The town was the site of a terrific conflict in the Vendean wars, and was well-nigh destroyed, and its inhabitants were massacred. Now vineyards grow upon the very soil that a hundred or more years ago covered thousands of corpses. Altogether it is a gruesome memory which Savenay conjures up, if one dare even to think of it.
Between Savenay and Guérande, at an equal distance between the two, are the peat-bogs of Grand Brière. They are the great resources of the country. Would you see them worked? Then come in August, when you are making your way to some seacoast resort of Lower Brittany. For nine days only in the year do the authorities permit the sods to be cut, but everybody takes part therein, you will be told; and enough peat will be gathered, and dried, and pressed into “loaves,” as the Brièrons call them, to warm Nantes for a year.
Guérande is a capital not quite so dead and alive as Savenay; it is the possessor of a past of a most momentous and vivid character in its relation to the history of Brittany and of France. To-day, as in other days, the town is avowedly Breton, as characteristically so as any of its size in the province. Much has been sacrificed to the god of progress, but enough of the ancient aspect of the place remains to recall its features of the time of Duguesclin and Clisson, and the Counts of Montfort and of Blois, who proclaimed peace here in 1365. The enormous Saint Michael Gate is a great fortress-gateway, flanked with two cylindrical and conical roofed towers of the time when feudalism ruled Brittany.
Ancient Fortifications of Guérande
“Guérande,” says a Frenchman, “has not unlaced its corselet of stone since the fifteenth century.” To-day, even, it is surrounded by its mediæval ramparts in a manner like no other northern city in France, reminding one of those great walled cities of Aigues Mortes and Carcassonne in Southern Gaul.
This proud belt of machicolated ramparts, ten towers, and four great gates, and its deep, though now herbage-grown, moat is indeed one of the few monuments of the middle ages that remain to us in all their undisturbed splendour.