Brittany is the nose on the map of France. Rosmarian, a tiny hamlet in the southern Breton département of Morbihan, holds the position and significance of a nostril hair. In 1991, the European Community may have contained more the 350 million people in fifteen member states, but the community of Rosmarian, whose name in Breton means “hill by the sea,” was home to a pair of working farms and a half dozen resident families. On the global economic highway, Rosmarian resembled a horse-drawn cart. The world was overtaking it without a second thought.
Visiting Rosmarian three decades ago was an American newspaper writer on a dilettante’s sojourn. We lived in a simple three-room stone cottage: full kitchen with modern conveniences (electric range, dishwasher); living room with fireplace; and above the kitchen, a cozy loft bedroom with low ceiling and handsome antique armoire. Built sometime in the last century of roughhewn red stone blocks and thick timber beams, the cottage was formerly a farm outbuilding, a storehouse for hay and feed.
Ten years earlier, the structure was dilapidated, its roof sunken. Monsieur M—, manager of a drugstore chain in Brussels who rehabilitated the property over several years, discovered in its neglected corners hundreds of discarded cider bottles and beer bottles. He supposed that in years past the local men would come out to the storehouse for a drink and leave behind any incriminating evidence.
An industrious and handy man, Monsieur M— was tall and lanky as the rail-splitting Abraham Lincoln and supremely confident in his self-taught ability to mix concrete, lay tiles, and hammer nails in planks. He was well-regarded in Rosmarian for thoughtfully transforming the eyesore of an abandoned storehouse into a handsome summer home. Residents called him, “chef” — in English, “boss” — as a term of endearment rather than deference.
“Les petits paysans Bretons” was how the farmer woman living beside our cottage called herself and her husband. Léontine and Marc G— were both in their early sixties, their grown children away at school in Paris or dispersed throughout the countryside in neighboring hamlets. Léontine was five feet tall, with thick red hair cut high above her foxlike ears. Protruding from the half sleeves of a frayed housecoat, her lower arms were muscular and ruddy. When the sun in the fields was strong, Léontine wore a wide-brimmed straw hat tied to her head by a knotted blue handkerchief. The hat helped to soften her appearance, which was otherwise sharp and hard, even fierce. Marc G— had a milder appearance. He wore a pleasant grin as regularly as his trademark plaid casquette. At six o’clock each morning, Marc would enter the shed below our bedroom window and begin shouting at his herd of twenty cows to get them moving into the milking room. This proved a reliable alarm. When Léontine yelled, however, sit was at her husband not the cows.
Rosmarian’s other family farmers tended fewer cows and smaller fields than their prosperous neighbors. The stone farm buildings where they worked were never tidy. A pack of black geese and several small dogs had the run of the main house where the door was always left open. Mornings and evenings, two sullen teenage daughters walked their family’s animals to and from pasture grounds along the hamlet’s only road. Any dilatory cows were swatted sharply on their haunches with switches.
Traffic in Rosmarian was heaviest at noon when a beige Renault van rumbled into the hamlet ahead of a churning cloud of red dust. Paul, a young Breton with unruly blonde hair and toothy grin, came home from his house painting chores for lunch with his wife, Clothilde, and their three young girls.
For distraction on Sunday afternoons and at night, Paul played the biniou, a short, slender black pipe resembling a piccolo or recorder with a similarly high, thin sound. He was a member of the reigning bagad champions of Brittany, Ronsed-Mor, whose name means “sea horse.”
In a bagad, the Breton version of a Scottish bagpipe band, the biniou section can number two dozen players accompanying a smaller group of bagpipers and several drummers. Ronsed-Mor traveled the Celtic festival circuit in the summer months and had played as far away as Kinvara on the west coast of Ireland. When Paul was practicing his instrument, he trilled long series of notes like a bird calling to its mate. His biniou made a ghostly music that seemed to stir forth ancient spirits residing in Rosmarian’s fields and pastures and wells.
Seated at a card table in a far corner of our cottage, I wrote on a manual Smith Corona typewriter every morning from eight until noon. The typewriter’s keys for “e” and “o” and “p” consistently knocked holes clean through double sheets of thin French typing paper. The machine’s clatter was loud enough to be heard at the hamlet’s stand of mailboxes 100 meters away from the house, the neighbors said.
