It is not surprising, therefore, that among a people of such simple and fervid faith devotion to the Blessed Virgin should especially have flourished. The popular impulse towards the expression of piety which displayed itself in France in the sixteenth century, and which soon covered the land with Calvaries and Chapels of Notre Dame, was nowhere more outspoken or lasting than in Brittany. Mme. Marie de Bon Secours, mère des pêcheurs—Mme. Mary of Good Help, mother of fishermen—is invoked as heartily on the coast of Tréguier as Notre Dame de tous les remèdes—Our Lady of All-Healing—on the mountains of Cornouailles. And, as might be looked for in an impressionable and imaginative race, this devotion has entwined itself with many quaint and curious legends. It is a general belief in Brittany—as, indeed, it is among the peasantry elsewhere in France, and we believe in some parts of Spain—that our Lord and his Blessed Mother visited their country in propria persona after the Resurrection. Ask a peasant of Vannes, for example, the origin of the galgals, or heaps of pebbles which diversify the monotony of his vast Landes, and he will tell you that the Blessed Virgin carried them there in her apron. The folk-lore of the country turns largely upon her intervention for the protection of those who call upon her. Two of the most curious of these legends we propose to give our readers from M. Souvestre’s very interesting collection entitled Le Foyer Breton. So far as we know they have not been rendered into English except in a mutilated and imperfect version styled Popular Legends and Tales of Brittany, which is simply the translation of a German adaptation of Souvestre’s book, and in which the essentially Catholic features of the original are for the most part studiously eliminated. This process of “evangelizing” Catholic literature is familiar enough from Dies Iræ down; it is to be regretted that Catholic publishers are sometimes found willing to father and to circulate such counterfeits.
The first of our legends is one current in the country of Tréguier—the Lower Breton still divides his beloved province, not into the departments fixed by the Revolution, but as of old into the four bishoprics of Léon, Tréguier, Vannes, and Cornouailles—and is known as Les Trois Rencontres, or, as we shall call it,
THE THREE BEGGARS.
Once upon a time, in the days when Jesus Christ and his Mother came often to visit Lower Brittany, when along the roads there were as many cells of holy hermits as there are now new houses with a manger and a branch of mistletoe by the door, there lived in the bishopric of Léon two young lords as rich as heart could wish, and so handsome that even their mother could not have wished them better-looking. They were called Tonyk and Mylio.
Mylio, who was the elder, was going on sixteen, while Tonyk was but fourteen. Both had taken lessons from masters so able that there was nothing to hinder them from becoming priests at once, if they had been old enough and had had a vocation.
Now, Tonyk was pious, ever ready to help the poor and forgive injuries. Money stayed no longer in his hand than anger in his heart; while Mylio would give to no one more than his due, and even haggled over that, and if anybody offended him he never rested until he had avenged himself to the utmost of his power.
As God had taken their father from them while they were still in long clothes, the widow, who was a woman of great virtue, had brought them up herself; but now that they were well grown, she deemed it time to send them to an uncle of theirs at a distance, from whom they might look for good counsel as well as a great inheritance. So one day, making each of them a present of a new hat, shoes with silver buckles, a purple cloak, a well-lined purse, and a horse, she bade them be off to the house of their father’s brother.
The two lads set out, glad enough of the chance to see strange lands. Their horses went so fast that at the end of some days they found themselves in another kingdom, where the trees and grain were unlike any they had seen at home. But one morning, as they were passing a cross-roads, they spied a poor woman sitting by the cross, her face buried in her apron. Tonyk pulled up his horse to ask her what was the matter. The beggar-woman told him with sobs that she had just lost her only son, who was her all, and that she was thrown upon the charity of Christians.
The lad was greatly touched; but Mylio, who had stopped some paces off, cried out with a jeering air:
“You are not going to swallow everything the first whimpering old woman tells you? That creature is there only to trick travellers out of their money.”