Far From the Madding Crowd

As I drove west across the Finistere, the lower part of Brittany where France juts farthest into the Atlantic, the landscape shifted as quickly as the weather. At Pointe du Millier, I stopped to look out over a splendidly sunlit Bay of Douarnenez.

Alone on the cliffs, I watched a stream plunge from its forest lair down into a calm sea that turned green, blue, purple and black as it approached the horizon. Then, suddenly, the skies darkened, the wind chopped white nicks into the bay, and angry waves battered the craggy coast.

By the time I jumped into my car, raindrops were dancing on the hood. Fifteen minutes later, a pair of rainbows heralded the reappearance of azure skies. All that remained of the storm were wet farm fields that smelled of the sea, making me wonder whether local farmers still fertilized their land with seaweed. I passed elaborately carved Celtic stone crosses placed at regular intervals on the roadside. I overtook a trio of serious bikers, pedaling furiously over rolling hills and around sharp curves--a terrain that has nurtured a couple of champions and many challengers for the annual Tour de France in the last few decades. I stopped in the hamlet of Lannourec to admire a small stone church with moss on its slate roof and steeple (this is a region bereft of the massive Gothic cathedrals of greater Paris and Normandy), and then again near the village of Plogoff to gape at a humble thatched-roof home that reminded me more of a traditional farmhouse in the English countryside than of the sturdier, more spacious rural residences of Burgundy and Alsace. Luckily, the skies were still clear when I reached Pointe du Raz, the lower pincer of the crab’s claw that reaches into the ocean and infuses meaning into the word Finistere--”Land’s End.” On one side of the peninsula, cormorants, guillemots and black-backed gulls wheeled above a magnificent stretch of saw-tooth cliffs. Straight ahead to the west, lighthouses warned ships away from the watery gap between the mainland and the Isle of Sein--a channel so treacherous that according to an old Finistere sailor’s tale, “No one passes without fear or sorrow.”

Less than an hour later, the rain fell in sheets again, streaming down the windshield so thickly that rubber wipers were useless. In the village of Audierne, I sought refuge in a cafe and warmed myself with a hot cider and cheese-filled crepe--the famed Breton pancake. The sun’s reemergence brought with it the start of a pardon, a religious procession asking for divine help and forgiveness for sins. Older women wearing traditional Breton lace headdresses and long, billowing skirts led scores of believers out of a stone chapel and onto the main street. “Bless our houses and children, bless our boats and harvests,” they chanted.

This was my second trip to the Finistere in three years. Both times I came on a four-day vacation after finishing assignments in Paris. I could have chosen the more predictable Mediterranean warmth and tranquillity of Provence or the C0te d’Azur. But I preferred the dramatic cycles of wet and dry, sun and clouds, stillness and wind, repeated several times during the day.

Thanks to the super-rapid express train, or TGV by its French initials, it is now only a four-hour trip between Paris and Quimper, the handsome medieval city of 60,000 people in the heart of the Finistere. For me, it’s a journey best made in late spring and early autumn, when the weather is in constant transition from dawn to dusk. Besides, the Finistere is too crowded in summer.

That’s true of many other places, but this is a corner of France whose tiny villages and coves are best appreciated in near solitude. Away from the vacationing hordes, it’s possible to follow the progress of a fish from sea to gourmet table, to lodge at an aristocratic manor with a privileged view of forest and farmland, to wander virtually alone among megaliths whose mysteries have remained unsolved for millennia. All this and it’s much less expensive than in more publicized rural and seaside locations in France.

I began my journey this time with a huge advantage over other travelers--a friendship with one of the Finistere’s great personalities, a fisherman named Alain Tocquet. We arranged to meet at a bar in his hometown, Quimperle, a little jewel lodged at the confluence of two rivers.

I arrived early, giving me plenty of time to carry out two pleasurable missions. The first was discovering crepes dentelles, the lace-like pancakes unique to Quimperle that my favorite French food writer, the late Waverley Root, once described as a “Breton creation of great finesse.” I found a street stand that offered satisfyingly light and sweet crepes dentelles, which I devoured while I walked toward my second objective: a visit to the glise Ste-Croix. The makers of the 12th century church used as its blueprint the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Its apse, with side chapels framed by columns and arcades, is considered the finest example of Romanesque design in Brittany.

As agreed, Tocquet picked me up in front of a riverside bar and drove me to his house. He is 48, with curly salt-and-pepper hair and the build of a middleweight boxer. He comes from a long line of fishermen, although his father tried to persuade him to enroll in a university and seek another career. But the pull of the sea was too strong. He bought an old boat of his own and let his two daughters name it the “Shtroumpf,” after their favorite television cartoon character.