All through the spring, I cheerfully maintained a daily correspondence with friends and family, though it soon became clear there would be little response. Writing these letters became an important part of my writerly routine despite the silence. I carefully folded the correspondence inside pale blue “Par Avion” envelopes edged with red and navy-blue stripes. Keeping in touch with home by post was not merely a writer’s quaint mannerism; our Rosmarian cottage was without a telephone.
Every noon, I left this pleasant work for an equally pleasant jog around the limits of Rosmarian. In my blue and yellow running suit (these were the colors of the EU flag emblazoned on a souvenir outfit bought in a Brussels shop), I provided a humorous spectacle for the hamlet’s other residents and an attraction for many family dogs. This daily run along a three-kilometer circuit took me through an invigorating and varied landscape. To the north lay a wild, ragged copse that was home to a bellowing cuckoo. At the western and southern corners were rolling fields of pasture and plots of fertile earth. A hill at the east descended to sweeping tidal marsh and the silvery river beyond.
On a cool spring evening at a table by a fireplace, Marc and Léontine talked about their farm work while we passed around a tin of English hard candies. The two of them were getting old, Léontine said, and they were giving thought to retirement. Marc listened quietly to his chatty wife. I watched him roll his thumbs nervously together as is they were on wheels. The shapely muscles in the farmer’s upper arms bulged like rubber balls. When Léontine rose to gather wood for the fire, Marc’s pale blue eyes followed his wife closely. She went to an enormous armoire from where she drew out a heavy glass jar filled with cherries macerating in a colorless eau de vie. Léontine had grown the cherries in Rosmarian and Marc had brewed the liquor from native Rosmarian potatoes, I learned. Digging further inside the armoire, Léontine brought out sherbet glasses and spoons. She served us each four soft, brown cherries in a shot of Breton fire water so strong it brought tears to our eyes.
Among farmers everywhere there is rarely any good news. Find a farmer, in fact, and you will usually find someone ready to tell you they are giving up farming. Marc and Léontine were no different. Léontine told us that production limits imposed on French farmers by the European Union, when taken together with incentives from the national government, could make not farming the land more profitable than bothering to work it. Léontine was clearly the one who wished to quit the farm. For his part, Marc said very little about anything. That night around the dining room table, he was occupied with his spoon, digging in his glass for every drop of liquor.
The seemingly tireless Léontine jumped away once more from her chair. She took from a bureau drawer a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings, each one neatly folded in a square. At last, she read to us about another farming couple who had retired and opened a petting zoo for children. This is what Léontine wanted to do, too. “We will have goats and rabbits and chickens and ducks,” she promised. For the American at the table, whose French came haltingly, she imitated the birds with a “cluck-cluck” and a “quack-quack.”
My daily exercise also took me by bicycle the two kilometers into Mendon, the nearest town from Rosmarian, where I visited the post office and the bakery. From my bike’s wicker basket, I withdrew a quantity of post cards and letters. Addresses on the envelopes were neatly typed, the final line in heavy block letters as if chiseled in stone: ETAS UNIS. The act of writing my country’s name in another language reminded me more of my temporary estrangement from home. The Mendon post office, situated at the town crossroads, had the air of a simple, bureaucratic chapel with an ancient wooden public telephone cabinet for the confessional, and an elbow-high counter for the altar. Even the air was vaguely ecclesiastical smelling of rosewater and furniture polish. Officiating here daily was a reserved woman of indeterminate middle age, round as a pumpkin, and so short then when she hunched over an account book at her desk, she could not be seen from the opposite side of the counter. This priestess dispensed three-franc stamps as if they were holy sacraments. She canceled my correspondence forcefully by hand, and the post office windowpanes shivered.
One morning, the post office manager astonished me with a demand for a franc supplement on the postage for a post card. The surcharge, she explained, was for having written too much. The post office manager held up the post card by the corner. It was nearly dripping with ink. I considered her tariff as counsel for me to be more concise. In card and after card thereafter, I usually wrote a simple, cheerful refrain: “Food is great. Wine is cheap. We’re not coming home.”
For a fresh supply of the town’s own post card, I pedaled 50 meters from the post office to the town’s one hardware store at the eastern edge of the village square behind a prominent bar-café. Outside the store’s corner door were displayed brooms and shovels in a range of colors, sizes and handle lengths; blue butane gas containers stacked on their sides like small torpedoes; and sagging sacks of peat moss and manure. An ancient well decorated with geraniums dominated the narrow courtyard that passed for a parking lot.
