A BRETON TOWN AND MANSION
France, especially in Brittany, still possesses certain towns
completely outside of the movement which gives to the nineteenth
century its peculiar characteristics. For lack of quick and regular
communication with Paris, scarcely connected by wretched roads with
the sub-prefecture, or the chief city of their own province, these
towns regard the new civilization as a spectacle to be gazed at; it
amazes them, but they never applaud it; and, whether they fear or
scoff at it, they continue faithful to the old manners and customs
which have come down to them. Whoso would travel as a moral
archaeologist, observing men instead of stones, would find images of
the time of Louis XV. in many a village of Provence, of the time of
Louis XIV. in the depths of Pitou, and of still more ancient times in
the towns of Brittany. Most of these towns have fallen from states of
splendor never mentioned by historians, who are always more concerned
with facts and dates than with the truer history of manners and
customs. The tradition of this splendor still lives in the memory of
the people,--as in Brittany, where the native character allows no
forgetfulness of things which concern its own land. Many of these
towns were once the capitals of a little feudal State,--a county or
duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, if the male
line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads became arms;
and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate.
For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient times
are beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for the
masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of
which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan.
Nowadays we have /products/, we no longer have /works/. Public
buildings, monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of
retrospection; but the monuments of modern industry are freestone
quarries, saltpetre mines, cotton factories. A few more years and even
these old cities will be transformed and seen no more except in the
pages of this iconography.
One of the towns in which may be found the most correct likeness of
the feudal ages is Guerande. The name alone awakens a thousand
memories in the minds of painters, artists, thinkers who have visited
the slopes on which this splendid jewel of feudality lies proudly
posed to command the flux and reflux of the tides and the dunes,--the
summit, as it were, of a triangle, at the corners of which are two
other jewels not less curious: Croisic, and the village of Batz. There
are no towns after Guerande except Vitre in the centre of Brittany,
and Avignon in the south of France, which preserve so intact, to the
very middle of our epoch, the type and form of the middle ages.
Guerande is still encircled with its doughty walls, its moats are full
of water, its battlements entire, its loopholes unencumbered with
vegetation; even ivy has never cast its mantle over the towers, square
or round. The town has three gates, where may be seen the rings of the
portcullises; it is entered by a drawbridge of iron-clamped wood, no
longer raised but which could be raised at will. The mayoralty was
blamed for having, in 1820, planted poplars along the banks of the
moat to shade the promenade. It excused itself on the ground that the
long and beautiful esplanade of the fortifications facing the dunes
had been converted one hundred years earlier into a mall where the
inhabitants took their pleasure beneath the elms.
The houses of the old town have suffered no change; and they have
neither increased nor diminished. None have suffered upon their
frontage from the hammer of the architect, the brush of the plasterer,
nor have they staggered under the weight of added stories. All retain
their primitive characteristics. Some rest on wooden columns which
form arcades under which foot-passengers circulate, the floor planks
bending beneath them, but never breaking. The houses of the merchants
are small and low; their fronts are veneered with slate. Wood, now
decaying, counts for much in the carved material of the window-casings
and the pillars, above which grotesque faces look down, while shapes
of fantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great
thought of Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature.
These relics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those
dusky tones and half-blurred features in which the artistic brush
delights.
The streets are what they were four hundred years ago,--with one
exception; population no longer swarms there; the social movement is
now so dead that a traveller wishing to examine the town (as beautiful
as a suit of antique armor) may walk alone, not without sadness,
through a deserted street, where the mullioned windows are plastered
up to avoid the window-tax. This street ends at a postern, flanked
with a wall of masonry, beyond which rises a bouquet of trees planted
by the hands of Breton nature, one of the most luxuriant and fertile
vegetations in France. A painter, a poet would sit there silently, to
taste the quietude which reigns beneath the well-preserved arch of the
postern, where no voice comes from the life of the peaceful city, and
where the landscape is seen in its rich magnificence through the
loop-holes of the casemates once occupied by halberdiers and archers,
which are not unlike the sashes of some belvedere arranged for a point
of view.
