At Plougastel we had found the uproar of a village fête, wooden horses, a female dwarf, a female giant, a fat lady, and a boneless man, and games and drinking stalls. And, in an isolated square, the Breton bagpipes played a rapid and monotonous air of olden times, and people in old-fashioned costume danced to this age-old music; men and women, holding hands, ran, ran like the wind, like a lot of mad folk, in a long frenzied file. It was a relic of old Brittany, retaining still its note of primitiveness, even at the gates of Brest, amid the uproar of a fair.
At first we tried, Yves and I, to calm the three sailors and make them sit down.
And then it struck us as rather comical that we, of all people, should assume the rôle of preacher.
"After all," I said to Yves, "it's not the first sermon of the kind we've preached."
"To be sure, no," he replied with conviction.
And we contented ourselves with holding on to the iron rails to prevent ourselves from falling.
The roads and the villages are full of people returning from the "pardon," and all these people are amazed at seeing pass this carriage-load of madmen with the three sailors dancing on the top.
The splendour of June throws over this Brittany its charm and its life; the breeze is mild and warm beneath the grey sky; the tall grass, full of red flowers; the trees, of an emerald green, filled with cockchafers.
And the three sailors continue to dance and sing, and at each couplet, the others, inside, take up the refrain:
"Oh! He set out with the wind behind him,
He'll find it harder coming back."