Madame R—, whose face was wrinkled like a dried apple, edged out tentatively from a kitchen behind the store’s tiny showroom. Her husband, Jean, was rarely to be found at his place of business. In addition to owning the village hardware store, he was also the village plumber and electrician. Given his line of work, Jean R— was usually avoiding someone. Asked when he might return to a job that he had left unfinished, Jean invariably answered, “Saturday.” Understood was that he might arrive on any Saturday from now until kingdom come.
In the store, the ancient stock lay about in great disorder: light bulbs in puzzling shapes, apparently from the early days of electricity; round washing machines on swollen cast iron legs standing like old women in armored support hose; kitchen knives and hunting knives growing dull on cardboard display panels. On an unsteady wire rack, I found the Mendon post cards, curled and faded with age, showing views of the Mendon village church, the town crossroads, and an Etel River scene. These were sold for a modest one franc each or less than a quarter.
An American accent prompted Madame R— to tell me her stories about the war. When American GIs came from Normandy in 1944 to liberate Brittany, she recalled, they handed out chocolate to all the children who went to watch them march by. Only months earlier in the Persian Gulf war (this was 1991), her son had served in the French Army medical corps with a company of American soldiers. Did I know Gen. Schwarzkopf’s men had no good food to eat, she asked me, only dried dinners you would not serve to a dog? The French medics, Madame announced proudly, had generously given their rations to Americans hungry for a real meal. These gourmet French meals must have seemed an appropriate repayment for the Hershey bars of a generation earlier.
As we spoke by the hardware store’s door, Madame R— pointed to a cat prowling in her courtyard. The animal had given birth to kittens in her garage shortly after the Gulf War ended, she said. The cat was not hers, but she considered it necessary to name the animal because she’s taken care of it for so long. Of all things, she called the stray cat, “Amérique.”
* * *
Brittany is Celtic France for what that was worth at the end of the 20th century. Most Americans are acquainted with Celtic culture through the Irish or Scottish strains, but in ancient times, Celts controlled the western half of Europe from the Alps to the Atlantic coast and from the British Isles to as far south as the Iberian peninsula. A sufficiently active imagination will find traces of Celtic influence in Brittany even if these seem only vague reminders of rural Irish architecture and landscapes: thatched roofs; winding country roads; a rough and rocky coast. Like all Celts, however, the Bretons have passed from one generation to the next an abiding affection for a good shrill bagpipe. When it swings – and the pipes, binious and drums can swing to a primitive, gut-gripping rhythm – Breton music has an undeniable power.
Ronsed-Mor, the Mendon village bagad and the champions of Brittany, organized un trophée one weekend. Our Rosmarian neighbor Paul, a Ronsed-Mor member, paid a call to invite us. Un trophée, he explained, is a juried contest for local bands with cash prizes awarded. The Ronsed-Mor bagad members planned to make the trophée a festive occasion – “fest noz” in the local language. There would be a stall for serving homemade crêpes, which Bretons traditionally consume at fairs and outings, and another for pouring glasses of frothy cider, the region’s preferred alcoholic refreshment. On Sunday, they would serve a hot lunch.
Spring had sputtered to a slow start in Brittany, though this trophée was as sure a sign of warming weather as the budding wisteria. One night, we returned late to Rosmarian to marvel at a full moon hanging like a cherry over the hamlet’s fields and farmhouses. Its color was a rich red as if the light were filtered through stained glass. We thought this red moon was lovely and wonderful, but we were not aware of the implications. “Avez-vous vu la lune rousse?” Clothilde, Paul’s wife, inquired the next morning. This “red moon,” she firmly explained with all the conviction of a television meteorologist, presaged a period of cold, dry weather. It was not good to have a red moon at this time of year when planting had already begun, and the young crops were at their most vulnerable.
The proof of what Clothilde said became clear in following days. We wore heavy wool sweaters and scarves inside the cottage and kept a fire burning all day at the wood stove. Our fingers stiffened and noses hardened to pencil-sharp points. A stone cottage, like an old man with a sour view of life, can prove impossible to warm. Wine served with meals was always cellar temperature, even though we did not have a cellar.
