Breton Folk: An artistic tour in Brittany :: CHAPTER V. Carhaix Huelgoet.

CHAPTER V. Carhaix Huelgoet.

Thus far we have spoken of the northern coast, where the busy inhabitants of the CÔtes-du-Nord come most in contact with French traders, and travellers of different nations. Let us now turn towards the mountains, where the country is less fertile, the people are more isolated, and there is more character and local costume to be seen.

If we leave the Western Railway at Guingamp or Belle-Isle-en-Terre, we may follow the course of the streams which take their rise in the Monts d’ArrÉe, and, passing through Callac, reach Carhaix the same evening. We cross the purple mountains where the solitary shepherd in goat’s-skin coat (sketched on page 68) tends his flocks on poor pastures, and where the, almost equally solitary, Englishman is busy with a fly-rod. At Callac, where comfortable quarters are to be obtained, many Englishmen stay for the fishing and shooting seasons; the streams are well stocked with fish, and there is little difficulty in getting permission for fishing.

The game laws are very strict in France, as is well known; the opening and closing of the shooting season varies every year, the prefect deciding the day in September when shooting may begin. The chasse courant, which includes hunting the wolf and the wild-boar, commences about a month later. The seasons close at the end of January, and whenever snow is on the ground. Altogether there is more attraction for the angler than for the sportsman in Brittany, and there is no better centre for the angler than Callac.

The aspect of the people and their dwellings in this neighbourhood is more simple and primitive than we have yet seen; and the features of the peasants are more strongly marked with the privations of generations. It is the same dull round of life, labour, and hardship, with a few gleams of sunshine in summer; and a Pardon and a blessing from the priest at the annual fÊte. There is the same story everywhere. “We move slowly; we do as our fathers did, and live contentedly as they lived.”

How did they live sixty years ago? An Englishman who spent some time in Brittany in 1818 says of the peasants:—“They are rude, uncivilised, simple, and dirty in their habits; they live literally like pigs, lying upon the ground and eating chestnuts boiled in milk as their principal food. Their houses are generally built of mud, without order or convenience, and it is a common thing in Brittany for men, women, children, and animals to sleep together in the same apartment, upon no resting-place but the earth covered with straw.”^[3] This was written sixty years ago, but the mud houses are before us, and the description holds good to-day. Forty years later a writer in an English newspaper is sent to report upon the state of the agricultural labourer in Brittany; what does he find? “The Breton peasant,” he says,^[4] “is still isolated from the towns by his language. He has kept himself apart, and mistrusts the outer world. His fare is black bread, made of buckwheat, or rye, oats or barley, boiled with milk. If he have a change in his diet, it is in the shape of potatoes. His life is an unbroken monotony. He never changes his manners, his habits, or his dress. He is a stranger in the large towns, where even his language is not understood, save by a few people who deal with him. He is as patient and quiet as a beast of burden; his daily hard labour seems to subdue even his affections, it leaves him no time for grief, no hours for the indulgence of remorse, no moment for despair.”

3.Stothard’s Brittany, 1820.

4.Blanchard Jerrold’s Letters to the Morning Post, 1853-60.

Twenty years later, what do we find? Excepting in a few districts, such as that near Lannion, where there is a considerable advance in agriculture, and where the peasant’s position is better, we find the same figure wearing the same coat, standing just where he did; his life the same weary round of labour by day, and rest in an old mud hovel at sundown. The problem of a life of labour and monotony is yet unsolved; he is just where he was in 1850, and where his father was in 1820. The great Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest, that was to do so much for the owners of the land and the tillers of the fruitful soil of Brittany, which has been driven through the heart of the country, with its enormous viaducts and its trains of cattle trucks; which has thrown up embankments of earth that shut him off from the rest of the world, appear to have done little good. A train rushes past his patch of land several times a day, and perhaps his priest is in it, on his way to Paris or Rennes; it no longer startles his children or his pigs, for it has passed now for years; but “traffic,” or what is generally understood by the term, scarcely exists, and passengers, excepting in summer, are few and far between.

