What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

"A very slight observation of human nature under a few only of its various phases may suffice to show that the instinct which prompts a woman to adorn her person to the best possible advantage is not the hot-house growth of cities, but a genuine wild flower of nature. No high-born beauty ever more repeatedly or anxiously consulted her wax-lit psyché on every faultless point of hair, face, neck, feet, and figure, before descending to the carriage for her first ball, than did our young Bretonne again and again recur to the mirror, which occupied the pier between the two windows of the salle à manger, before sallying forth on the great occasion of her confirmation.

"The dear object of girlish ambition was the same to both; but the simplicity of the little paysanne showed itself in the utter absence of any wish to conceal her anxiety upon the subject. Though delighted with our compliments on her appearance, our presence by no means prevented her from springing upon a chair every other minute to obtain fuller view of the tout ensemble of her figure. Again and again the modest kerchief was arranged and rearranged to show a hair's breadth more or a hair's breadth less of her brown but round and taper throat. Repeatedly, before it could be finally adjusted to her satisfaction, was the delicate fabric of her coiffure moved with cautious care and dainty touch a leetle backwarder or a leetle forwarder over her sun-browned brow.

"Many were the pokings and pinchings of frock and apron, the smoothings down before and twitchings down behind of the not less anxious mother. Often did she retreat to examine more correctly the general effect of the coup d'oeil, and as often return to rectify some injudicious pin or remodel some rebellious fold. When all was at length completed, and the well-pleased parent had received from the servants, called in for the express purpose, the expected tribute of admiration, the little beauty took L'Imitation de la Vierge in her hand, and tripped across to a convent of Soeurs Grises on the other side of the way to receive their last instructions and admonitions respecting her behaviour when she should be presented to the bishop, while her mother screamed after her not to forget to pull up her frock when she kneeled down.

"All the time employed in this little revision of the toilet had not been left unimproved by my companion, who at the end of it produced and showed to the proud mother an admirable full-length sketch of her pretty darling. The delighted astonishment of the poor woman, and her accent, as she exclaimed, 'O, si c'était pour moi!' and then blushed to the temples at what she had said, were irresistible, and the good-natured artist was fain to make her a present of the drawing."

My Breton book ("though I says it as shouldn't") is not a bad one, especially as regards the upper or northern part of the province. That which concerns Lower Brittany is very imperfect, mainly, I take it, because I had already nearly filled my destined two volumes when I reached it. I find there, however, the following notice of the sardine fishery, which has some interest at the present day. Perhaps the majority of the thousands of English people who nowadays have "sardines" on their breakfast-table every morning are not aware that the contents of a very large number of the little tin boxes which are supposed to contain the delicacy are not sardines at all. They are very excellent little fishes, but not sardines; for the enormously increased demand for them has outstripped the supply. In the days when the following sentences were written sardines might certainly be had in London (as what might not?) at such shops as Fortnum and Mason's, but they were costly, and by no means commonly met with.

On reaching Douarnenez in the summer of 1839 I wrote:—"The whole population and the existence of Douarnenez depend on the sardine fishery. This delicious little fish, which the gourmands of Paris so much delight in, when preserved in oil, and sent to their capital in those little tin boxes whose look must be familiar to all who have frequented the Parisian breakfast-houses" [but is now more familiar to all who have entered any grocers shop throughout the length and breadth of England], "is still more exquisite when eaten fresh on the shores which it frequents. They are caught in immense quantities along the whole of the southern coast of Brittany, and on the western shore of Finisterre as far to the northward as Brest, which, I believe, is the northern limit of the fishery. They come into season about the middle of June, and are then sold in great quantities in all the markets of southern Brittany at two, three, or four sous a dozen, according to the abundance of the fishery and the distance of the market from the coast. I was told that the commerce in sardines along the coast from l'Orient to Brest amounted to three millions of francs annually."

At the present day it must be enormously larger. I remember well the exceeding plentifulness of the little fishes—none of them so large as many of those which now fill the so-called sardine boxes—when I was at Douarnenez in 1839. All the men, women, and children in the place seemed to be feasting upon them all day long. Plates with heaps of them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could be found together. All this was a thing of the past when I revisited Douarnenez in 1866. Every fish was then needed for the tinning business. They were to be had of course by ordering and paying for them, but very few indeed were consumed by the population of the place.

And this subject reminds me of another fishery which I witnessed a few months ago—last March—at Sestri di Ponente, near Genoa. We frequently saw nearly the whole of the fisher population of the place engaged in dragging from the water on to the sands enormously long nets, which had been previously carried out by boats to a distance not more I think than three or four hundred yards from the shore. From these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, exactly like whitebait. I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty of the Thames. Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them frequently at the hotel under the name of gianchetti, and could find no difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy. The season for them did not seem to last above two or three weeks. The fishermen continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of giancketti. But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious. All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old days. When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths in them, eat them up by hundreds. The children too, irrepressibly thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations eat blackberries. I did not try the experiment of eating them thus, as one eats oysters, but I can testify that, crisply fried, and eaten with brown bread and butter and lemon juice, they were remarkably good.

Fortified by the excellent example of Sir Francis Doyle, who in his extremely amusing volume of Reminiscences gives as a reason for disregarding the claims of chronology in the composition of it, the chances that he might forget the matter he had In his mind if he did not book it at once, I have ventured for the same reason to do the same thing here. But I have an older authority for the practice in question, which Sir Francis is hardly likely to have lighted on. That learned antiquary and portentously voluminous writer, Francesco Cancellieri, who was well known to the Roman world in the latter years of the last, and the earliest years of the present, century, used to compose his innumerable works upon a similar principle. And when attacked by the critics his cotemporaries, who Italian-like supposed academically correct form to be the most important thing in any literary work, he defended himself on the same ground. "If I don't catch it now, I may probably forget it; and is the world to be deprived of the information it is in my power to give it, for the sake of the formal correctness of my work?"

There is another passage in my book on Brittany respecting which it would be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report that the state of things there described no longer exists. I wrote in 1839—