Renan's Birthplace

— Thanks to its being still ten or twelve miles from a railway, Tréguier is not in the least modernized or beset by curiosity-hunters. The drive, moreover, from Lannion gives an idea of the peaceful scenery amid which. Renan was reared. It is an undulating country of pastures and orchards, with little wayside or moorland oratories dedicated to saints unknown outside Brittany, and with peasants’ cottages, not nestling together as in most parts of France, but standing isolated in the fields, The sea is not visible even from a high table-land, and we must not imagine Renan familiar with the melancholy ocean. Tréguier is on a river, or creek, five miles from the open sea, and the boy’s long rambles with Ids mother can seldom have brought him within hearing or sight of the waves breaking on the granite coast. Nor does Trdguier, at the first view, give the impression of an ecclesiastical atmosphere. It is sleepy and old-fashioned rather than religious. There are, indeed, three convents, besides the hospital, or poorhouse, which is in charge of nuns; but these are not visible from tho street, being concealed by high granite walls. Little, too, is to be seen externally of tbe college, or seminary, which Renan in his later days vainly sought permission to revisit. The cathedral, though the only religious edifice for the twenty-seven hundred inhabitants, is the smallest in Brittany, and its graceful spire, granite like the rest of the structure, was not erected till just before the Revolution. Then unbishoped by being annexed to St. Brieue, Tréguier has not even a subprefect to represent civil authority. Not a single house in the town looks less than a century old, and the half dozen streets are almost lifeless. It is strange to find such a Sleepy Hollow lit up by electricity, but these incongruities are not infrequent in France. A natural oyster-bed is an element if not of prosperity, of well-being ; for the small but delicate mollusk is in high repute, and cod and mackerel fisheries give employment to the people.

My driver, though so ardent an antiquary that he volunteered to walk through the town with me, pointing out with admiration all the picturesque houses, had evidently never heard of Renan. Visitors must not expect, indeed, to find the great writer honored in his own country. In so Catholic a town no statue of him is likely to be tolerated in our time, even were strangers to subscribe for it ; nor is the Grande Rue, a winding and usually narrow street of dingy granite houses, with very few shops, and those decidedly third-rate, likely to be renamed Rue Renan. Nor do his works or his photograph appear at any shop window. The landlady of the Lion d’Or directed me, however, to his house, a plain granite building one hundred and fifty years old, looking as if it might have seen better days. A baker’s shop now occupies the frontage, while the back, the first floor, and the attics are let as tenements. The shop was where Renan’s mother sold groceries and marine stores till the death of her husband, on whose coasting voyages she depended for supplies. On the first floor his sister Henriette must have afterwards carried on the school by which she bravely tried not only to maintain her mother and young brother, but to pay off the debts left by an enterprising but unbusinesslike father. On her departure for Paris in 1835, mother and son contented themselves with two or three rooms, letting all the rest. One of these is on the ground floor, and is shown to visitors as Renan’s bedroom, now adorned, by the irony of events, with Catholic pictures. It looks out on a small yard and garden. The back attic, which was Renan’s study, commands a view of the country. The garden, though stocked with vegetables and fruit trees, contains a few flowers, and the elderly woman who is now the tenant of it and of part of the house—she remembers Renan’s mother well, describing her as a model woman, but apparently she knew little of the son until late in life, when, passing the summer at a neighboring village on the coast, he occasionally visited the spot —offers flowers to strangers, more numerous since his death, as mementos. What a tale that study could tell of mental conflicts while Renan was hesitating whether to risk breaking his mother’s heart by renouncing the priesthood of a church in which he no longer believed ! But for Henriette’s counsels and purse, as is evident from their recently published correspondence, he might perhaps have silenced his scruples, and become at least a Catholic professor, possibly a Catholic bishop, in lieu of three years’ drudgery as usher in an insignificant boarding-school, and, as late as 1852, of earning fifty cents a night in cataloguing manuscripts at the Paris Library, after a literary mission to Italy for the Academy of Inscriptions. Put Wisdom is justified of her children.

