Recollections of My Youth | Page 7

behind
his palace and fled to England. The concordat abolished the bishopric,
and the unfortunate town was not even given a sub-prefect, Lannion
and Guingamp, which are larger and busier, being selected in
preference. But large buildings, fitted up so as to fulfil only one object,
nearly always lead to the reconstitution of the object to which they
were destined. We may say morally what is not true physically: when
the hollows of a shell are very deep, these hollows have the power of
re-forming the animal moulded in them. The vast monastic edifices of
Tréguier were once more peopled, and the former seminary served for
the establishment of an ecclesiastical college, very highly esteemed
throughout the province. Tréguier again became in a few years' time
what St. Tudwal had made it thirteen centuries before, a town of priests,
cut off from all trade and industry, a vast monastery within whose walls

no sounds from the outer world ever penetrated, where ordinary human
pursuits were looked upon as vanity and vexation of spirit, while those
things which laymen treated as chimerical were regarded as the only
realities.
It was amid associations like these that I passed my childhood, and it
gave a bent to my character which has never been removed. The
cathedral, a masterpiece of airy lightness, a hopeless effort to realise in
granite an impossible ideal, first of all warped my judgment. The long
hours which I spent there are responsible for my utter lack of practical
knowledge. That architectural paradox made me a man of chimeras, a
disciple of St. Tudwal, St. Iltud, and St. Cadoc, in an age when their
teaching is no longer of any practical use. When I went to the more
secular town of Guingamp, where I had some relatives of the middle
class, I felt very ill at ease, and the only pleasant companion I had there
was an aged servant to whom I used to read fairy tales. I longed to be
back in the sombre old place, overshadowed by its cathedral, but a
living protest, so to speak, against all that is mean and commonplace. I
felt myself again when I got back to the lofty steeple, the pointed nave,
and the cloisters with their fifteenth century tombs, being always at my
ease when in the company of the dead, by the side of the cavaliers and
proud dames, sleeping peacefully with their hound at their feet, and a
massive stone torch in their grasp. The outskirts of the town had the
same religious and idealistic aspect, and were enveloped in an
atmosphere of mythology as dense as Benares or Juggernaut. The
church of St. Michael, from which the open sea could be discerned, had
been destroyed by lightning and was the scene of many prodigies.
Upon Maunday Thursday the children of Tréguier were taken there to
see the bells go off to Rome. We were blindfolded, and much we then
enjoyed seeing all the bells in the peal, beginning with the largest and
ending with the smallest, arrayed in the embroidered lace robes which
they had been dressed in upon their baptismal day, cleaving the air on
their way to Rome for the Pope's benediction.
Upon the opposite side of the river there was the beautiful valley of the
Tromeur, watered by a sacred fountain which Christianity had hallowed
by connecting it with the worship of the Virgin. The chapel was burnt

down in 1828, but it was at once rebuilt, and the statue of the Virgin
was replaced by a much more handsome one. That fidelity to the
traditions of the past which is the chief trait in the Breton character was
very strikingly illustrated in this connection, for the new statue, which
was radiant with white and gold over the high altar, received but few
devotions, the prayers of the faithful being said to the black and
calcined trunk of the old statue which was relegated to a corner of the
chapel. The Bretons would have thought that to pay their devotions to
the new Virgin was tantamount to turning their backs upon their
predecessor.
St. Yves was the object of even deeper popular devotion, the patron
saint of the lawyers having been born in the minihi of Tréguier, where
the church dedicated to him is held in great veneration. This champion
of the poor, the widows and the orphans, is looked upon as the grand
justiciary and avenger of wrong. Those who have been badly used have
only to repair to the solemn little chapel of _Saint Yves de la Vérité_,
and to repeat the words: "Thou wert just in thy lifetime, prove that thou
art so still," to ensure that their oppressor will die within the year. He
becomes the protector of all those who are left