Nantes

“ These features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French water-side places—the bright greyness which is the tone of French landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an eminently well-established, air. ”

“ To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an infinite charm for a less absorbed mind. This beautiful spot, this great liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a rare harmony, such as one but seldom meets with in life. ”

“ About eight o'clock at night he perceived Nantes at length upon the horizon, like a dark mass from out the midst of which some scattered lights were shining starlike in the gloom.
He tried to breathe, and thinking his cravat was choking him, he tore it off and threw it on the road.
Thus, mounted on his black horse, wrapped in his black cloak, and long ago bareheaded (his hat had fallen off) , Gaston was like some fiendish cavalier bound to the witches' Sabbath. ”

“ Command me, and the silver moon I’ll bring thee!
Yvette
With what a sudden glory shines the sun!
It gilds the streets, it gilds the running Loire!
And from them both the blood-stains fade away!
Ah, let us rest from death in Nantes to-day,
And think how falls the eve in Bethlehem!—
There is a little village that I know,
A hungry village by a hungry sea,
As worn and grey as any calvary!
The hungry shadows ate the sunshine up ”

“ There are a hundred possibilities of poverty and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.
The great treasure of Nantes is the two noble se- pulchral monuments which occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its nobleness) the rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany, and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Chateau de Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first husband ”

“ Upon arriving at Nantes I learned that a body of ten thousand troops, commanded by Monsieur De Forbin, had just entered Brittany in order to crush the rebellious parliamentarians—were they bourgeois or peasants. On the following day the town of Nantes was occupied by two regiments of infantry, supported by artillery and cavalry. The executions commenced. On the first day forty-seven leading bourgeois were hanged, and eleven men of the common people, who were marked as seditious, broken alive on the wheel."
"My God!" cried Mademoiselle Plouernel horrified. "How much blood! How much blood!" ”

“ Lyons is clean swept, spick and span as a toy town; Bordeaux is coquettish as her charming Bordelaise; Nantes, certainly, is not particularly careful of appearances. But Marseilles is dirty, unswept, littered from end to end; you might suppose that every householder had just moved, leaving their odds and ends in the streets, if, indeed, these beautifully-shaded walks can be so called. The city in its development has laid out alleys and boulevards instead of merely making ways, with the result that in spite of brilliant sky and burning sun, coolness and shadow are ever to be had. ”

“ To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward, across the historic bocage of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting. The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses, orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the traveller is apt to deem the feathery foliage of France. ”

“ The most hideous episode of the Revolution was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire. The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the air noble, in France always reminds me of those dreadful years, - of the street-scenes of the Revolution. ”

“ In population (town, 118,244; commune, 133,247, in 1906) Nantes is the first city of Brittany. The Loire here divides into several branches forming islands over portions of which the city has spread. It receives on the left hand the Sèvre Nantaise, and on the right the Erdre, which forms the outlet of the canal between Nantes and Brest. The maritime port of Nantes is reached by way of the Loire and the ship canal between the island of Carnet and La Martinière (91/2 m.) ”

“ It is rather a matter of surprise that an enlightened people should have submitted to tyranny so long.”
Nantes is the Paris of the Loire. Its streets, boulevards, public squares, the forest of masts in the river, and the trees that line its banks, all seem a copy of the bright and gay French capital. Its old cathedral is a queer-looking building, with towers scarcely higher than its roof; but it contains a most beautiful tomb which was erected in memory of Francis II. last Duke of Bretagne. It is adorned with figures of angels, the twelve Apostles, St. Louis, and Charlemagne. ”

“ This voyage will probably be the last I shall undertake, and then I am coming to take up my abode near you."
"Monsieur, monsieur, the Nantes diligence is coming in," cried the old servant, rushing into the room. "You haven't a minute to lose."
"Farewell, Pierre," said Henri, clasping his friend in a last embrace.
"Farewell. God grant we may meet again, my dear Henri."
A few minutes afterward, Henri David was on his way to Nantes, from which port he was to start on an expedition to Central Africa. ”

“ Below Nantes the Loire estuary has turned the surrounding country into a little Holland, where fisherfolk and their boats, with sails of red and blue, form charming symphonies of pale colour. In the cabarets along its shores there is a strange medley of peasants, sea-farers, and fisher men and women. Not so cosmopolitan a crew as one sees in the harbourside cabarets at Marseilles, or even Le Havre, but sufficiently strange to be a fascination to one who has just come down from the headwaters. ”

“ Three nights after that on which we have seen the regent, first at Chelles and then at Meudon, a scene passed in the environs of Nantes which cannot be omitted in this history; we will therefore exercise our privilege of transporting the reader to that place.
On the road to Clisson, two or three miles from Nantes—near the convent known as the residence of Abelard—was a large dark house, surrounded by thick stunted trees; hedges everywhere surrounded the inclosure outside the walls, hedges impervious to the sight, and only interrupted by a wicket gate. ”

“ Of all the cities of the Loire, Orleans, Blois, Tours, Angers, and Nantes alone show any spirit of modern progressiveness or of likeness41 to the capital. The rest, to all appearances, are dead, or at least sleeping in their pasts. But they are charming and restful spots for all that, where in melancholy silence sit the old men, while the younger folk, including the very children, are all at work in the neighbouring vineyards or in the wheat-fields of La Beauce. ”