This intellectual evolution, by which, at twenty-six, Renan, in his then partially printed L’Avenir de Science, had reached all the conclusions developed in his later works, is not easily explained by heredity, albeit Henriette, twelve years his senior, had previously passed through a like crisis. The father, who was drowned, or drowned himself, when Ernest was only five years old, is described by him as melancholy, but this may apply only to his later days of adversity. Another authority depicts him as corpulent, courageous, taciturn, but hottempered and, like so many Breton sailors, addicted to the bottle. What is certain is that he had no aptitude for business, which defect, together with his obesity, he bequeathed to his son. His wife, a Lannion beauty, was lively and sanguine, very pious, but with so much of primitive heathenism blended with her religion as to allow a friendly witch to ascertain Ernest’s chances of recovery from a dangerous illness by taking his shirt to a holy well and seeing whether it would float or sink. Both parents, so far as we can judge, were commonplace. So also was the elder son, Alain, who, beginning life as a bank clerk, then failing in business at St. Male, became bookkeeper in a Paris business house, unable either to assist Henriette in maintaining mother and brother and paying off the father’s forbearing creditors, or to advise Ernest in his mental conflicts. It is true that the paternal uncle, Pierre, was a sort of untutored genius, a belated troubadour or hard, averse to work, the life and soul of village taverns, with his fund of stories and jokes, or retold chapters of Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and the Diable Boiteux, books rescued by him from a priestly expurgation of his brother’s scanty library. Who had collected these forbidden hooks does not appear; perhaps the paterfamilias in his voyages. It is not derogatory to Kenan to suggest that he resembled this ne’erdo-well uncle, who died by the roadside, more than his parents, — which of course implies inheritance of qualities from a common ancestor ; for atavism is the only explanation of the difference between Henriette and Ernest and the rest of the family. Renan’s own theory of the influence of his mother’s Gascon ancestry would fail to account for uncle Pierre. Grandfather Kenan, moreover, must have been an intelligent man, or he would not have migrated from a fishing village to Trdgnier, nor have sent his son to Brest to learn English and navigation, which proved useful acquirements to him when captured by a privateer and imprisoned mi English pontoons.

As for the milieu, on which Taine lays so much stress, other Breton towns, indeed the very nearest, Lannion, possess much more architectural charm, and other Breton districts have much wilder scenery. Regarding the legend of the submerged town of Is, its spires sometimes visible, its chimes sometimes audible, it was not peculiar to that region, for several localities compete for the site. Trégnier is perhaps exceptionally disinclined to enterprise or money-making, and this would help to account for Renan’s indifference to wealth, his dislike to pushing his way, whether in soliciting a post or entering a car ; but it does not explain his own or Henriette’s mental evolution. Most of his schoolfellows must have become parish priests, devoid alike of his gifts and his doubts. We can no more explain why Trdgnier produced Renan than why it produces oysters. It is in both cases an unconscious production, the very reverse of Oxford, which, as a waggish alderman of my acquaintance once told a parliamentary committee, has “ two manufactures, parsons and sausages.” Brittany has produced but one Kenan, for Chateaubriand and Lamennais do not count ; they Sprang from that part of Brittany which is Norman in speech, and at least semi-Norman in race. But Britain — whether the island or the peninsula is uncertain — produced also Pelagias ; and a curious analogy might be traced between the optimistic rationalism of the earlier and that of the later heretic.

However baffling, too, in other respects, a visit to Trégnier leaves a distinct conviction that Breton was Renan’s mother tongue. Breton is still the predominant language, not only in the working class, but among the bourgeois, and seventy years ago French must have been as rare in the towns as it is now in the villages, for which the English Bible Society has provided a Breton version of the Bible. My driver, a man of forty, did not know a syllable of French until he joined the army, and the present occupants of Renan’s house habitually use Breton. Renan tells us, moreover, that his mother spoke Breton admirably, and her folk-lore would have lost half its charm in French, while uncle Pierre would assuredly have been unintelligible in that tongue in village inns. It is not a little surprising to find that one of the greatest of French stylists was thus of alien race and speech. It is as though Macaulay, the grandson of a Presbyterian minister in the Hebrides, had lisped in Gaelic.