It is impossible to walk about the place without thinking at every
step of the habits and usages of long-past times; the very stones tell
of them; the ideas of the middle ages are still there with all their
ancient superstitions. If, by chance, a gendarme passes you, with his
silver-laced hat, his presence is an anachronism against which your
sense of fitness protests; but nothing is so rare as to meet a being
or an object of the present time. There is even very little of the
clothing of the day; and that little the inhabitants adapt in a way to
their immutable customs, their unchangeable physiognomies. The public
square is filled with Breton costumes, which artists flock to draw;
these stand out in wonderful relief upon the scene around them. The
whiteness of the linen worn by the /paludiers/ (the name given to men
who gather salt in the salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the
blues and browns of the peasantry and the original and sacredly
preserved jewelry of the women. These two classes, and that of the
sailors in their jerkins and varnished leather caps are as distinct
from one another as the castes of India, and still recognize the
distance that parts them from the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the
clergy. All lines are clearly marked; there the revolutionary level
found the masses too rugged and too hard to plane; its instrument
would have been notched, if not broken. The character of immutability
which science gives to zoological species is found in Breton human
nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830, Guerande is still a
town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic, silent,
self-contained,--a place where modern ideas have little access.
Its geographical position explains this phenomenon. The pretty town
overlooks a salt-marsh, the product of which is called throughout
Brittany the Guerande salt, to which many Bretons attribute the
excellence of their butter and their sardines. It is connected with
the rest of France by two roads only: that coming from Savenay, the
arrondissement to which it belongs, which stops at Saint-Nazaire; and
a second road, leading from Vannes, which connects it with the
Morbihan. The arrondissement road establishes communication by land,
and from Saint-Nazaire by water, with Nantes. The land road is used
only by government; the more rapid and more frequented way being by
water from Saint-Nazaire. Now, between this village and Guerande is a
distance of eighteen miles, which the mail-coach does not serve, and
for good reason; not three coach passengers a year would pass over it.
These, and other obstacles, little fitted to encourage travellers,
still exist. In the first place, government is slow in its
proceedings; and next, the inhabitants of the region put up readily
enough with difficulties which separate them from the rest of France.
Guerande, therefore, being at the extreme end of the continent, leads
nowhere, and no one comes there. Glad to be ignored, she thinks and
cares about herself only. The immense product of her salt-marshes,
which pays a tax of not less than a million to the Treasury, is
chiefly managed at Croisic, a peninsular village which communicates
with Guerande over quicksands, which efface during the night the
tracks made by day, and also by boats which cross the arm of the sea
that makes the port of Croisic.
This fascinating little town is therefore the Herculaneum of
feudality, less its winding sheet of lava. It is afoot, but not
living; it has no other ground of existence except that it has not
been demolished. If you reach Guerande from Croisic, after crossing a
dreary landscape of salt-marshes, you will experience a strong
sensation at sight of that vast fortification, which is still as good
as ever. If you come to it by Saint-Nazaire, the picturesqueness of
its position and the naive grace of its environs will please you no
less. The country immediately surrounding it is ravishing; the hedges
are full of flowers, honeysuckles, roses, box, and many enchanting
plants. It is like an English garden, designed by some great
architect. This rich, coy nature, so untrodden, with all the grace of
a bunch of violets or a lily of the valley in the glade of a forest,
is framed by an African desert banked by the ocean,--a desert without
a tree, an herb, a bird; where, on sunny days, the laboring
/paludiers/, clothed in white and scattered among those melancholy
swamps where the salt is made, remind us of Arabs in their burrows.
Thus Guerande bears no resemblance to any other place in France.
The town produces somewhat the same effect upon the mind as a
sleeping-draught upon the body. It is silent as Venice. There is no
other public conveyance than the springless wagon of a carrier who
carries travellers, merchandise, and occasionally letters from
Saint-Nazaire to Guerande and /vice versa/. Bernus, the carrier, was,
in 1829, the factotum of this large community. He went and came when
he pleased; all the country knew him; and he did the errands of all.
The arrival of a carriage in Guerande, that of a lady or some invalid
going to Croisic for sea-bathing (thought to have greater virtue among
those rocks than at Boulogne or Dieppe) is still an immense event.
The peasants come in on horseback, most of them with commodities
for barter in sacks. They are induced to do so (and so are the
/paludiers/) by the necessity of purchasing the jewels distinctive of
their caste which are given to all Breton brides, and the white linen,
or cloth for their clothing.
For a circuit ten miles round, Guerande is always GUERANDE,--the
illustrious town where the famous treaty was signed in 1365, the key
of the coast, which may boast, not less than the village of Batz, of a
splendor now lost in the night of time. The jewels, linen, cloth,
ribbon, and hats are made elsewhere, but to those who buy them they
are from Guerande and nowhere else. All artists, and even certain
bourgeois, who come to Guerande feel, as they do at Venice, a desire
(soon forgotten) to end their days amid its peace and silence, walking
in fine weather along the beautiful mall which surrounds the town from
gate to gate on the side toward the sea. Sometimes the image of this
town arises in the temple of memory; she enters, crowned with her
towers, clasped with her girdle; her flower-strewn robe floats onward,
the golden mantle of her dunes enfolds her, the fragrant breath of her
briony paths, filled with the flowers of each passing season, exhales
at every step; she fills your mind, she calls to you like some
enchanting woman whom you have met in other climes and whose presence
still lingers in a fold of your heart.
