Up the little river Blavet, at the head of deep-sea navigation, is Hennebont, a most delightfully disposed little place, which has been called the pearl of the Blavet. Like most of the tidal rivers of France, the Blavet, on its lower reaches, offers about the most paintable of all landscapes imaginable. This, with the Auray, the Aven, the Scorff, and the Elle, would prove a sketching-ground quite inexhaustible, in the variety of its moods, to the artist of an average length of life.
Hennebont
Hennebont, which has eight thousand or more inhabitants and a delightful inn, electric-lighted though it be, is divided into the new town and the fortified town. It sits beside the river’s bank, and crosses on a bridge of three arches. Above, the river dwindles to a mere rivulet, but below the incoming tides will bring craft of a tonnage of three hundred or more straight to the heart of the town. A tonnage of three hundred does not mean much to the travellers by twenty-thousand-ton steamships, but assuredly when one sees one of these little craft, with their three slender square-rigged masts, by the soft light of the full moon, in the little Breton port of Hennebont, it looks like the phantom ship, whose masts and spars “cross the moon like prison bars.”
Hennebont derives its name from the Breton words for old bridge. The first lord of the place, Huelin of Hennebont, lived in 1037. The fortified town was, of course, the earlier foundation, the new town only coming into existence in the sixteenth century, when the great Church of Our Lady of Paradise was still in the open country.
Trade follows the flag, but habitations follow the church, and so, when this great Gothic edifice was built in 1513-30, it began to draw the houses of the city dwellers around it, and now the fortified town is practically non-existent except as a quarter.
This church is a wonder-work of its kind, considering its great size, its graceful lines, and its ornamental Gothic spire, rising to a height which must approximate three hundred feet.