Red moon or not, Marc dutifully ran his tractor up and down the dirt paths morning and night. The soil in Rosmarian’s newly turned fields had faded overnight from moist brown to a dry, sandy grey. Scattered around the hamlet were several fields the farmer had already plowed but not yet planted where the soil resembled more the rough sand in a children’s sandbox than anything like fertile earth. With each trip, the wheels of Marc’s John Deere tractor stirred up sandy clouds. Léontine told me that her husband would return at night from his chores with a kilo of earth plugged in each ear.
On the Saturday afternoon before the Ronsed-Mor trophée, I rode my bicycle alone through Mendon. In Lapaul, a nearby hamlet where several well-maintained thatched roof cottages made for one of the most picturesque communities in the area, I heard the weird wail of a solitary bagpipe. Praying a farm dog might not come yelping and give me away, I dismounted quietly. I traced the music’s source to somewhere behind a dark stone barn, but the practicing musician never appeared to me. The shrill notes he played were borne on the air like voices of spirits. To hear the eerie song was like coming on a gateway open to the past. I rested a quarter of an hour in the bagpipe’s thrall before I slipped away unnoticed by any living creature.
The trophée was convened that evening on a vacant lot at the edge of the village. Paul had warned us to expect a wide range of talent among the competing bagads. Several high school groups attended as well as village ensembles from throughout Morbihan. One of the first bagads to play roused the patient crowd visibly. Led by an arm-swinging young man in black beret, the band’s numbers all had the elemental force of a terrifying thunderstorm. In the center of the group, a grey-haired man held high on a staff the Breton national flag, which resembled an American flag with black and white horizontal stripes. In the flag’s corner, instead of stars, were hermines, the Breton counterparts of fleurs-de-lis. Shaped like keyholes, as I thought, hermines are common in Breton heraldry and represent the winter coat of the stoat, which medieval noblemen wore.
Swaying in time to the music, one old fellow two-stepped alone toward the stage. He wore a great wide-brimmed black hat with two flowing ribbons falling against his black collar. Lost in a reverie, he made an entertaining if haunting spectacle for the modern dress audience. Nearly a century and a half ago, when Gauguin painted at Pont-Aven, a Breton man or woman would not have gone to work, let alone attended a festival without donning appropriate headgear. A woman of quality, certainly, would never have dared to leave her house without donning une coiffe, a lace kerchief delicately pinned to the hair. By this time , I only ever saw elderly women wear such coiffes.
The Ronsed-Mor trophée seemed much more than an occasion for amateur musicians to compete for cash prizes. It served as a cultural rallying point. To attend was to declare oneself Breton. In a sense, this was a highly romantic gesture. Breton nationalism was most concerned with romantic gestures, I concluded, such as the introduction of bilingual French-Breton road signs. Asserting one’s Breton-ness, however, was a triumph of identity in a world of anonymity. Evoked in a time when Europe was then intent on economic and political homogenization and in danger of accompanying that with cultural homogenization, Breton nationalism spoke to a longing to recapture a golden age when the sense of community was stronger than is felt by all modern peoples. Perhaps our Rosmarian neighbors Paul and Clothilde sent their children to learn the ancient Breton language because they hoped it might bind them to their native land and culture when other, foreign tongues called them away. The unseen bagpiper of Lapaul, likewise, may have wished to drown out those same voices.
A Bulgarian folk music band were welcomed to the stage at the Ronsed-Mor trophée. An announcer told the audience that in Bulgaria, people danced in the same style as in Brittany – but in the opposite direction. I jokingly wondered what was the chance that Bulgarian music was simply Breton music played in reverse. What I heard from “Krachno Horo” made me suspicious that it was.
“Krachno Horo” were four musicians: a clarinetist, an accordionist, a percussionist, and an electric bass player. They dove into their first number with abandon and did not let up until an hour later. What came out of them sounded like something you might hear from a klezmer band playing at a Greek wedding. The clarinetist for Krachno Horo had the small head of a bird and a mouth like a beak. When he played, he sprayed a shower of musical notes at dizzying speed. Watching him, I soon felt out breath. The accordion player, a burly, bearded thug in a leather jacket, chugged away apparently indifferent to others. He played, then stopped, and then resumed, all seemingly at will, and while pulling at the ends of his instrument as if he would tear it apart. The members of the rhythm section, by contrast, were low-key. The bass player, a swarthy character with a long, well-waxed mustache, never blinked. His body was rigid except for his left arm and fingers gliding along his instrument’s shiny frets. The drummer played either on a set of African bongos or marching drum slung over his shoulder and grinned happily. The music Krachno Horo made together managed to pull into its vortex the assembled families of Mendon, who wore joyful and confounded expressions throughout the performance. All the same, no one in the audience that night attempted to execute tradition Breton dances in reverse.
