Brittany Observed From a Rural Hamlet -- Part II

Story & Photos By Christopher Kenneally

• Brittany Observed Part I
• Brittany Observed Part II

The Mendon village clochard, in doing nothing at all, did provide 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 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 a Japanese noh play.

The clochard was known to everyone in Mendon as a great drinker. The villagers, out of pity, had permitted him to take 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. Perhaps they recognized in the clochard an aspect of character or spirit they did not notice when, as children, they laughed at him and ran away when he growled back.

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, spurred whenever a tired journalist dredges up the hoary story of Brittany's famous prophet.

The curious American asked Léontine if she knew anything about Stevan's predictions and she readily admitted her own confidence in them. She even invited me to 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.

Not much 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. At last, Léontine emerged into the light of day. 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 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 enough 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 about my wife and her family.

Finally, she reached for the envelope. As she began to open it, she explained that King Stevan had carefully studied the moon and the stars -- la lune et 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, repeating the phrase like a schoolboy, "la lune et les étoiles."

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," the amateur 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, which was rather like predicting snow for the North Pole. Stevan also foresaw a supreme conflict 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 he might picture the shape of a fulminating mushroom cloud.

Oysters!

Like Michelangelo vigorously chipping a block of marble to reveal frozen figures, Madame LeGrel, ostréiculturiste, stood inside her studio attacking her own medium with hammer and chisel. A quick succession of blows sent flying a sparkling white shower. Short and stocky, Madame LeGrel addressed visitors in a soft, agreeable voice between her displays of Vulcanic strength. A pearly glitter was spread on the woman's thick eyebrows and lashes. In the shack's cramped quarters, enormous flies shadowed her movements.

The ostréiculture method was perfected a century ago in Brittany, specifically Morbihan, and ever since, it has 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 like barnacles to natural shells or artificial porcelain tiles suspended in seawater. Ridges in the shell and tile surfaces somehow attract the infant oysters to install themselves safely before they can be consumed by passing fish. Under similar circumstances on land, farmers would need to lay out flypaper in their fields in order to capture windblown seeds for their crops.

When Madame LeGrel finishes detaching recalcitrant layers of oyster buds, she arranges them by size to be placed later in rectangular wire mesh cages and 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 feasts makes for a busy Christmas season, said Madame LeGrel. She added ruefully that December is also Brittany's coldest, dampest period. In 25 years of marriage, her only break from this labor-intensive, physically discomforting work has been another, la maternité.

Sixty families and several small companies raise oysters in the rich Etel River estuary. These operations range from the sophisticated to the shabby with la famille LeGrel falling in the middle and prospering well. Their windowless tin shack, built on a cramped dock overlooking the river, had a single utilitarian feature: a three-sided, waist-high counter for accumulating all manner of oyster shells and fractions.

Ostréiculture equipment was equally simple: hammers and tools 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 perpetually tuned to Radio Nostalgie, Brittany's golden oldies station.

A small rowboat with outboard motor was moored at an adjacent concrete slip. The child who provided Madame LeGrel with an all-too-brief relief from her hammer and shells -- a son, Eric, in his early twenties -- was studying ostréiculture and related marine subjects at a post-secondary school program in nearby Etel ville. Whatever oyster cultivation techniques his mother and father practiced were likely acquired at an early age when they were pressed into the family business without benefit of education and the formality of exams and diplomas. A generation later, pressure to carry forth tradition may be just as great, yet Eric will, at least, accede to it with considerably more dignity.

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. The boat's size and design required we sit facing Eric while he maneuvered the motor's till. His considerable weight raised the bow from the water and lent a false impression of speed. Slowly, dock and shack receded from view and the LeGrel family dog's harsh barking 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, heron were gathered for a buffet of delicate crab. From a distance, the elegant white birds resembled animated versions of lace coiffes, the elaborate traditional headdresses of Breton women.

Holding to a course straight down the river's middle, Eric LeGrel, like Charon the underworld ferryman, had nothing whatsoever to say. His visitors fell mute. Like recently departed souls, we contemplated in silence the treasures we'd left behind.

Another afternoon, I walked along the Etel 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 through the view finder, then started 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 named 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 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 Guyonvarch by a fence. "What a beautiful day!" I exclaimed, spoken like any tourist when relieved his vacation has at last turned for the better. Rather than smiling in return, however, the farmer twisted his cap around his head and looked at his neighbor 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 at the splendid weather.

La Corneille Ste. Brigitte

I went to pay respects to Mendon's most important Celtic-era monument. A single standing stone ten feet high with smooth shaft and round cap, the menhir undeniably resembled a phallus erect in Etel River marsh land.

Such a pagan totem, however, was long ago apprehended by the Catholic church. In the language of modern veterinary medicine, it was "fixed" and renamed, la Corneille Ste. Brigitte (literally, St. Brigitte's crow).

Whatever its religious affiliation now, and despite its ridiculous appearance, the ancient monument commanded tremendous awe. By its mute presence, the simple stone pillar undeniably declared the surrounding sea and bog to be holy ground.

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 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 by the Etel River as it had for generation and generations and stared out to sea where it beheld eternity.

In those days under a red moon in Brittany, I would go walk in the very early mornings before the dawn mist had entirely cleared from the fields. Marc 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 farmer might have been an eternal spirit allotting on those fields fertility and a bountiful harvest, but I knew he was an aging man who would soon retire.

• Brittany Observed Part I
• Brittany Observed Part II