Near the church of Guerande stands a mansion which is to the town what
the town is to the region, an exact image of the past, the symbol of a
grand thing destroyed,--a poem, in short. This mansion belongs to the
noblest family of the province; to the du Guaisnics, who, in the times
of the du Guesclins, were as superior to the latter in antiquity and
fortune as the Trojans were to the Romans. The Guaisqlains (the name
is also spelled in the olden time du Glaicquin), from which comes du
Guesclin, issued from the du Guaisnics.
Old as the granite of Brittany, the Guaisnics are neither Frenchmen
nor Gauls,--they are Bretons; or, to be more exact, they are Celts.
Formerly, they must have been Druids, gathering mistletoe in the
sacred forests and sacrificing men upon their dolmens. Useless to say
what they were! To-day this race, equal to the Rohans without having
deigned to make themselves princes, a race which was powerful before
the ancestors of Hugues Capet were ever heard of, this family, pure of
all alloy, possesses two thousand francs a year, its mansion in
Guerande, and the little castle of Guaisnic. All the lands belonging
to the barony of Guaisnic, the first in Brittany, are pledged to
farmers, and bring in sixty thousand francs a year, in spite of
ignorant culture. The du Gaisnics remain the owners of these lands
although they receive none of the revenues, for the reason that for
the last two hundred years they have been unable to pay off the money
advanced upon them. They are in the position of the crown of France
towards its /engagistes/ (tenants of crown-lands) before the year
1789. Where and when could the barons obtain the million their farmers
have advanced to them? Before 1789 the tenure of the fiefs subject to
the castle of Guaisnic was still worth fifty thousand francs a year;
but a vote of the National Assembly suppressed the seigneurs' dues
levied on inheritance.
In such a situation this family--of absolutely no account in France,
and which would be a subject of laughter in Paris, were it known there
--is to Guerande the whole of Brittany. In Guerande the Baron du
Guaisnic is one of the great barons of France, a man above whom there
is but one man,--the King of France, once elected ruler. To-day the
name of du Guaisnic, full of Breton significances (the roots of which
will be found explained in "The Chouans") has been subjected to
the same alteration which disfigures that of du Guaisqlain. The
tax-gatherer now writes the name, as do the rest of the world, du
Guenic.
At the end of a silent, damp, and gloomy lane may be seen the arch of
a door, or rather gate, high enough and wide enough to admit a man on
horseback,--a circumstance which proves of itself that when this
building was erected carriages did not exist. The arch, supported by
two jambs, is of granite. The gate, of oak, rugged as the bark of the
tree itself, is studded with enormous nails placed in geometric
figures. The arch is semicircular. On it are carved the arms of the
Guaisnics as clean-cut and clear as though the sculptor had just laid
down his chisel. This escutcheon would delight a lover of the heraldic
art by a simplicity which proves the pride and the antiquity of the
family. It is as it was in the days when the crusaders of the
Christian world invented these symbols by which to recognize each
other; the Guaisnics have never had it quartered; it is always itself,
like that of the house of France, which connoisseurs find
inescutcheoned in the shields of many of the old families. Here it is,
such as you may see it still at Guerande: Gules, a hand proper
gonfaloned ermine, with a sword argent in pale, and the terrible
motto, FAC. Is not that a grand and noble thing? The circlet of a
baronial coronet surmounts this simple escutcheon, the vertical lines
of which, used in carving to represent gules, are clear as ever. The
artist has given I know not what proud, chivalrous turn to the hand.
With what vigor it holds the sword which served but recently the
present family!
If you go to Guerande after reading this history you cannot fail to
quiver when you see that blazon. Yes, the most confirmed republican
would be moved by the fidelity, the nobleness, the grandeur hidden in
the depths of that dark lane. The du Guaisnics did well yesterday, and
they are ready to do well to-morrow. To DO is the motto of chivalry.
"You did well in the battle" was the praise of the Connetable /par
excellence/, the great du Guesclin who drove the English for a time
from France. The depth of this carving, which has been protected from
the weather by the projecting edges of the arch, is in keeping with
the moral depth of the motto in the soul of this family. To those who
know the Guaisnics this fact is touching.