* * *
The French do not necessarily eat better than Americans — the difference lies in that they eat with deep conviction. In France, food is handled with the care usually reserved for the sacred, and meals are conducted like religious rituals — thoughtfully, respectfully, and especially slowly. In America, lunch is a hurried culinary pit stop, while in France, the midday meal is several courses and ceremoniously served and usually concluded with cheese and dessert. Coffee arrives long after the last dishes are cleared away. Of course, if speed is the only consideration, one could pull over at a McDonald’s, which in French towns are usually on what the billboards call “McDrive.”
On an extended and time-limited itinerary, the real American longs to finish a meal quickly. Our own special quest was to find a native fast-food experience, roughly the equivalent of an American truck stop. This search, however, was not easy. For one thing, there are no obvious architectural clues. The French apparently were never introduced to chrome-skinned, streamlined diner cars. In the country, modern French roadside architecture is, sadly, a monotonous collection of enormous, prefabricated warehouses and supermarkets broken up only by cinder-block bar-restaurants.
In Brittany an honest-to-God truck stop would seem to be a necessity. Les routiers, the French truck drivers who ride high up in their cabs, hidden behind soccer team pennants strung across the windshields like blinds, were always racing up and down the Breton roads, hauling their loads to and from Channel ports and surely working up healthy appetites. Trucks were common on local roads, too, because all French superhighways are expensive toll roads. Budget-minded routiers hauled their massive rigs fearlessly down four-lane nationals and even more narrow departmental roads. Their presences made life anxious for someone driving an Opel the size of a paperweight, yet they raised considerably the chances that we would eventually come upon a genuine truck stop.
Our patience and attention were rewarded on a departmental route outside Paimpol in Cote-du-Nord, Brittany’s northernmost department. The road through the countryside was lined with dusty, newly plowed fields and lush pastures. Just after noon, we passed at a fast clip a plain, vanilla-colored, peak-roofed Bar Restaurant. The single-story building was long and massive and stood alone among the grazing cows and growing corn. The parking lot beside it was as big as a field and was neatly arranged with rows of rigs. Not much farther up the road, we made a U-turn.
The name for such a bar-restaurant — un relais — dates from a time when coaches would pause on their routes to change horses. The average relais is not much to look at and is usually little more than a local watering hole or whatever the French would call a dive. All types and sizes of French trucks were there, from semis with long trailers and Citroen repair vans to the ubiquitous Renault 4, the drayhorse of French plumbers and tradespeople. In the parking lot, I began singing.
“Pour me another cup of coffee/ For it is the best in the land/ I’ll put a nickel in the jukebox/ And play the ‘Truck Drivin’ Man’.” As I pulled the door open, I did not hear any Buck Owens playing on a jukebox. A sign advertised that the day’s “menu” was available for 46 francs (at that time, about $7.50). Inside, the bar was nearly empty. A few older men sat by a window table with little glasses of red wine in their greasy fingers. Near the cash register, a middle-aged woman, peroxide blonde, exhaled smoke and waved us on into the next room.
As we entered, the hall full of routiers looked up from their meals. The place was as completely male as a locker room. We received directions from a pale waitress with a sweaty brow who was working the hall alone. She motioned to a cafeteria-style display of hors d’oeuvres — pleasantly arranges plates of pungent saucissons, paté, and melon — and we were told to sit where we liked. Already we were impressed, for this was by far the quickest first course we had ever been served in France. The hall was rather plain, with large windows at one side that looked out on the parking lot and only a few cheap landscape paintings hanging on the walls. There was no music at all. Of course, because this was France, a smokers’ paradise, a thick blue haze hung between the tables and the ceiling.
