Writing of his stay at Guingamp,—which is about the dividing line where one passes from the zone of the French tongue to that of the Breton, where one is frequently to hear the short exclamation, “I do not understand you,”—Arthur Young tells us of putting up at a roadside inn “where the hangings over his bed were full of cobwebs and spiders.” The inn-keeper remarked to him that he had “a superb English mare,” and wished to buy it from him. “I gave him half a dozen flowers of French eloquence for his impertinence,” said the witty traveller, “when he thought proper to leave me and my spiders in peace.” “Apropos of the breed of horses in Lower Brittany,” he continues, “they are capital hunters, and yet my ordinary little English mare was much admired, while every stable round about is filled with a pack of these little pony stallions sufficient to perpetuate the local breed for long to come.”
To the humble inn—one of the regular posting-houses on the great highroad from Paris to Brest—he is not so complimentary. “This villainous hole,” said he, “which calls itself a great house, is the best inn of the town, at which marshals of France, dukes, peers, countesses, and so forth, must now and then, by the accidents to which long journeys are subject, have found themselves. What are we to think of a country that has made, in the eighteenth century, no better provision for its travellers?” In this our author was clearly a faultfinder, or at least he was unfortunate in not living at a later day, for the above is certainly not true of the inns of France to-day, though it may truthfully be said that, even to-day, the inns of Brittany are a little backward, but it is not true of the Hôtel de France at Guingamp, which has even a dark room for the kodaker, and a fossé for the motor-car traveller.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FISHERIES
WHAT the cider-apple crop is to Normandy, that the fisheries are to Brittany, and more, for the fisheries turn over more money by far than the cider of Normandy, which is grown purely for home consumption. The Breton young person of the male sex takes to the sea in the little pilchard-boats, the three-masters of the deep-sea fishery, or the whalers, for the purpose of earning his livelihood, and also to secure a prescribed term of exemption from military or naval service. With such an object, it is no wonder that the industry employs so many hands, and has become so important and considerable in its returns. Of course the geographical position of the country has more than a little to do with this, and also the stony soil of the country-side, suggesting the harvest of the sea as a more ample crop.
In Brittany, the sea nourishes the land, though perhaps but meagrely.
Douarnenez