Tocquet has strong opinions about his profession. Modern fishing methods, using ships that go far into the ocean and drag gigantic nets over many square miles, are destroying fish populations, he said. Besides, their catch is often kept under ice for more than a week before arriving at port and can hardly be called fresh by the time it is served. Fish grown in captivity in hatcheries have even less taste, he said.

Tocquet is part of an elite hundred or so Breton fishermen who catch sea bass the old-fashioned way, using hooks and lines, delivering them to their customers no more than 24 hours later. It’s tough work. Tocquet boards his boat at 3 a.m., baits a thousand hooks and returns with his haul at nightfall, docking at Concarneau, where la criee, the fish auction, is held in the early mornings. On a good day, he can catch about 100 sea bass and a smaller haul of mackerel. The first half of this year, however, the weather at sea was so treacherous that he could make only about 40 fishing trips. But he doesn’t get discouraged. “I do what I love, so I’m a free man,” he said.

He suggested that I join him two days later at la criee (guided tours of the fish auction are available in French and English to visitors). I met him in Concarneau’s port at 6 a.m. Across the water, on an islet connected to the mainland by two small bridges, rose the original walled medieval town, its massive ramparts ghostly in the predawn fog. By contrast, our side of the harbor had the look and sound of 21st century bustle. Forklifts and pickup trucks dashed in and out of a white Lego-like building illuminated by megawatt bulbs, where la criee was just getting started. Nearly 100 buyers from fish shops and restaurants throughout Brittany and as far away as Paris clustered in small groups around the auctioneers.

Men dressed in wool sweaters, slickers and knee-length rubber boots sloshed through the wet floor and dug calloused hands into mounds of fish and crustaceans. Around me were crates of writhing lobsters, crabs and crayfish. There were boxes of sardine, mackerel, rouget, sole, flounder, conger eel, haddock and monkfish, many of them still so fresh that blood dribbled from their mouths. Other species--macrocephalic monsters with eyes the size of platters--were a mystery to me.

Tocquet explained that a global shortage of fish was forcing fleets to troll ever deeper for species that even he had not seen until a few years ago.

“Look at this shark,” he said, pointing to a 3-foot-long black specimen with skin in leathery folds. “It was caught 500 meters below the sea. It’s ugly but delicious.” Tocquet then led me into a colder, quieter chamber of the building. This was reserved for frozen fish brought in by larger commercial vessels that spent weeks at sea. “Can you smell the difference?” he asked, wrinkling his nose with obvious disapproval.

When we returned to la criee, a burly auctioneer with a megaphone was praising the firm, oily flesh of a batch of cod. But clients seemed more interested in the sea bass. Among the dwindling boxes, only one was from the Shtroumpf because Tocquet had already delivered the rest directly to his favorite restaurants. I noticed the price tags were less than a dollar a kilo--about 40 cents a pound. At the wholesale level, France could indeed be cheap.

Later that day, when the same sea bass made it to the table of one of the finer restaurants, its price had multiplied 50 times. That’s how much it cost at La Taupiniere, where I dined that evening with Tocquet. This one-star Michelin restaurant is on the main road connecting Concarneau and Pont-Aven, about eight miles east. A village of narrow streets that wind up a hillside from a riverbank, Pont-Aven was made famous by Paul Gauguin, who lived here between 1888 and 1896 to paint his distinctive figures in flamboyant colors.

La Taupiniere, on the village’s western outskirts, has a thatched roof and aquamarine walls. Inside, it has a cozy, theatrical ambience created by placing the open kitchen in full view of the dining room. Our first dish was a sea bream tartare in a creamy herb sauce that could only have been invented by a French chef.

Next came crab crepes in truffle sauce, the richest recipe of the night. We then shared a half-dozen large crayfish grilled to tender perfection on the open hearth next to our table and brushed with a tarragon sauce that enhanced rather than smothered the delicate, natural flavor.

The main course was the sea bass caught the previous day by Tocquet. Before grilling, the 2-pound fish was shown to us, with a label that read “Shtroumpf” attached to a gill. At first I thought it was a tongue-in-cheek homage to the fisherman. But it’s a practice recently taken up by the better Breton restaurants to let diners know that their fish was caught by the traditional hook-and-line method rather than raised at a hatchery or delivered frozen.

Our sea bass didn’t need a label of provenance. Grilled and sprinkled with lemon, it was the most delicious fish I sampled during my Finistere sojourn. This was not a conclusion arrived at lightly, since I ate at three other local restaurants that had earned a star from Michelin. In Quimper, the main town in the southern Finistere, I lunched in the old medieval quarter at L’Ambroisie, a restaurant with minimalist modern decor, where I had a roasted monkfish with the texture and taste of a lobster, prepared in hearty, traditional Breton style with mushrooms and potatoes.

