Rambles in Brittany

by M. F. Mansfield

AT Ancenis, the Loire, that mighty river which rises near the frontier of Garde, a Mediterranean department, enters Brittany on its way to the Atlantic. For more than nine hundred kilometres above this point, the Loire has been navigable for such fresh-water craft as usually are found upon great waterways, and, having passed Orleans, Blois, and Tours, and broadened out into a great, wide, shallow stream, it is to be reckoned as one of the world’s great rivers. Mostly its appearance is that of a broad, tranquil, docile stream, with scarce enough depth of water to make a respectable current, leaving its bed with its bars of sand and pebbles bare to the sky. This lack of depth, except at occasional flood, is the principal and obvious reason for the comparative absence of water-borne traffic.

At the times of the great freshets there are twenty-three feet or more registered on the huge black and white scale of the bridge at Ancenis, and again it falls to less than a fourth of that height, and then there is a mere rivulet of water trickling through the broad channel at Chaumont, at Blois, or at Orleans.

In the olden time, as one passed from Anjou into Brittany, by way of the valley of the Loire, he came to a great barrier across the road,—a veritable frontier post, with a custom-house and examiners, as if one were passing into a foreign country. The Revolution changed all this, and now nothing but another of that vast family of great, white departmental boundary-posts marks the dividing line between the Maine et Loire and the Loire-Inférieure, the border departments between the old province of the Counts of Anjou and that of the Breton dukes.

Just above Ancenis, one passes vineyard after vineyard, and château after château follows rapidly in turn,—all very delightful, as Pepys would have said. Not so the bridge at Ancenis, quite the ugliest wire-rope affair to be seen on the Loire, and one is only too glad to leave it behind, though it is with a real regret that he parts from Ancenis itself.

Ancenis is one of those blessed spots possessing a château; it is endowed with a wonderfully picturesque situation, and, moreover, is capable of catering for the inner man in so satisfactory a manner that one can but put it down in his books as one of the spots to be favoured. The Barons of Ancenis were a long and picturesque line, and their local fame has by no means perished. The old-time château, constructed in the fifteenth century, was the masterwork of a famous Angevin architect, Jean Lespine by name. To-day this fine building, or what is left of it, has become an Ursuline boarding-house. Much is still left to tell the story of its former greatness, but it is not so accessible as one would like.

The most that can be remarked is a great doorway flanked by two towers, with overpowering machicolations, another smaller tower,—a tourelle, the French themselves would call it,—and a ruined pavilion, where, in 1468, Francis, Duke of Brittany, signed a treaty with Louis XI. On the market-house of Ancenis is superimposed a sort of a belfry which, seen in conjunction with the low-lying river-bank, imparts a low-country aspect to the town. The old streets of Ancenis give shelter to many fine mediæval houses, of which the most notable is perhaps the old “house of the Croix de Lorraine.”

Below Ancenis, navigation is not so difficult, but the river current is more strong. For a long distance, on the right bank, extends a dike, carrying the roadway beside the river for a matter of a hundred kilometres. This is one of the charms of travel by the Loire. When you see any animation on its bosom, save an occasional fishing-punt, neither it nor its occupant usually very animated, it is one of those great flat-bottomed ferry-boats, with a square sail hung on a yard amidships, such as Turner always made an accompaniment to his Loire landscapes.

Conditions of traffic thereon have not changed much since those days. Whenever one sees a barge or a boat worthy of classification with those on the rivers of the east or north, or of the canals, it is only about a quarter of the usual size, so, altogether, in spite of its great navigable length, the waterway of the Loire is more valuable as a picturesque and healthful element of the landscape than as a commercial artery. Below Nantes is the “section maritime,” which from Nantes to the sea is a matter of some sixty kilometres. Here the boats increase in number and size. They are known as lighters, barges, and tenders, and go down with the river current and return on the incoming ebb, for here the river is tidal.

From this one gathers that the Loire, so noble and magnificent, is the most aristocratic river of France, and so, too, it is with respect to its associations of the past.

It has not the grandeur of the Rhône when the spring freshets from the Jura and the Swiss lakes have filled it to its banks; and it has not the burning activity of the Seine, as it bears its thousands of boat-loads of produce and merchandise to and from market; it has not the prettiness of the Thames, or the legendary aspect of the Rhine; but, in a way, it combines something of the features of all, and has, in addition, a tone that is all its own, as it sweeps the horizon through its countless miles of ample curves, and holds within its embrace all that is best of mediæval and Renascence France, the period which built up the later monarchy and—who shall say not?—the present prosperous nation.