CHAPTER V.
MORBIHAN—LORIENT AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
THREE towns of Morbihan little known, still less visited by travellers in Brittany, lie within a comparatively small area just north of the coast, and their names are Lorient, Hennebont, and Pont Scorff.
The very name Lorient will appeal to many. It suggests the great trade with the East, in full swing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the town grew up as a necessary part of a vast commerce. Some of the old-time romantic picturesqueness of the shipping has disappeared, and the Hotels “Royal Sword” and “White Horse” have given way to the Hotels “Modern” and “of France,” with electric lights and sheds for motor-cars, but there is still a distinguishing excellence to be remarked which makes Lorient a place well worth visiting.
It was in the seventeenth century that an association of Breton merchants, who were carrying on the trade with the East Indies, first built their warehouses here. The traffic grew to proportions so considerable that Louis XIV. ultimately gave letters patent for the foundation of a new and grander East India Company.
The company erected ship-houses here, and the name Lorient was given to the settlement, which was fast growing to a prime importance among the ports of France. An English fleet, under Admiral Lestock, landed some six or seven thousand men in the bay of Poldu, at twelve kilometres west of Lorient, and marched upon the town as a revenge for certain attacks upon British interests in the East.
The English met with no great triumph here, but Louis XV. was indifferent enough to allow many of the French settlements in the Indies to be taken, and this led to the rapid decadence of the great East India Company and its port. Napoleon resuscitated it, as he did many another decaying institution in France, and developed the industry of the port to such an extent that Lorient became one of the principal maritime towns of France. Its past history sounds romantic enough, but there is little of romance about the life of its streets and wharves to-day; instead, there is activity not admitting even the thought of romance. Jangling gongs of tram-cars, the puffing of locomotives, and the shrieks of the sirens, to say nothing of the accompaniment of belching chimney-stacks and the sound of the riveting hammers in the great shipyards, all testify that Lorient is living in the age of progress.
Local sights, outside this marvellous exposition of modern spirit, are few. There is a municipal museum, containing some good modern pictures, many of them of Breton subjects, but there are no ecclesiastical or architectural monuments worthy of remark. The commercial harbour and the dockyard are decidedly the most interesting features. Within the walls of the latter is the parade-ground, which serves as a fine promenade for the population of Lorient when the military band plays on summer evenings.
The roadstead of Lorient is a great deep-water harbour, which can shelter the largest ships afloat. It is guarded by six great lights, one of them in the cupola of the Church of St. Louis. This is one of the very few instances where a great city church is a mariner’s beacon, besides performing its other functions on behalf of lost souls.
Opposite Lorient is Port Louis, founded a century before its bigger sister. Anciently it was known as Blavet, but took its present name in honour of Louis XIII. Its walls were begun in 1652.
In the immediate neighbourhood of Lorient and Port Louis are many delightful little seaside places, hardly popular resorts in any sense of the word, but all the better for that, where one may get such views of sea and shore and shipping of all ranks as is hardly to be found elsewhere on the Breton coast.