In part, these fortifications date from the fourteenth century, and at high water are entirely surrounded by the sea. The great bastion attributed to the former Duchess Anne—after she had become a queen of France—is a stupendous work of its time. For the most part, the other parts of the walls have been restored and built up anew in modern times.
Concarneau is the Ploudenec of Blanche Willis Howard’s charming Breton tale of “Guenn,” and Nevin, where the great pardon dance was held, may have been Pont Aven or Rosporden.
There is a wealth of charming colour in this sad tale, and not a little truth with regard to some of the characters, to which Americans, before now, have attempted to attach the names of real persons in the world of art and literature.
Opposite Concarneau is Beg-Meil, which in more respects than one is an anomaly. It has some pretence at being a watering-place, but there is no town there, save such as is built up around a few country-houses and hotels, catering only to summer folk; besides this, a few scattered and isolated farms form the sum total of the habitations of this little jutting point of land running out into the billowy Atlantic. For four-fifths of the year, the population of this salt meadow is composed only of sea-birds, which, like their fellows elsewhere, form an interesting colony of themselves.
The sea-birds of Brittany, like those of other rock-bound shores, are ever interesting to the traveller. Like the gulls of London Bridge, those near the great bay of Concarneau are wonderfully tame and singularly ravenous, and apparently eat all day. That is, when they are not sleeping or billing and cooing, as is the sea-birds’ way, for in this they would seem to rival the turtle-dove. When they are not courting or sleeping, they go a-fishing, and the seaweed-strewn rocks about Concarneau are their happy hunting-grounds. They will eat, say the fisherfolk of the sardine fleet, five pounds or more of fish in a day, which is considerably more than the weight of an individual bird.
From Concarneau one must perforce follow back along the coast-line to Pont Aven, for a trip to Brittany without having known the delights of this colony of artist-folk, in which Americans predominate, would be like the tragedy without Hamlet, or the circus without the elephant or the pink lemonade.
“Pont Aven, the Barbison of Bretagne! chosen home of the painters of all nations and all schools, with Americans predominating.” This is a faithful translation of the remark of an appreciative travelling salesman, one “who loved art,” if the description be credible. You will hear tales at Pont Aven of the time when artists found their accommodation at a roadside inn outside the town—now apparently vanished—for fifty-five francs per month, and paid a sou for a litre of milk, and four sous for a litre of cider.