At the table beside ours, a half dozen truck drivers attacked their meal. We spotted several empty wine bottles. The waitress brought the men a large tray of bread, and we were awed as they dispatched it roughly and instantly. A moment later, she returned with a tray on each muscular arm, one plate heaped with steaming boiled potatoes, the other loaded with baked turkey breasts in gravy. A wine bottle was uncorked and passed around. I had not seen food so roundly attacked since dinners at Boy Scout summer camp.
The wine, we soon learned, was included in the price of the meal along with mineral water. We uncorked our own bottle of Blason d’Or, a blend of red table wines, the label explained, from countries of the European community. The Euro wine rather quickly delivered a dull ache to the temples, but our glasses could be refilled as endlessly as coffee mugs in diners back home. The service was quick and cheerful, considering the waitress was outnumbered 50 to 1. It felt good to be eating, for once, without the usual French fine manners, although the difference between Gallic and American truck stops was so striking as to amount to a revelation of sorts.
For one thing, no one was eating alone at this “rendez-vous routiers” — the proper name, we later learned, for such places. There are no solo acts in French restaurants, it would seem, not even on the road. A dusty driver could no more haul himself in there and order a piece of pie and coffee at the counter than a diner in the United States would serve a cheese course.
What is lacking in France is the culture of the road that is so much a part of American life. The windows at the rendez-vous routiers we visited subtly acknowledged that by disregarding the road entirely. At home, a diner or truck stop always has the road on view. The road is enjoyed in America for its own sake, often by the solo traveler, a springboard for independence or merely flight. Turning their backs to the road, the French routiers we ate among had re-created home in their rendez-vous, complete with a substitute wife, overworked and unappreciated. The men ate and talked at table as family members might. Moreover, the French are all devoted to food and to eating. At a truck stop –about as godless a dining experience as exists – they refused to lapse into culinary atheism.
Our meal went on after the turkey and potatoes to include a selection of cheeses as well as dessert. The cheeses were a bit on the dry side, but the dessert — a rum-soaked cupcake topped with a red maraschino cherry and whipped cream — had a satisfying gooeyness. It was approaching two o’clock before we took the last sips of coffee. Around us, the tables now were nearly empty and a cloud of dust in the air above the parking lot was the only indication that once a crowd of empty trucks had waited there. There was still a good bit of Blason d’Or left, and we judged that we could drive safely. We walked back through the dark bar, paid up for the meals and the coffee, and hit the road.
* * *
The Mendon village clochard, in doing nothing at all, provided his fellow citizens with an affecting social lesson. Like a similar character in a Renoir film, he also satisfied a characteristically French fascination with the grotesque. Clochard begs translation from a politically correct French-English dictionary as “homeless person,” yet the Mendon clochard was not homeless at all. He lived in a ramshackle one-room cottage without electricity or other utilities on the edge of the village center. His not untidy hovel was furnished with a table and several old chairs. A printed tablecloth smartly covered the table.
Tall and bearded, wearing a greasy tweed jacket and mud-spattered pants, the clochard was the picture of health with a ruddy complexion, engaging blue eyes, and plenty of meat on his bones. He may have been in his late fifties or some other age entirely, a war veteran, or an inveterate layabout. He presented himself every morning on a stump-legged chair in front of his cottage, a ginger-colored mutt tied to a stake nearby. Whenever I passed them on my bicycle, man and dog glared melodramatically like characters from Japanese noh theatre.
The clochard was known to everyone in the Mendon as a great drinker. I was told that the villagers, taking pity on his situation, had permitted him to have the abandoned cottage for his shelter. I had no idea how one applied or even qualified for such a social program in such a village. Lanky young men in laborer’s clothes were frequent guests at his cottage.
In the late 18th century, another clochard, “Le Roi Stevan” (King Steven) traveled in the area around Auray, a city of 10,000 not far from Mendon. This colorful vagabond became known in his day as a marvelous clairvoyant, a hometown Nostradamus. His cult survives in our era owing to an occasional revival whenever a tired journalist dredges up the hoary story of Brittany’s famous prophet. I decided to ask Léontine the farmer if she knew anything about Steven’s predictions. She readily admitted she did and professed her own confidence in them. She even invited me to come and examine a book she had discovered when cleaning a disused farm building in Rosmarian. She described it as an ancient diary in which King Stevan’s prophecies were written.