The gate when open gives a vista into a somewhat vast court-yard, on
the right of which are the stables, on the left the kitchen and
offices. The house is build of freestone from cellar to garret. The
facade on the court-yard has a portico with a double range of steps,
the wall of which is covered with vestiges of carvings now effaced by
time, but in which the eye of an antiquary can still make out in the
centre of the principal mass the Hand bearing the sword. The granite
steps are now disjointed, grasses have forced their way with little
flowers and mosses through the fissures between the stones which
centuries have displaced without however lessening their solidity. The
door of the house must have had a charming character. As far as the
relics of the old designs allow us to judge, it was done by an artist
of the great Venetian school of the thirteenth century. Here is a
mixture, still visible, of the Byzantine and the Saracenic. It is
crowned with a circular pediment, now wreathed with vegetation,--a
bouquet, rose, brown, yellow, or blue, according to the season. The
door, of oak, nail-studded, gives entrance to a noble hall, at the end
of which is another door, opening upon another portico which leads to
the garden.
This hall is marvellously well preserved. The panelled wainscot, about
three feet high, is of chestnut. A magnificent Spanish leather with
figures in relief, the gilding now peeled off or reddened, covers the
walls. The ceiling is of wooden boards artistically joined and painted
and gilded. The gold is scarcely noticeable; it is in the same
condition as that of the Cordova leather, but a few red flowers and
the green foliage can be distinguished. Perhaps a thorough cleaning
might bring out paintings like those discovered on the plank ceilings
of Tristan's house at Tours. If so, it would prove that those planks
were placed or restored in the reign of Louis XI. The chimney-piece is
enormous, of carved stone, and within it are gigantic andirons in
wrought-iron of precious workmanship. It could hold a cart-load of
wood. The furniture of this hall is wholly of oak, each article
bearing upon it the arms of the family. Three English guns equally
suitable for chase or war, three sabres, two game-bags, the utensils
of a huntsman and a fisherman hang from nails upon the wall.
On one side is a dining-room, which connects with the kitchen by a
door cut through a corner tower. This tower corresponds in the design
of the facade toward the court-yard with another tower at the opposite
corner, in which is a spiral staircase leading to the two upper
stories.
The dining-room is hung with tapestries of the fourteenth century; the
style and the orthography of the inscription on the banderols beneath
each figure prove their age, but being, as they are, in the naive
language of the /fabliaux/, it is impossible to transcribe them here.
These tapestries, well preserved in those parts where light has
scarcely penetrated, are framed in bands of oak now black as ebony.
The ceiling has projecting rafters enriched with foliage which is
varied for each rafter; the space between them is filled with planks
painted blue, on which twine garlands of golden flowers. Two old
buffers face each other; on their shelves, rubbed with Breton
persistency by Mariotte the cook, can be seen, as in the days when
kings were as poor in 1200 as the du Guaisnics are in 1830, four old
goblets, an ancient embossed soup-tureen, and two salt-cellars, all of
silver; also many pewter plates and many pitchers of gray and blue
pottery, bearing arabesque designs and the arms of the du Guaisnics,
covered by hinged pewter lids. The chimney-piece is modernized. Its
condition proves that the family has lived in this room for the last
century. It is of carved stone in the style of the Louis XV. period,
and is ornamented with a mirror, let in to the back with gilt beaded
moulding. This anachronism, to which the family is indifferent, would
grieve a poet. On the mantel-shelf, covered with red velvet, is a tall
clock of tortoise-shell inlaid with brass, flanked on each side with a
silver candelabrum of singular design. A large square table, with
solid legs, fills the centre of this room; the chairs are of turned
wood covered with tapestry. On a round table supported by a single leg
made in the shape of a vine-shoot, which stands before a window
looking into the garden, is a lamp of an odd kind. This lamp has a
common glass globe, about the size of an ostrich egg, which is
fastened into a candle-stick by a glass tube. Through a hole at the
top of the globe issues a wick which passes through a sort of reed of
brass, drawing the nut-oil held in the globe through its own length
coiled like a tape-worm in a surgeon's phial. The windows which look
into the garden, like those that look upon the court-yard, are
mullioned in stone with hexagonal leaded panes, and are draped by
curtains, with heavy valances and stout cords, of an ancient stuff of
crimson silk with gold reflections, called in former days either
brocatelle or small brocade.
On each of the two upper stories of the house there are but two rooms.
