ABSTRACT
It was over the nineteenth century that Brittany first became a place of unrivaled, though also imperiled, cultural originality. That imputation sat at the very heart of the English novelist and travel writer Katherine Macquoid’s 1877 narrative Through Brittany, recounting a summer voyage undertaken along the southern portion of the region in the company of her husband, whose drawings illustrated the text. Following upon the heels of her well-received and similarly titled 1874 travel narrative and guide to Normandy, Macquoid’s volume on Brittany traced a route leading westward from the city of Nantes into the departments of Morbihan, Finistère and the Côtes du Nord, permitting the author to steer well clear of the northern beaches that had become so beloved of her traveling countrymen over the preceding decades. It was, she purported, in these still “Breton” departments, as opposed to the almost fully Gallicized eastern ones of Loire Inférieure and Île-et-Vilaine, that a traveler stood the greatest chance of encountering and experiencing the “novelty and originality” that in her view defined the object of genuine travel. Where the “commonplace, self-centered traveler” in France might be fully content in pursuing the costly pleasures along the more established “Grande Route” leading southward and eastward from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, Switzerland and Italy, Brittany exercised a more powerful allure upon the “real pilgrim in search of new ideas, and of peaceful and often rugged beauty, freshness and originality, and above all constant variety and amusement”. “Every day as one travels in this fresh unspoiled country”, she wrote at the end of her introductory overview of the region, “one is charmed and amused by some beauty of nature or some strange and unusual sight or custom; and one feels that many months could be passed in Brittany before this pleasure could be exhausted”. 1
