At one side, leaning against the wall, is a statue of the Virgin, conceived with as contrary a sentiment as possible. She is all tenderness and delicacy, and has a leaning attitude, the head inclined, with the gentle look of the Mother who calls the sinner to her side. Her robe falls in numberless plaits, her mantle envelops her with a harmonious grace; for she is no longer the Mother of sorrow, but the sweet consoler of human kind, holding her Son in her arms, whom she presents to bless the earth, Notre Dame de Bot Scao, The Virgin of Good News.
The faith of sailors in the Blessed Virgin is well known, that of the Breton sailors particularly. At Brest, we look in vain for a museum of pictures. Brest is not a city of art; it breathes of war; the port, filled with large ships, the arsenal and its cannon, its shells, its gigantic anchors, the forts built on the rocks, the animated movement of the streets, where soldiers of all kinds go and come, and sailors constantly arriving from all parts of the world, give to it an air of intense reality—a character at once powerful and precise. Man has built on the rock his granite home, and we may believe it is immovably established.
But ascend the steps that lead from the lower to the upper town, and under a vault you will find four pictures appended to the wall. Here is the museum of Brest. Sea pictures dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, the departure of the vessel, women and children on the beach on their knees during a tempest, the vessel tossed by the waves, and the arms of the sailors extended to heaven; and on their return, the rescued sailors, bending their steps, with tapers in their hands, toward the chapel of Notre Dame; and underneath, touching legends, cries of the soul that implores, humbles itself, or renders thanks. Holy Virgin, save us! Holy Virgin, protect those who are now at sea! Man we see in his weakness, his aspirations, and his hopes—the true man; the rest was but the mask.
They seize every opportunity and use every pretext to testify their faith. At Saint Aubin d'Aubigné between Rennes and Saint Malo, you go along a tufted hedge; you see a cross cut of thorn—a cross which grows green in the spring, among the eglantines and roses. [Footnote 176]
[Footnote 176: At St. Vincent les Redon, a tree is cut in the form of the cross.]
You return to visit the land of Carnac—a land so pale and desolate, where the standing stones are squared by thousands, gigantic and silent sphinxes that for twenty centuries have kept their impenetrable secret—what is that cross that rises on an eminence? One that they have planted on an isolated ruin in the land—a cross on a Druidical altar, and before the army of stones which mark, perhaps, a cemetery of a great people.
Elsewhere, at the cross-way of a road near Beauport, a spring gushes out and flows among the rocks, forming both basin and fountain on the heaped-up stones; in an arched niche is enclosed a Virgin crowned with flowers; all around, the field morning-glory, the periwinkle, and the eglantine have peeped through the moss and herbs, and enlaced the rustic chapel with their flowery festoons, and fallen again on the infant Jesus. Opposite lie fields of green thorn-broom, and above their long, slender stalks appear the half-destroyed walls of an ancient abbey, roofless, opened to heaven, and silent. Through the blackened arches appears the blue sea, whose prolonged and incessant roaring fills the air.
In this Catholic country par excellence, all the churches are remarkable. There is no village, however small, of which the church does not form an interesting part; and here and there, as at Guérande and Vitré, we find the beautifully carved pulpits enclosed in the wall, from which the missionary fathers, on certain extraordinary occasions, speak to the people assembled in the square. At Carnac and Rennescleden we have the arched roofs so exquisitely painted; at Roscoff, Crozon, and elsewhere, medallions of stone and wood framing the altar with quaint gilded sculptures; then, again, we meet with a tabernacle formed for an architectural monument, a sort of palace in miniature, with its wings, pavilions, columns, domes, galleries, and statues, (as at Rosporden;) then an antique confessional greets us in a little chapel near Chateaulin, and a canopy sculptured in wood or even crystal, at Landivisiau. An odd ornament, which is found in only one church—that of Notre Dame de Comfort, on the way to the Bec du Raz—is called the wheel of good fortune, and is composed of a large wheel suspended from the roof of the church, and entirely surrounded by bells. On days of solemn feasts, for baptisms and weddings, the wheel is turned, and, agitating all the bells at once, forms a noisy chime, which times the march of the procession, and adds a joyous and silver-toned accompaniment to the voices of the young girls chanting the canticles to the Blessed Virgin. Finally, we meet with one of those trunks of trees, large squared pillars of oak, encircled with heavy bands of iron, and placed in the middle of the church, by the side of a catafalque of blackened wood, but sowed with whitened tears; the trunk and the coffin, emblems of the fragility of life, and the Christian principle above all others, charity.
The churches in the towns are truly chefs-d'oeuvres, the cloisters of Tréguier and Pont l'Abbé, for example, where the arcades are so light and so finely carved; or the bas-reliefs inside the portal of Sainte Croix, at Quimperlé, a vast page of sculptured stone, finished with the delicacy and richness of invention, the charming qualities of youth and of the Renaissance. Then, in all these churches, near the altar, you perceive immediately the painted statue of the parish saint, one of the Breton saints, not found elsewhere—Saint Cornély, Saint Guénolé. Saint Thromeur, Saint Yves especially. Saint Yves has the privilege of being represented in almost all the churches, even in those of which he is not patron; the remembrance of this great, good man, this wise priest, this incorruptible judge, is indelibly impressed on the heart of every Breton. Sometimes he is seen in his judge's robe, his cap on his head, and listening to two litigants, one in red velvet, embroidered in gold, with his grand wig, his silken stockings, and sword; the other, the poor peasant, all in rags, holes on his knees and his elbows, and naked feet in his wooden shoes. The great lord, with his cap on his head, and an air of pride, presents the saint a purse of gold; the peasant, with timid look and attitude, his head bent down, his cap in his hand, humbly awaits his sentence. He has nothing to give, but justice will not fail him. Saint Yves turns toward him with a gracious smile, and, handing him the judgment written on parchment, lets him know it is his. And thus the history of the middle ages: the church protecting the peasant, the weak against the powerful and the strong.
As to monuments, properly called, nowhere can we find more of these beautiful churches of the middle ages, testimonies of the piety, the science, and the taste of so glorious an epoch. Here, the Cathedral of Dol, of the best day of Gothic art—the thirteenth century—imposing by its massiveness, its grandeur, and the noble simplicity of its ornaments and the harmony of its proportions, the granite of whose towers, in the lapse of ages, is permeated with the air of the sea, has a color of rust, we might say built with iron; there, Tréguier and its exquisite wainscoting, benches, altars, stalls, pulpit in brilliant black oak, carved in such fine and delicate designs, with inexhaustible variety; not a baluster alike, enough models to furnish the entire sculpture of our time; and further on, Saint Pol de Leon and its spire of granite; daring and easy, a prodigy of equilibrium, immovable, girded with open galleries like graceful crowns, flinging to heaven its tiny sharpened bells; so beautifully carved, so aerial, the joy of Brittany, as well it may be, its legitimate pride; then Folgoat, a little unknown village north of Brest, lost at the extremity of the isle, and necessary to leave one's route to see it; but even here, two Breton princes, the Duke Jean III. and the Duchess Anne, have constructed a royal church accumulating all that Gothic art in its richest ornamentation, united to the most ingenious caprices of the Renaissance, could have imagined of delicacy and brightness; portraits sculptured, statues of the finest style reflecting their antiquity, a richly Gothic and carved choir, and a gallery—one of those graceful and original monuments of Catholicism so seldom met with—of lace-work, where trefoils, roses, and foliage are carved in indestructible blue granite. The hammer of the Revolution has only knocked off small pieces of these beautifully carved stones. They resisted the passions of men, as they have defied the action of time.