A step higher than the peasant, and we find the farm people, all working on in the old grooves, and, excepting in the matter of sending their children by train to be educated (which to a certain extent is compulsory), and in the gradual use of modern agricultural implements, showing little signs of change. Nearly all the farms are worked on a small scale, and with the least employment of capital. “Thrift, thrift!” is the watchword with them all; early and late they labour, man, woman, and child, and year by year gain a little on the past; a piece more land, a few hundred francs put by; but they live on in the same humble, penurious way, with little care or trouble about the outer world, and knowing little of its movements. Their very charities are an investment by the teaching of their own church: a sou is given to a beggar without grudging, for shall it not be repaid? Thus on the one side we may contemplate a life of work and thrift, which is admirable, and a conservatism which keeps the soil in the hands of the labourer; but on the other, the view is of a race behindhand in civilisation, wanting in knowledge and in sympathy with the rest of mankind.

We descend the hills from Callac, following the course of the river Aven to Carhaix, the ancient capital of a province and the centre of a large agricultural district, owing its present importance to its cattle fairs. At ordinary times life is peaceful enough at Carhaix; in the principal square is the HÔtel de la Tour d’Auvergne, where visitors can live as comfortably as in any country town in France, and where the days resemble one another very closely. Every afternoon the people sit and sun themselves in the principal square, as in the sketch below, and pigs lie down undisturbed in the middle of the street; every evening the inhabitants walk under the trees on the dingy Place, with its avenues of limes, where there is a fine view over the country, and where is Marochetti’s bronze statue of La Tour d’Auvergne, “le premier grenadier de France.”

Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon there is the only communication with the outer world, when, with much cracking of whips and rattling over stones, a crazy vehicle called “the courier,” with its lame and battered horse, covered with dust and foam, comes lumbering in. It brings a packet of newspapers, chiefly local; for Carhaix cares little for the doings of the world beyond that of which it is the centre. But we must now speak of the fair.

Six roads converge upon Carhaix, and upon these roads, and across the open land, on a summer’s morning, comes a stream of horses, cattle, pigs, and people. It is the day of the cattle fair, a day for meeting and marketing for all the country round; a day of rejoicing, bargaining, and of cruelty to animals scarcely to be paralleled elsewhere; the day and the place to see the Breton farmers and cattle-dealers, to study the costumes and the ways of the peasants from some of the most primitive districts of Brittany.

ON THE ROAD TO MARKET.

It is only four o’clock in the morning, but the sounds of shouting (in strong Breton tones, which seem to Englishmen a perpetual echo from the Welsh hills), the lowing of cattle, the shrieking of pigs, and the heavy thud of sabots resound upon the roads. On the rising ground just outside Carhaix, on the western road, we can see them through an avenue of trees coming across the country in narrow defile, like the commissariat train of an army on the march; the men leading cattle, the women on horseback and on foot, laden with provisions; and others in holiday attire, arriving in country carts.

The sun shines full on the wrinkled faces of the men, and on the white caps of the women, and lights up the group with unwonted brilliancy; even the sober costumes of the people with their blue and brown stuffs, and the black, and white and fawn-coloured, cattle which they lead, would, if recorded faithfully by a painter, stand out in high accents of colour against the low-toned land; a rustic picture so fitful and vanishing that only the rapid artist, who has presented Brittany to us in these pages (as it has never been pictured before), could depict. It is the sunny side of Brittany in all its quaintness, the pastoral aspect of life which those who dwell in cities seldom see. There is nothing to mar the beauty of the morning, for the noise of the market is as yet a distant sound, mingled with the bells of Carhaix for early mass; there is nothing to suggest a change but the gathering of the clouds towards the west, and the stout umbrellas and cloaks carried by the women.

