Quiberon
The lobsters, too, are a great feature of the trade here, and are sold by their length, measuring from the eye up to the first scale of their tails. An average price is rather over four sous, and Paris takes the best of the lot. They travel first-class and by express, the lobsters of Quiberon, when they take their first and last voyage to the “shining city,” and there are plenty of friends awaiting them at the station. They invariably arrive at the fish-market for the earliest sales, and at noon the epicure may eat them at Marguery’s, which sounds like a French version of the “Alice in Wonderland” tale.
One hour from Quiberon, by a tiny steamboat, and one finds himself skirting the cliff walls surrounding and sheltering the little port and town of Palais on Belle Ile, overlooked by the powerful citadel built by Vauban, who, as the fortress-builder of France, stood in his profession where Napoleon did in his.
This “plus belle île de l’ocean” has forty-eight kilometres of coast-line, and every one of them has been so cut and serrated by the action of the waves that the island would form a veritable ocean graveyard were it situated on the direct line of travel by sea.
For the most part, visitors content themselves with making an excursion to the northerly end of the island, a visit to the apothecary’s grotto, and another to the lantern of the great lighthouse, which at night sends its electric rays far out to sea.
What tourists may not do is to roam over the old citadel now occupied as a national fort, and this is a pity, for there they might conjure up a reminder of other days that would be like a chapter out of Dumas.
The citadel was built by Marshal de Retz in 1572, and was the refuge of the cardinal of the same name when he fled from Nantes in 1653. Not far away is the Château Fouquet. Nicholas Fouquet, Marquis of Belle Ile, was Superintendent of Finance under the regency of Anne of Austria, and continued the important office after the accession of Louis XIV. The consensus of opinion is that Fouquet was insinuating, specious, hypocritical, and sensual. It was at the great fête given by Fouquet at Vaux that the king planned his arrest, “fearing he would escape to Belle Ile,” then thought to be an impregnable fortress. Both in the pages of the historians and in the romances of Dumas one may read the story.
Belle-Ile-en-Mer, also, was made the home of Aramis after Dumas had given him episcopal rank. The minute details given in “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” would form an admirable supplement to any guide-book.
The great Sara Bernhardt has of recent years made her home on this barren and desolate isle. It is not altogether desolate, however, for there are hotels at Palais and Sauzon, and tourists, solitary and in droves, are continually making excursions thither in the season from the neighbouring Breton coast, from Vannes, Quiberon, or Lorient.
Although Belle Ile is only a pin-head on most maps of France, it has a considerable population. Palais is a town of five thousand souls, and Sauzon counts something over sixteen hundred, and so Belle Ile, being only about 21,000 acres in extent, is a very thickly populated part of the globe.