Brittany Observed From a Rural Hamlet -- Part II

• Brittany Observed Part I
• Brittany Observed Part III

Brittany is Celtic France for what that's worth in the late 20th century. Most Americans' acquaintance with Celtic culture may be limited to the Irish or Scotch 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, the Bretons have passed from one generation to the next an abiding affection for a good shrill bagpipe. When it swings, and it can swing to a primitive, gut-gripping rhythm, the Breton music of pipes and binious and drums 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 jury contest for local bands of a certain middling level with cash prizes awarded. The Ronsed-Mor bagad members planned to make the trophée a really 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 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 a photographer's gel. 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. Planting had already begun and the young crops were at their most vulnerable.

The proof of what Clothilde said was not only in the swirling fog of exhaled breath. We wore heavy wool sweaters and scarves inside the cottage, and kept a fire burning all day in the wood stove. A stone cottage, like an old man with a sour view of life, can be difficult to warm. Our fingers stiffened and noses hardened to pencil-sharp points. Wine served with meals was always the perfect 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 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 the Ronsed-Mor trophée was set to begin, I rode my bicycle alone through Mendon. In Lapaul, a nearby hamlet where a number of 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 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 a 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 though with black and white horizontal stripes and a corner field of keyhole-like hermines, the Breton counterpart of fleurs-de-lis.

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 back collar. Lost in reverie, he made an entertaining if haunting spectacle for the modern dress audience. A century 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 not have dared to leave her house without donning a coiffe, a lace kerchief delicately pinned to the hair. Today, elderly women wear coiffes, but rarely. Only flamboyant butchers at the Saturday market in Vannes ever wore the traditional men's hats.

The Ronsed-Mor trophée became, finally, much more than only amateur musicians competing 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, a pacific strain, is mostly concerned with gestures; it is responsible, for example, for the introduction of bilingual French-Breton road signs. Asserting one's Breton-ness, however, is a triumph of identity in a world of anonymity. Evoked at a moment when Europe is intent on economic and political homogenization and in danger of accompanying that with cultural homogenization, contemporary Breton nationalism speaks to a longing felt by all modern peoples to recapture a golden age when the sense of community was stronger.

Our Rosmarian neighbors Paul and Clothilde likely want to see their children learn the ancient Breton language because it may bind them to their native land and culture when other, foreign tongues call them to abandon it. The unseen bagpiper of Lapaul may have wished to drown out those same voices.

On Saturday evening, a Bulgarian folk music band were welcomed to the stage at the Ronsed-Mor trophée. An announcer told the audience that in Bulgaria, people dance in the same style as in Brittany but in the opposite direction, though there's little chance that Bulgarian music is simply Breton music played in reverse.

The four members of "Krachno Horo" were a clarinetist, an accordionist, a percussionist who played either on a set of African bongos or a marching drum slung over his shoulder, 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 made me feel out breath. The accordion player, a burly, bearded thug in a leather jacket, chugged away apparently indifferent to the others. He played and stopped and resumed again, seemingly at will, all the time pulling at the ends of the accordion 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 just 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 traditional Breton dances in reverse.

Be Sure to Also Read:

• Brittany Observed Part I
• Brittany Part Observed III