The first is the bedroom of the head of the family, the second is that
of the children. Guests were lodged in chambers beneath the roof. The
servants slept above the kitchens and stables. The pointed roof,
protected with lead at its angles and edges, has a noble pointed
window on each side, one looking down upon the court-yard, the other
on the garden. These windows, rising almost to the level of the roof,
have slender, delicate casings, the carvings of which have crumbled
under the salty vapors of the atmosphere. Above the arch of each
window with its crossbars of stone, still grinds, as it turns, the
vane of a noble.
Let us not forget a precious detail, full of naivete, which will be of
value in the eyes of an archaeologist. The tower in which the spiral
staircase goes up is placed at the corner of a great gable wall in
which there is no window. The staircase comes down to a little arched
door, opening upon a gravelled yard which separates the house from the
stables. This tower is repeated on the garden side by another of five
sides, ending in a cupola in which is a bell-turret, instead of being
roofed, like the sister-tower, with a pepper-pot. This is how those
charming architects varied the symmetry of their sky-lines. These
towers are connected on the level of the first floor by a stone
gallery, supported by what we must call brackets, each ending in a
grotesque human head. This gallery has a balustrade of exquisite
workmanship. From the gable above depends a stone dais like those that
crown the statues of saints at the portal of churches. Can you not see
a woman walking in the morning along this balcony and gazing over
Guerande at the sunshine, where it gilds the sands and shimmers on the
breast of Ocean? Do you not admire that gable wall flanked at its
angles with those varied towers? The opposite gable of the Guaisnic
mansion adjoins the next house. The harmony so carefully sought by the
architects of those days is maintained in the facade looking on the
court-yard by the tower which communicates between the dining-room and
the kitchen, and is the same as the staircase tower, except that it
stops at the first upper story and its summit is a small open dome,
beneath which stands a now blackened statue of Saint Calyste.
The garden is magnificent for so old a place. It covers half an acre
of ground, its walls are all espaliered, and the space within is
divided into squares for vegetables, bordered with cordons of
fruit-trees, which the man-of-all-work, named Gasselin, takes care of
in the intervals of grooming the horses. At the farther end of the garden
is a grotto with a seat in it; in the middle, a sun-dial; the paths are
gravelled. The facade on the garden side has no towers corresponding
to those on the court-yard; but a slender spiral column rises from the
ground to the roof, which must in former days have borne the banner of
the family, for at its summit may still be seen an iron socket, from
which a few weak plants are straggling. This detail, in harmony with
the vestiges of sculpture, proves to a practised eye that the mansion
was built by a Venetian architect. The graceful staff is like a
signature revealing Venice, chivalry, and the exquisite delicacy of
the thirteenth century. If any doubts remained on this point, a
feature of the ornamentation would dissipate them. The trefoils of the
hotel du Guaisnic have four leaves instead of three. This difference
plainly indicates the Venetian school depraved by its commerce with
the East, where the semi-Saracenic architects, careless of the great
Catholic thought, give four leaves to clover, while Christian art is
faithful to the Trinity. In this respect Venetian art becomes
heretical.
If this ancient dwelling attracts your imagination, you may perhaps
ask yourself why such miracles of art are not renewed in the present
day. Because to-day mansions are sold, pulled down, and the ground
they stood on turned into streets. No one can be sure that the next
generation will possess the paternal dwelling; homes are no more than
inns; whereas in former times when a dwelling was built men worked, or
thought they worked, for a family in perpetuity. Hence the grandeur of
these houses. Faith in self, as well as faith in God, did prodigies.
As for the arrangement of the upper rooms they may be imagined after
this description of the ground-floor, and after reading an account of
the manners, customs, and physiognomy of the family. For the last
fifty years the du Guaisnics have received their friends in the two
rooms just described, in which, as in the court-yard and the external
accessories of the building, the spirit, grace, and candor of the old
and noble Brittany still survives. Without the topography and
description of the town, and without this minute depicting of the
house, the surprising figures of the family might be less understood.
Therefore the frames have preceded the portraits. Every one is aware
that things influence beings. There are public buildings whose effect
is visible upon the persons living in their neighborhood. It would be
difficult indeed to be irreligious in the shadow of a cathedral like
that of Bourges. When the soul is everywhere reminded of its destiny
by surrounding images, it is less easy to fail of it. Such was the
thought of our immediate grandfathers, abandoned by a generation which
was soon to have no signs and no distinctions, and whose manners and
morals were to change every decade. If you do not now expect to find
the Baron du Guaisnic sword in hand, all here written would be
falsehood.