A few days later, I wandered up the road in Rosmarian and located Léontine by following telltale sounds of squawking chickens. I called her name several times into a dark tin shed. For all I knew, she was wringing a bird’s neck when I had disturbed her. She wiped her hands briskly across her apron and greeted me enthusiastically. As I explained my mission, Léontine’s expression became quizzical, as usual. Whenever I spoke to her in my best high school French, she looked in wonder at me like a child coming upon an organ grinder’s monkey performing in the street. For my part, I strained to interpret Léontine’s sharp Breton accent and a speech pattern as rapid as a hen’s clucking.
In Léontine’s simple Rosmarian kitchen, polished copper pots hung on the walls like an array of soldiers’ helmets. Bread dough was rising under dishcloths, something I had seen before only in my Irish grandmother’s kitchen. The yeast gave off a sharp odor. At the table, Léontine laid a large brown envelope before her. I was anxious to see what I had come to imagine really was Le Roi Stevan’s original 18th century diary, but Léontine preferred first to make all manner of polite inquiries.
Finally, she reached for a paper packet. As she began to open it, she explained that King Stevan had carefully studied the moon and the stars – la lune at les étoiles – and because I may not have understood her, Léontine closed the envelope and returned it to the table so that she could raise her arms skyward and draw circles in the air. I nodded impatiently. “Oui,” I said, “la lune at les étoiles,” repeating the phrase like a schoolboy.
The diary of Le Roi Stevan turned out to be written in a thin blue notebook of the sort used everywhere in the world for school examinations. The flowing script on the pages had dried to a sepia tone, but I could not believe the book was from any earlier than 1968. On the first page, headed “Le Roi Stevan,” an anonymous student of folklore had transcribed a paragraph of French, then another in Breton, and so forth. As I inspected several such pages in the notebook, Léontine remarked that Stevan’s prophecies were “formidable” — extraordinary.
King Stevan had predicted a war between France and a foreign country. That was rather like predicting bad weather at the North Pole. Stevan also foresaw a supreme conflict, one in which the whole earth would be destroyed. Léontine told me she was sure Armageddon would come one day soon. Should I have missed her point, the farmer’s wife raised her hands in the air and motioned vigorously so that I might picture the shape of a fulminating mushroom cloud.
A few kilometers beyond Rosmarian along the rich Etel River estuary, sixty families and several small companies raised Breton oysters, famous across Europe. Like Michelangelo vigorously chipping a block of marble to reveal frozen figures, Madame L— stood inside her studio attacking her chosen artistic medium with a hammer and chisel. A quick succession of blows sent lying a sparkling white shower of oyster shell fragments. A pearly glitter was spread on the woman’s thick eyebrows and lashes. She worked in a windowless tin shack built on a cramped dock overlooking the river. Enormous black flies shadowed her movements. In the cramped quarters were the essentials of ostréiculture equipment – hammers and related blunt instruments in quantity enough for a blacksmith; several pairs each of green wading boots and yellow rubber work gloves; countless aluminum and plastic buckets; and a leather-bound transistor radio tuned to Radio Nostalgie, Brittany’s golden oldies station.
Oyster farming methods – in French, ostréiculture – were perfected a century ago in Brittany, specifically Morbihan, and ever since, they have yielded consistently profitable results. Time has made few improvements on the basic procedure. According to the practice, free floating oyster larvae will, under proper conditions, attach themselves to natural shells or artificial porcelain tiles suspended in seawater. Ridges in the shell and tiles surfaces somehow attract the infant oysters to install themselves like barnacles before they can be consumed by passing fish. On land under similar circumstances, farmers would need to lay out flypaper in their fields to capture windblown seeds for their crops. After sufficient time spent growing on the tiles, Madame L— pried away these oyster buds and arranged them by size in rectangular wire mesh cages that were then returned to shallow water.
Ostréiculture requires more than usual patience: a two-year-old oyster is only as round as a quarter. Cultivated oysters dragged from the Etel River estuary in spring are not considered ready to eat until the following December. The popularity of the shellfish at French holiday feats makes for a busy Christmas season, Madame L— said. She added ruefully that December is also Brittany’s coldest, dampest period. In her 25 years of marriage, she said, the only break she had enjoyed from this labor-intensive, physically discomforting work was la maternité.
