Over Strand and Field: A Record of Travel through BrittanyFlaubert, Gustave
General
Over Strand and Field: A Record of Travel through Brittany
Flaubert, Gustave
Brittany (France) -- Description and travel
On one of the bridges of the Loire, relates Guépin, opposite the Hôtel
de la Boule-d'Or, an expiatory monument was erected to his memory. It
was a niche containing the statue of the _Bonne Vierge de crée lait_,
who had the power of creating milk in nurses; the good people offered
her butter and similar rustic products. The niche still exists, but the
statue is gone; the same as at the town-house, where the casket which
contained the heart of Queen Anne is also empty. But we did not care to
see the casket; we did not even give it a thought. I should have
preferred gazing upon the trousers of the marshal of Retz to looking at
the heart of Madame Anne de Bretagne.
CHAPTER III.
CARNAC.
The field of Carnac is a large, open space where eleven rows of black
stones are aligned at symmetrical intervals. They diminish in size as
they recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four thousand
of these rocks and Fréminville has counted twelve hundred of them. They
are certainly very numerous.
What was their use? Was it a temple?
One day Saint Cornille, pursued along the shore by soldiers, was about
to jump into the ocean, when he thought of changing them all into stone,
and forthwith the men were petrified. But this explanation was good only
for fools, little children, and poets. Other people looked for better
reasons.
In the sixteenth century, Olaüs Magnus, archbishop of Upsal (who,
banished to Rome, wrote a book on the antiquities of his country that
met with widespread success except in his native land, Sweden, where it
was not translated), discovered that, when these stones form one long,
straight row, they cover the bodies of warriors who died while fighting
duels; that those arranged in squares are consecrated to heroes that
perished in battle; that those disposed in a circle are family graves,
while those that form corners or angular figures are the tombs of
horsemen or foot-soldiers, and more especially of those fighters whose
party had triumphed. All this is quite clear, but Olaüs Magnus has
forgotten to tell us how two cousins who killed each other in a duel on
horseback could have been buried. The fact of the duel required that the
stones be straight; the relationship required that they be circular; but
as the men were horsemen, it seems as if the stones ought to have been
arranged squarely, though this rule, it is true, was not formal, as it
was applied only to those whose party had triumphed. O good Olaüs
Magnus! You must have liked Monte-Pulciano exceeding well! And how many
draughts of it did it take for you to acquire all this wonderful
knowledge?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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