Let us follow them, later in the day, to a large square where the fair is held, and where there are wonderful sights and sounds; under the trees a crowd of men and women, in the dust and heat, horses, cattle, and pigs, in perpetual movement, with much drinking and shouting at the booths which line one side of the enclosure. There are a great many horses for sale, which do not find buyers, although the government agents are here from the neighbouring haras at Callac, and horse-dealers have come from all parts. The cattle market is overstocked, and the little black and white cattle, a cross between Alderneys and Bretons, go for very small sums to reluctant purchasers. The pig market is more active, as every Breton peasant likes to possess a pig, and the noises proceeding from this part of the square are deafening. The gentleman farmer in blue blouse to keep off the dust is the portrait of a prominent figure moving amongst the crowd.

CATTLE FAIR AT CARHAIX.

The meetings of the country people, and the groups sitting under the trees to rest, are as suggestive pictures as we have seen, and the costumes are full of variety and interest; the whole forms a scene of which the full-page sketch gives an accurate idea. These markets are held several times a year, and for a few hours disturb the quiet of the sleepy town of Carhaix.

We could well stay at Carhaix, for the scenery is varied and interesting, and there is much to observe in the farmhouses in the neighbourhood; old furniture, old carved bedsteads, cabinets, and clocks; old brass-work, old lace and embroideries.

Pictures come to us at every turn, pictures of domestic happiness and content, only to be seen in byways far removed from cities and their troubles; family groups, in which our presence seems sometimes an intrusion. Brittany, like Spain, is a country that should be travelled through cautiously; the inhabitants live out of doors in summer-time, and perform various domestic operations in the roads, regardless of traffic. Turn a corner suddenly and you may come upon a scene of family discord, or affection, where you are of necessity de trop; take a walk in the evening in the outskirts of a town, and the mute aspect of the people, one and all, is that the road belongs to them, that the dirt and the dunghills of the poorest are heirlooms which no invading sanitary inspector shall reform.

In the farmhouses in the neighbourhood we shall often find but one living and sleeping room—kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom, all in one; the bedstead of carved oak, the cupboards and chests with brass handles and bosses, the copper cooking utensils bright and shining, the floor at the same time being of bare earth. There is often a dungheap outside, and a shed for cows opening into the living room, which is common alike to pigs, fowls, and children. We see the women coming out of their dark, unhealthy dwellings on fÊte-days, looking bright and clean, with old lace in their caps, embroidered shawls, and the neatest of shoes. We see them thrashing corn and scattering the grain wastefully on the ground, and farming on a small scale in primitive fashion. But the Bretons who live thus are nearly all prosperous and thrifty in their own way; they own most of the land they farm, paying rent, for a portion perhaps, at the rate of twenty or twenty-five francs an acre, but adding to the extent of their ownership year by year. Nearly everyone we meet at Carhaix is engaged in agriculture, and the majority are well-to-do. The land yields well, and there is the Canal de Brest passing through the town to take the produce to the coast.

Waiting for Dinner, Huelgoet.

Turning northwards towards Morlaix, we pass through somewhat dreary scenery, until we come to a gorge near Huelgoet, which, with its rocks and rushing streams, will remind us of Switzerland; here are some ancient lead and silver mines, which were a source of considerable wealth in the fifteenth century.

There is a silent and deserted air about the streets of Huelgoet, seldom disturbed by the sound of wheels; at the inn where we rest our dinner is cooked in the salle À manger at the open fireplace, and from the manner of the people it is evident strangers are rare, even in summer. We are asked by the taciturn landlord to take up our abode here “for the sake of the fishing,” and a book is shown containing the names of visitors who have staid at the inn.

The road between Huelgoet and Morlaix, passing over a spur of the Monts d’ArrÉe, is again wild and desolate; we see flocks scattered over barren pastures, and men and women at work on open ground far away from habitations. It is a suggestive part of Brittany for the landscape painter, a dark lonely land of rugged outline, full of poetry and mystery.

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