A small rowboat with outboard motor was moored at an adjacent concrete slip. Eric, the son who provided Madame L— with an all-too-brief relief from her hammer and shells, was in his early twenties and was studying ostréiculture and related marine subjects at a post-secondary school program nearby in the town of Etel. Whatever oyster cultivation techniques his mother and father still practiced were likely acquired without benefit of education and the formality of exams and diplomas but at an early age when they were pressed into the family business. At his mother’s insistence, Eric took the family’s visitors for a short Etel River tour. A hefty young man with the high forehead and gentle, distracted regard of a poet, he waded obediently into shallow water at the dock and gallantly steadied the rowboat for boarding. Slowly, dock and shack receded from view and the harsh barking of the family dog faded on the air.
Out on the wide, empty river, day-to-day business abandoned on shore appeared remote. The water’s glassy surface separated the boat thoroughly from the surrounding scenery of rolling green hills, drab stands of hemlock, and colorless shacks. Automobiles riding on coastal roads skimmed the river’s edge noiselessly like beetles. On a sandbar, herons were gathered for a buffet of delicate crab. From a distance, the elegant white birds resemble animated versions of lace coiffes, the elaborate traditional headdresses of Breton women. Holding to a course straight down the river’s middle, a somber Eric resembled Charon the ferryman and had nothing to say at all. His passengers, too, fell silent like recently departed souls unfamiliar with the underworld.
On another afternoon, I walked along the Etel River at la Pointe de Rosmarian to scout for photographs. Obligingly, a small figure fifty feet ahead on the muddy bank picturesquely hauled a simple fishing shallop to land. I tried to frame a shot but in the glaring light of a recumbent sun, fisherman and boat were only dark silhouettes. The shadowy figure waved at me though the view finder, then started walking in my direction. I let the camera hang harmlessly around my neck and returned the man’s shouts with a hearty, if accented bonjour. “Americain?” the fisherman inquired on arrival. The Breton surprised me, however, when he smiled and fingered the brim of his cap. “I tip my hat to the Americans,” he said warmly. “I fought with them in the Resistance. I remember their courage.”
This pro-American fisherman was an old pensioner with thick glasses and tobacco stains on his teeth and mustache. He led the stranger to his boat so that he could finish the work of bringing it in for the day. We passed the time talking only about the weather and the fishing until I noticed that his boat, painted green and white, was name “Paix” for peace.
Pretty name for a boat, I told him. “C’est dur, la guerre,” he answered, a phrase best translated as, “War is hell.” The old fisherman lifted his threadbare casquette, wiped his brow with a greasy kerchief, and pierced me with an expression of deep sorrow. “It is not easy for the people who have seen war to forget it,” he announced. “The young do not understand it, but the old ones do.”
Far into the spring, la lune rousse held sway over Brittany. For my afternoon bike rides, I wore a wool sweater to ward off the wind chill. One bright, clear morning with a rare warm breeze, I met Marc G— by a fence. “What a beautiful day!” I exclaimed. I must have sounded like a tourist when relieved that his vacation has at last turned for the better. Rather than smiling in return, however, my farmer neighbor twisted his cap around his head and looked at me with a very needy expression. As if it were a matter of obtaining medicine for a sickly child, he replied, “But the fields are so dry!” My heart went out to Marc and his crops, though I selfishly remained pleased with the splendid weather.
Mendon’s most significant Celtic-era monument was la Corneille Ste. Brigitte, a single stone standing in Etel River marsh land. When I went to inspect it, I found an impressive, ten-foot-tall menhir with a smooth shaft and rounded cap. The ancient monument, clearly a fertility totem, commanded tremendous awe in its mute presence.
Squatting by the river’s edge, I watched as small crabs danced in shallow water among polished stones and emerald patches of salicorne, a common Breton marine plant that are pickled and eaten like cornichons. I dipped my hand in the cool water and blessed myself like a pilgrim with splashes of water to the forehead, face and neck. The Celtic menhir stood stiff by the Etel River as it had for generations after generations.
In those days under a red moon in Brittany, I would go walk in the very early mornings before the dawn mist entirely cleared from the fields. Marc the farmer was out then, too, stepping alone through one of his several Rosmarian plots to inspect the rows of thin yellow shoots. Against the white sky, he made a peaceful yet somber silhouette. The Breton peasant might have been an eternal spirit blessing those fields to ensure fertility and a bountiful harvest, but I knew he was an aging man who would soon retire.
