Pont l’Abbé is a town of embroiderers. Everywhere one finds shops whose sole business it is to sell those fine braid embroideries—yellow on a black ground—which have made this part of Brittany famous.
The costumes of Pont l’Abbé are famous throughout all Brittany. The coif recalls those seen in the pictures of the ancient Gauls. It is virtually a little black velvet hood, and the coif itself is a “pignon de couleur,” as the hostess of the hotel described it, and then, man-fashion, the author felt he was wallowing in a strange subject. Locally this confection, taken entire, it is inferred, is known as a bigouden,—a picturesque but not precisely instructive word.
The men wear a hat with three great buckles, and some of them—though their numbers are few—may yet be seen in the culotte bouffante, that peculiarly Breton species of breeches known in their own tongue as “bragou-braz.”
With such an introduction, one might expect almost any fantastic costume to step out from a doorway, but, to realize the quaintness of it all to the full, one should see the inhabitants at the Fêtes de la Tréminou, held on the twenty-fifth of March, Whit-Monday, the third Sunday in July, and the fourth Sunday in September.
The dances of Pont l’Abbé are famous and are indescribable by any one but a dancing-master. Inasmuch as they invariably take place in the open air, they may be accepted as the free and spontaneous expression of an emotion, which stuffy ballroom cotillons most decidedly are not.
The church of Pont l’Abbé dates from a Carmelite foundation of the fourteenth century, and is a fine work of its era, though surmounted by a curious and modern bell-tower in wood. Within the church are the tombs of many of the ancient barons of Pont l’Abbé. The magnificent rose window is of modern glass, but so admirable that one stands before it with a certain respectful awe, as before that old thirteenth-century glass in Chartres cathedral. The ancient cloisters are still preserved and surround a fine garden.
Pont l’Abbé is only five kilometres from the coast, and Loctudy, also the possessor of a fine mediæval church, and Penmarc’h form a trio of Breton coast towns quite as worthy of one’s attention as many better known resorts.
Penmarc’h—which for some inexplicable reason is pronounced Penmar—is situated in the midst of a great bare peninsula terminating in the Pointe de Penmarc’h. Instead of a high cliff sheared off at the water’s edge, as one so frequently sees on the north coast, the point sinks gently into the blue waters of the Atlantic until it is swallowed up, with never so much as a line of breakers to indicate its presence from seaward. Penmarc’h in Breton signifies the “head of a horse,” and Benzec Capcaval, a village not far distant, means the same. An ingenious person will have no difficulty in following the etymology of the latter word, but the former is quite incomprehensible except to a Welshman.
Penmarc’h was for four centuries a city which kept pace with Nantes. Its early riches came from the traffic in “lenten meat,” which is simply codfish.
The Church of St. Nonna is a late Gothic edifice, with a great square tower which will be remarked by all who come near it. Its interior has two baptismal fonts, strangely decorated with stone carvings of fantastic shapes, depicting the history of Penmarc’h.