Landerneau
One is not likely to be met with a statement by his host, as was the century-old traveller, that a respectable man begs to know if he may eat at the same table, and accordingly one will not have to reply, “With all my heart,” for most likely there will be twenty at the common table, and all will sit down to a meal of all the good things of life, “sea food” and golden cider and apple sweetmeats predominating.
It is all excellent, however, and the abundance of deliciously cooked fish will make one think it were no hardship to make a lenten sojourn here. A great church and a good hotel are indeed all-sufficient attractions for a market-town of perhaps eight thousand souls.
The town borders upon a picturesque little river, the Elorn, which finally flows into the harbour of Brest. From the fifth century until the sixteenth, it was far and away a more important place than its now more opulent neighbour at the river’s mouth. Then it was the chief town of Léon, the domain of the De Rohans, one of the ancient Breton baronies.
At the entrance of one of the principal streets—Rue Plouedern—are two curious ancient pieces of sculpture,—a lion and a man armed with a sword, bearing the inscription “Tire Tve.” They came from an old house which existed here in the sixteen hundreds, and are fitting examples of that curious mediæval symbolism which so often crops out in domestic and religious architecture. Although the chief of Landerneau’s ecclesiastical monuments is the sixteenth-century edifice dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, the Church of St. Houardon is a contemporary work of some pretension; its base Renaissance portico was added at a later time. The arms and emblems of the De Rohans are conspicuous in both edifices.
July fifteenth is the great fête-day hereabout, when the horse-races, boat-races, and illuminations attract the peasantry from the inland country and the workmen from the dockyards at Brest.