We are told by M. de Villemarqué that the ballad of The Plague of Elliant is never sung without the addition of the following legend:
"It was the day of the Pardon (the feast of the patron saint) at Elliant; a young miller, arriving at the ford with his horses, saw a fair lady in a white robe seated on the bank of the river, a little staff in her hand, and who requested him to convey her over the water. 'Oh! yes; assuredly, madame,' replied he, and already she was on his horse's crupper, and soon deposited on the other side. Then the fair lady said to him, 'Young man, you know not whom you have brought over: I am the Plague. I have just made the tour of Brittany, and I go to the church of the town, where they are ringing for mass; all whom I strike with my staff will quickly die; as for yourself, fear nothing; no harm shall happen to you, nor yet to your mother."
"And the Plague kept her word," adds the Breton peasant; for does not the song itself say that none but
"A widow poor of sixty, and her only son, are left?"
The following is most probably only a fragment of the original:
THE PLAGUE OF ELLIANT.
Thus spake the holy bard who dwells not far from Langolen.
'Twixt Langolen and Le Faouet, the father Rasian:
Let every month a mass be said, ye men of Le Faouet,
A holy mass for all the souls the plague has rent away.
From Elliant, bearing heavy spoils, at last the plague has gone:
Seven thousand and a hundred slain, and left but two alone.
Death has come down upon the land, and Elliant has bereft:
A widow poor of sixty, and her only son, are left.
"The plague is at my cottage door, and when God wills," she said,
"She will come in, and we go out, among the other dead."
Go look in Elliant market-place, and mow the waving grass;
Save in the narrow rut whereby the dead-cart used to pass.
Oh! hard must be the heart of him, whoever he may be,
Who would not weep, such utter desolation could he see.
See, eighteen carts all piled with dead stand at the graveyard gate;
And eighteen carts all piled with dead, behind their turn await.