Pierre Loti

“ All about is that immense peace which is peculiar to the fine days of autumn; in the air a savour of dampness and of fallen leaves, a pervading sense of the dying year. I am in the well-known woods of Trémeulé, on the height overlooking all the region of Toulven. Below me, the lake, motionless under this floating mist, and, in the distance, wooded horizons, as they must have been in the ancient days of Gaul.
And those who are with me, sitting among the thousand little flowerets of the heather, are my Breton friends, my brother Yves and little Pierre, his son. ”

“ I was in the Near East when these little letters of Yves reached me; they brought me, in their simplicity, the already far-off perfume of the Breton country.
My memories of Brittany were fading fast. Even now I seemed to see them as through a mist of dreamland; the reefs I had known so well, the lights on the coast, Cape Finistère with its great dark rocks; and the dangerous approaches to Ushant on winter evenings, and the west wind blowing under a mournful sky, in the fall of December nights. From where I was now, it all seemed a vision of a sunless country. ”

“ By the roadside there are carpets of Easter daisies and Breton flowers: the first pink silenes and the first foxgloves.
Turning a rocky corner we find that the rain and the wind have suddenly ceased. And as if by magic the aspect of things is entirely changed.
We see before us as far as eye commands a great flat country, a barren moor, bare as a desert: the old country of Léon, in the background of which, far away, stands the granite shaft of the Creizker.
And yet this mournful country has a charm of its own, and Yves smiles as he perceives his tower towards which we are moving. ”

“ From Bannalec to Toulven is an hour's drive through the woods. With my eyes fixed in front of me I watch for the granite steeple of the church in the distance of the green horizon.
And now it appears reflected deep below in the mournful pool. The weather has cleared and the sky is blue again, a pale blue.
Toulven! . . . The diligence stops. Yves is there waiting for me, holding little Pierre by the hand.
We look at each other—and our first impulse is to laugh, on account of our moustaches. Our faces are altered, and we seem odd to each other. ”

“ Toulven, in spring; the lanes full of primroses. A first warm breeze stirs the air, a surprise and a delight; it stirs the branches of the oaks and beeches, and the great leafless woods; it brings us, in this grey Brittany, the scent of distant places, memories of sunlit lands. A pale summer is at hand, with long, mild evenings.
We are all outside at the cottage door, the two old Keremenens, Yves, his wife, and Anne, little Corentine, and little Pierre. Religious chants, which we had first heard in the distance, are slowly drawing near. ”

“ Around the ship which proceeds slowly, the infinite blue spreads its perfect circle. The surface shines and glitters under the eternal sun.
Yves is there, alone, carried high in the air in a thing which oscillates slowly; he passes, in his top.
He gazes, with unseeing eyes at the limitless circle; he is as it were dazed with space and light. His expressionless eyes come to rest at hazard, for, everywhere, all is alike.
Everywhere, all is alike. . . . It is the great blind, unconscious splendour of things which men believe have been made for them. ”

“ In Toulven there was a music of bagpipes. To reach the inn, to which they were both escorting me, we had to pass through an unexpected fête, going on in the moonlight. It was the wedding of a well-to-do couple and there was dancing in the open, on the square. I stopped, with Anne and Marie, to watch the long chain of the gavotte whirl and pass, led by the shrill voice of the pipes. The full moon made whiter the coifs of the women which flitted past us as if carried away by wind and speed; on the breasts of the men we caught the fleeting glitter of embroidered gorgets and silver spangles. ”

“ Everything is of a blue-green, of a blue of night, of a colour of infinite depth; the moon, which at first sails high in the heaven, throws little flickering reflections on the sea, as if everywhere, on the immense empty plain, mysterious hands were agitating silently thousands of little mirrors.
The half-hours pass one after another, undisturbed, the breeze steady, the sails very lightly stretched. The sailors of the watch, in their linen clothes, are asleep on the bare deck, in rows, all on the same side, fitted in one with another, like rows of white mummies. ”

“ There was commotion this night in Brest: the patrols were kept busy.
In the Rue de Sept Saints and in the Rue de Saint Yves, singing and shouting went on until the morning; it was as if barbarians had been loosed there, bands escaped from ancient Gaul; there were scenes of rejoicing that recalled the boisterousness of primitive times.
The sailors sang. And the women, their fingers itching for the pieces of gold—agitated, dishevelled in this great excitation of the sailors' homecoming—mingled their shrill voices with the deep voices of the men. ”

“ Here and there, on the roadside, are grey cottages, very old and covered with moss.
From one of them comes a lullaby, sung in slow cadence by a voice which also is very old:
"Boudoul, boudoul, galaïchen! [4]
Boudoul, boudoul, galaïch du!"
"It is he they are rocking," said Yves, smiling. "Come in!"
This cottage of the old Keremenen people is half-buried and overgrown with moss. Above it the oaks and beeches spread their green vault; it seems as old as the earth of the lanes.
Inside the light is dim; one sees the press-beds in line with cupboards along the rough granite of the walls. ”

“ A fine summer's day in Saint Pol-de-Léon is a rare thing in this region of fogs: a kind of melancholy radiance is shed over everything; the old town of the Middle Ages is, as it were, awakened out of its mournful slumber in the mist and made young again; the old granite warms itself in the sun; the tower of Creizker, the giant of Breton towers, bathes in the blue sky, in the full light, its delicate grey fretwork marbled with yellow lichens. And all around is the wild moorland, with its pink heather, its golden gorse, exhaling a soft perfume of flowering broom. ”

