brittany

by M. F. Mansfield

TO-DAY the Bretons are the most loyal of all the citizens of the great republic of France. In reality they are a most democratic people, though they often affect a devotion for old institutions now defunct. They may be a superstitious race, but they are not suspicious, although they have marked prejudices. When thoroughly understood, they are both likable and lovable, though their aspect be one of a certain sternness and aloofness toward the stranger. Their weapons are all in plain view, however, like the hedgehog’s; there is nothing concealed to thwart one’s desires for relations with them.

Their country, their climate, and their environment have much to do with their character, manners, and customs; and environment—as some one may have said before—is the greatest influence at work in shaping the attitude of a people toward an outsider, and every one is still an outsider to a Breton, be he French, English, or American.

The Breton is really a gayer person than his expression leads one to suppose. Madame de Sévigné wrote, with some assurance, as was her wont: “You make me prefer the gamesomeness of our Bretons to the perfumed idleness of the Provençals.”

Certainly, to one who knows both races, the comparison was well made. It is a case of doing mischief against doing nothing.

Brittany has not Normandy’s general air of prosperity, and indeed at times there is a very near approach to poverty and distress, and then it is bruited abroad in the public prints that the fisheries have proved a failure.

The Breton farming peasant, however, is not the poverty-stricken wretch that he has sometimes been painted. He lives humbly, and eats vast quantities of potatoes and bread, little meat, some fish, always a salad, and, usually, a morsel of cheese, but he eats it off a cleanly scrubbed bare board and from clean and unchipped plates.

In his stable, such few belongings in the form of live stock as he has are well fed and contented, and his chickens and ducks and pigs and cows are as much a pride and profit to him as to the peasant of other parts; but, after all, Brittany is not a land of milk and honey. The peasant lives in the atmosphere of dogged, obstinate labour, but he draws a competence from it, and it is mostly those who live in the seacoast villages, and those who will huddle themselves in and about the large towns and ports, such as Quimper and Brest, that are ever in want, and then only because of some untoward, unexpected circumstance.

Agriculture and the business of the sea are closely allied in Brittany. Hundreds upon hundreds of young men work in the winter upon farms far inland, and come down to the sea with the coming of February and March, to ship in some longshore fishing-smack, or even to go as far away as Newfoundland, the Orkneys, or to Iceland.

This gives not only a peculiar blend of character, but also a peculiar cast of countenance to the Breton; he is a sort of half-land and half-sea specimen of humanity, and handy at the business of either.

In many ports, the Breton struggles continually against shifting sand,—sand which is constantly shifting when piled in banks on the seashore, and becomes of the nature of quicksand when lying beneath the water where the Breton moors his lobster-pots. Between the two, he is constantly harassed, and until the off season comes has little of that gaiety into which he periodically relaxes. Every one will remark that the aspect of both men and women is sombre and dark, even though their spontaneous gaiety and dress on the feast of a patron saint or at a great pardon gives one the impression of gladness.