Rambles in Brittany

by M. F. Mansfield

The city’s attractions are many, from its great cathedral and its château-fortress, enclosing a beautiful edifice wherein once lived the Duchess Anne, to its great hotels, cafés, and shops of modern times.

Five great events of history stand forth prominent in the memory of the very name of Nantes: the struggle of John of Montfort against Charles of Blois for the ducal power; the affairs of the League; the famous Edict; the Cellamare conspiracy; and the rising of the Vendeans and the rascally Carrier’s retaliation in Revolutionary days.

Each and every one of these were vivid and bloody enough to furnish inexhaustible material for a novelist of the Dumas school, should he rise in the future, for the half has not yet been used. It was in the Place of Bouffay that that execution of the Breton conspirators took place, of which we read in the graphic pages of Dumas. Gaston, who sought to deliver his former companions, was posting along the road to Nantes with their reprieve safely guarded. Before the age of steam and electricity, news travelled slowly, and Sèvres, Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres, Mans, and Angers were then far apart. But the faithful Gaston travelled fast, one of the bystanders at Rambouillet calling to him: “If you go at that pace, you will kill more than one team between here and Nantes.”

Gradually he learned that a “courier of the minister’s” had passed that way. This was the beginning of what Dumas called the “tragedy of Nantes.” The event was historical, and Dumas’s account was most dramatic, yet did not differ greatly from the facts. Gaston arrived too late. Talhouet was dead, and the Place of Bouffay reeked with the blood of the conspirators, who, guilty though they were, had received the pardon of the Regent. The cry of De Conedic, as he bent his head to the block, still echoes down through history: “See how they recompense the services of faithful soldiers! Ye cowards of Bretagne,” he cried, as the sword of the executioner fell upon him. Ten minutes afterward the square was empty. One of the corpses still held a crumpled paper in his hand,—it was the pardon of the other four, for the bearer had arrived too late. Thus finished “the tragedy of Nantes.”

Though this part of Brittany has the reputation of being the least illiterate of any, as late as the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century might be seen at Nantes the sign of the public scrivener, which read:

ÉCRIVAIN PUBLIQUE
10 centimes par lettre

Below Nantes the Loire basin has turned the surrounding country into a little Holland, where fisherfolk and their boats, with sails of red and blue, form charming symphonies of dull colour. In the drinking-places along its shores there is a strange medley of peasants, seafarers, and fisher men and women. Not so cosmopolitan a crew as one sees in the harbour-side drinking-places at Marseilles, or even at Havre, but sufficiently strange to be a fascination to one who has just come down from the headwaters.

Gray and green is the aspect at the Loire’s source, and green and gray it still is, though of a decidedly different colour value, at St. Nazaire, below Nantes, the real deep-water port of the Loire. By this time the river has amplified itself into a broad estuary, and is lost in the incoming and outgoing tides of the Bay of Biscay. From its source the Loire has wound its way gently, broadly, and with placid grandeur through rocky escarpments, fertile plains, populous and luxurious towns, all historic ground, by stately châteaux and through vineyards and fruit-orchards. Now it becomes more or less prosaic and matter of fact, though, in a way, no less interesting, as it takes on some of the attributes of the outside world.

Here one gives the last glance to the Loire, as an inland waterway, for, by the time Nantes is passed, it is of the sea salty. Here the Sèvre Nantaise comes from the Department Deux-Sèvres and numerous other streams broaden the lower river until it meets the bay at St. Nazaire, where coasters and deep-sea fishermen take the place of boat-haulers and vineyard-workers as picturesque accessories to the landscape.

Jacobites and their sympathizers will take pleasure in noting that it was in the early days of St. Nazaire’s importance as a port that the Young Pretender set sail thence in 1745, in a frigate provided by a Mr. Walsh of Nantes.