“ When I take my leave of them, Yves gets up also in order to accompany me as far as the village, where I am going to sleep at the inn.
Outside, in the sunken lane, under the branches, it is now pitch dark; we are enveloped by a double obscurity, that of the trees and that of the night.
It is a kind of peace to which we are not accustomed, the peace of the woods. And there is no sea; the country of Toulven is far away from it. We listen; it seems to us still that we ought to hear in the distance its familiar sound. But no; all about is silence. ”

“ The sails, the cordage hung limp, like dead things; we drifted lifeless like a wreck.
Aloft, in Yves' domain, might still be felt some slow movements which were no longer perceptible below. In this motionless air saturated with rays, the crow's nest continued to rock with a tranquil regularity which conduced to slumber. There were long slow oscillations accompanied always by the same flappings of drooping sails, the same creakings of dry wood.
It was intensely hot, and the light had a surprising splendour, and the mournful sea was of a milky blue, of the colour of melted turquoise. ”

“ In the evening after supper, we went for a walk, Anne, Yves and I, a walk much more peaceful than that of the day.
And, at nine o'clock, we sat down by the side of a wide road which traversed the woods.
It was not yet dark, so prolonged in Brittany are the evenings in the beautiful month of June; but we began, nevertheless, to talk of phantoms and the dead.
Anne said:
"In winter when the wolves come we can hear them from our home; but sometimes ghosts, too, utter cries like theirs." ”

“ And in the more neglected parts where time has levelled the little mounds of turf, there are still flowers for the dead: silenes, and the foxgloves of the fields of Brittany; the ground is pink with them. The tombs are thick near the door of the age-old church, as on the mysterious threshold of eternity; this tall grey thing rising up here, this steeple uplifted in eager aspiration, it seems as if it does in fact protest a little against annihilation; in raising itself into the sky, it appeals, it supplicates; it is like an eternal prayer immobilized in granite. ”

“ The next tide brought in a stiff little corpse, a little body of white wax, which was laid to rest near the chapel, under a wooden cross and a mound of green turf.
She still cherished a hope in her son Yves, the last, the best beloved, because he had remained the longest at home. . . . Perhaps he, at least, would return one day to live near her!
But it was not to be. This Marie Keremenen had stolen him from her; and, at the same time—a thing which counted in her rancour—she had taken from her also the money which this son had previously sent to help her to live. ”

“ From the height we had reached we could see woods as far as eye could command; the blackthorns were already in flower; all the branches, all the reddish sprigs, full of buds, were waiting for the spring. And, in the distance, in the midst of this country of trees, Toulven church raised its grey spire.
We had been out so long that Corentine had been placed on the look out in the green lane to announce our return. We saw her from a distance, jumping, dancing, playing all sorts of tricks alone, her big head-dress and her collarette fluttering in the wind. ”

“ And, in an isolated square, the Breton bagpipes played a rapid and monotonous air of olden times, and people in old-fashioned costume danced to this age-old music; men and women, holding hands, ran, ran like the wind, like a lot of mad folk, in a long frenzied file. It was a relic of old Brittany, retaining still its note of primitiveness, even at the gates of Brest, amid the uproar of a fair.
At first we tried, Yves and I, to calm the three sailors and make them sit down. ”

“ And we begin our regular little walk up and down the wooden deck of the Sèvre. We know by heart all the little hollows where the water collects, all the angle blocks in which one's feet may be caught, all the rings over which one may stumble.
The sky is overcast for our last walk together, the moon hidden, and the air damp. In the distance, from the direction of Recouvrance, come as usual the eternal songs of the sailors.
We speak of many things. I give Yves much advice, and he, very submissive, makes many promises; and it is very late when he leaves me to seek his hammock. ”

“ Little Pierre is at Plouherzel, trying to play in front of his grandmother's door—quite lost as he looks at the motionless sheet of water before him, with the large beastlike shape which seems to be asleep in the centre, behind a veil of mist. There is free air and open sky here, to be sure, but the wind is keener than at Toulven, and the country more desolate; and children feel these things by instinct; in the presence of things forlorn, they have involuntary melancholies and silences—as birds have. ”

“ Yves had climbed with the larboard men into the disarray of the rigging, and then I kept my eyes aloft, blinded myself also, and only seeing momentarily now the human cluster in the air.
And, suddenly, in a lurch more violent than any that had gone before, the silhouette of this group was broken brusquely and changed its form; two bodies broke away from it and fell with outspread arms into the roaring volutes of the sea, while another crashed on the deck, without a cry, falling as a man might who was already dead. ”

“ Marie remained there, motionless, perceiving with a painful acuteness all these already familiar sounds of the winter mornings which ascended from the street, voices husky with alcohol and the rumblings of sabots. It was in one of those old many-storeyed houses, tall, immense, with dark yards, rough granite walls as thick as ramparts, sheltering all sorts of people, workmen, pensioners, sailors; at least thirty families of drunkards. It was now four months since—on Yves' return from the Antilles—she had left Toulven to come and live there. ”

“ There is still the perfume of honeysuckle; but, with the night, have come a penetrating freshness and odours of moss, of earth, of the dampness of Brittany.
All this sleeping countryside, all these wooded hills which surround us, all these slumbering trees, all these tranquillities oppress us. We feel rather like strangers in the midst of it all, and we miss the sea, the sea which, after all, is the great open space, the great unconfined field over which we are accustomed to run. ”