The manufacturing industry throughout Brittany is practically null, if one except the work of the great arsenals and ship-building ports, and the production of such articles of local consumption as sail-cloth.
Flax and hemp are grown in considerable quantities, but the ordinary crops of cereals rise to nothing like the proportions of those reared in Normandy or Perche. The Breton is strong on bee-keeping, however, and keenly watches the busy workers of his hives as they gather their harvest from the abundant crop of wild flowers covering the hillsides.
The Breton communes are of vast extent compared with those of other parts of France, but the population is scattered. Gathered around the parish church are the dwellings of the market-towns of three, four, or five hundred inhabitants or more. Upon the whole, Brittany is not thinly peopled, the mean of its population exceeding that of most of the other provinces of France. Whatever the aborigines were, whether of Indo-Germanique type or of a species hitherto unplaced, the present Breton population has been developed along lines close to those of Britain. And the Bretons are not far behind, and herein undoubtedly lies the charm of Brittany for the English-speaking traveller.
Writing of his stay at Guingamp,--which is about the dividing line where one passes from the zone of the French tongue to that of the Breton, where one is frequently to hear the short exclamation, "I do not understand you,"--Arthur Young tells us of putting up at a roadside inn "where the hangings over his bed were full of cobwebs and spiders." The inn-keeper remarked to him that he had "a superb English mare," and wished to buy it from him. "I gave him half a dozen flowers of French eloquence for his impertinence," said the witty traveller, "when he thought proper to leave me and my spiders in peace." "Apropos of the breed of horses in Lower Brittany," he continues, "they are capital hunters, and yet my ordinary little English mare was much admired, while every stable round about is filled with a pack of these little pony stallions sufficient to perpetuate the local breed for long to come."
To the humble inn--one of the regular posting-houses on the great highroad from Paris to Brest--he is not so complimentary. "This villainous hole," said he, "which calls itself a great house, is the best inn of the town, at which marshals of France, dukes, peers, countesses, and so forth, must now and then, by the accidents to which long journeys are subject, have found themselves. What are we to think of a country that has made, in the eighteenth century, no better provision for its travellers?" In this our author was clearly a faultfinder, or at least he was unfortunate in not living at a later day, for the above is certainly not true of the inns of France to-day, though it may truthfully be said that, even to-day, the inns of Brittany are a _little_ backward, but it is not true of the Hôtel de France at Guingamp, which has even a dark room for the kodaker, and a _fossé_ for the motor-car traveller.