“ There was only one man on deck, Beauty—on the whole deck just one man. I remember him well: he was all crooked—a crooked nose, crooked teeth, and a crooked smile. And there was something nasty in the way he answered my simple question about the Notre Dame de Nantes. 'The Notre Dame de Nantes?’ he smiled. 'She's not anchored anywhere about here; she's not anchored at all. ”

“ I travelled so long as earth supported me, and only halted at Nantes, close to the sea, on a hill which overlooks the yellow streams of Brittany as they flow onward to mingle, in the Loire, with the gray waters of La Vendée.
We established ourselves in a large country mansion, completely isolated, in the midst of the constant rains with which our western fields are inundated at this season. At such a distance from the ocean, one does not feel its briny influence; the rains are tempests of fresh water. ”

“ You must make your way by different routes to Nantes. There are many villages on the bank where you can find a boat that will take you across. Never travel more than two together. You must all take the green ribbons off your hats, leave your belts behind, and hide your pistols. If questions are asked you, reply that you are going to get work at Nantes, where you have friends, and that you are afraid to stay in your own villages.
"I will give each of you assignats for five francs. It would not do to give you silver. With this you can pay for your ferry across the water, and buy food on the way. ”

“ Overhead windows were thrown open—the good burghers of Nantes, awakened from their sleep, forgetful for the nonce of all their anxieties, their squalor and their miseries, leaned out to see what this new kind of din might mean. From everywhere—it almost seemed as if some sprang out of the earth—men, either of the town-guard or Marats on patrol duty, or merely idlers and night hawks who happened to be about, yielded to that primeval instinct of brutality which causes men as well as beasts to join in a pursuit against a fellow creature. ”

“ Nantes (116) , capital of the department of Loire-Inférieure, North-West France, on the Loire, 35 m. from the sea; its fine streets, handsome buildings, and historical associations make it one of the most interesting cities in France; the cathedral and the ducal castle date from the 15th century; shipbuilding, sugar-refining, and hardware are the staple industries, while an active shipping trade is kept up with the colonies. ”

“ Nantes was turned into a city of wailing; peasant-women—mothers, sisters, daughters, wives of the condemned, trooped from their villages into the city, loudly calling on M. le duc for mercy, besieging the improvised court-house, the prison gates, the town residence of M. le duc, the palace of the bishop: they pushed their way into the courtyards and the very corridors of those buildings—flunkeys could not cope with them—they fought with fists and elbows for the right to make a direct appeal to the liege-lord who had power of life and death over their men. ”

“ Houses were then built outside the old city walls, docks and quays sprang up along the river, and at last a cathedral appeared high on the hill which dominates the city.
The location of Nantes, only fifty-five kilometers from the sea, and at the junction of the railroad lines from Bordeaux, Brest, St. Nazaire and Paris, with direct communication with Brest by canal, made it an advantageous freight port, and great quantities of food and ammunition passed through it before and after the armistice. ”

“ Throughout this region, in the valleys of the Moine and the Sèvre-Nantaise, the rocks and the verdure and the admirable, though ill preserved, ruins, all combine to produce as unworldly an atmosphere as it is possible to conceive within a short half-hundred kilometres of the busy world-port of Nantes and the great commercial city of Angers. One continually meets with ruins that recall the frightful struggle of Revolutionary times; hence the impression that one gets from a ramble through or about this region is well-nigh unique in all France. ”

“ By night in Nantes the Rain-bow shall appear,
Sea Rain-bows shall cause Rain;
The Arabian Gulf shall drownd a great Fleet,
A Monster shall be in Saxony from a Bear and a Sow. ANNOT. Nantes is a City in France, Iris is the Rainbow, Saxony is a Province in Germany; the rest is plain.
XLV.
French. ”

“ There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size, and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic—a tall elegant building of the sixteenth century. The château is naturally not wanting in history. ”

“ My idea is to collect together all the most disreputable and notorious evil-doers of this city ... there are plenty in the entrepôt at the present moment, and there are plenty more still at large in the streets of Nantes—thieves, malefactors, forgers of State bonds, assassins and women of evil fame ... and to send them in a batch to Paris to appear before the Committee of Public Safety, whilst I will send to my colleagues there a letter couched in terms of gentle reproach: 'See!' I shall say, 'what I have to contend with in Nantes. See! the moral pestilence that infests the city. ”

“ This is not bad for a climate which on the Loire approaches almost Mediterranean mildness. It is a pity that cold and austere England does not rise a little earlier in the morning. London, it is true, sits up late enough, but she makes up for it by dawdling away all the morning up to half-past ten or eleven.
In spite of all its loveliness and gaiety, Nantes is a city more ancient than modern,—this antique Namnêtes, the capital, by preference, of the Dukes of Brittany, and the political rival of Rennes. ”

“ Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now the brigands are threatening Nantes itself. There is abject want in the city, disease is rampant; people are dying of hunger in the streets and of typhus in the prisons. ”

“ The whole population of Nantes was in commotion, and it was said that the investigation would be fictitious, that the duke would screen his kinsman, and that the object of general execration would escape with the surrender of some of his lands.
And such would probably have been the event of the trial, had not the Bishop of Nantes and the grand-seneschal taken a very decided course in the matter. They gave the duke no peace till he had yielded to their demand for a thorough investigation and a public trial. ”