The following evening, Tocquet joined me for dinner about 12 miles south of Quimper at La Ferme du Letty, on a bay near the village of Benodet. As its name suggests, the restaurant is a renovated farmhouse, with scythes, spades and other ancient rural implements hanging on its stone walls. But the cuisine served in this rustic setting was delicate, contemporary fare. For an appetizer, we had raw crayfish with artichoke and truffle vinaigrette, and for the main course, turbot filets with green peppers, endives and caramelized carrots.

The Moulin de Rosmadec, in Pont-Aven, is the oldest of the acclaimed local restaurants, having earned its Michelin star more than 65 years ago. Straddling the swift-flowing Aven River, the establishment occupies a restored mill with stone walls and timber columns dating to the 15th century. Perhaps because of its pedigree, the Moulin de Rosmadec had a bourgeois stuffiness. Maybe the overly formal ambience is to discourage the tourist bus crowd that descends upon Pont-Aven during the summer to scour its numerous memento shops and undistinguished art galleries in search of Gauguin’s ghost.

The Moulin de Rosmadec’s food, however, was beyond reproach. Cod with lentils and bacon in a white wine sauce was superb. I broke my all-fish diet and tried a memorable duck breast, cooked in its own juices with leeks and sweet wine. I ended the meal with the restaurant’s justifiably celebrated mandarin ice cream with fresh slices of the fruit.

While I experienced Finistere’s seafaring tradition largely at the dining table, I enjoyed its aristocratic heritage mainly in the lodgings. Most hotels I visited were manor houses recently adapted to receive paying guests from spring to autumn. The arrangement allows the owners to enjoy their noble privacy during the colder months, when tourism ebbs to a trickle. The Finistere aristocrats were never as wealthy as their counterparts in the Loire Valley, Normandy or Burgundy. Their residences, even when they are called chateaux, don’t quite measure up to real castles or palaces.

Multiple renovations over the centuries suggest that most noble families were neither rich nor powerful enough to maintain ownership for long. And unlike the extravagant horticultural scene just across the Channel in England, gardening at the Finistere’s chateaux and manors was always a more restrained affair. But these should not be viewed as drawbacks or defects for travelers seeking comfort, intimacy and informality in a brief, inexpensive sojourn at an aristocratic residence.

I found all these qualities at the Manoir de Kerhuel on the outskirts of the village of Ploneour-Lanvern, about a 10-minute drive southwest of Quimper. At a sign with the manor’s name, I turned off a country road into an allee of oaks. Kerhuel, set in the center of its 15-acre park, was originally built more than 500 years ago, but it now has tan-and-white stone walls and a steeply angled slate roof that suggest a 19th century architectural makeover. My room faced the back garden and a farm field beyond.

For a more elegant, stately manor, I stopped at the Manoir du Stang, about 20 miles east, on a back road that looped around small Atlantic coves. Hidden in the woody outskirts of the village of La Foret-Fouesnant, the 16th century manor house is set behind its own moat and surrounded by formal rose and topiary gardens, a small lake and 100 acres of farmland. Guest rooms and common areas are furnished with antiques. Dinners are served by waitresses in traditional Breton lace headdresses and skirts.

Some of the aristocratic residences are just for visiting. The Chateau de Lanniron, a mile south of Quimper, has a faade of Neoclassical columns and a riverside quay with a long stone balustrade. Lanniron began as a 15th century summer residence for the bishops of Quimper, but was confiscated from the clergy during the French Revolution. In 1825, an eccentric Englishman bought and rebuilt the chateau in Venetian style and planted an exotic garden that took advantage of the quirky, mild microclimate. I was surprised to find warm-weather species such as Japanese cypress, Chinese palm, green oak and bamboo growing alongside the giant red and violet rhododendrons more common to this latitude.

At the Manoir de Kerazan, near the quiet little port of Loctudy, the interior was far more appealing than the garden. Kerazan belonged to a local bourgeois family called Astor who bequeathed it to a cultural foundation in 1928. The manor has been so meticulously preserved that it looks as if the Astors are still living there. The rooms are sumptuously decorated in Louis XIV, XV and XVI furniture and woodwork. The dining room ceiling has painted panels of fruit, herbs and game animals.

The Astors were also great collectors of Breton artists and artisans, and they filled their estate with several centuries of paintings and drawings of local landscapes and folkloric characters. But for me, the real prize was a life-size cello, made of the polychrome ceramic known as Breton faience. This astonishingly sophisticated masterpiece led me to reconsider Breton faience. I had always thought that its typically bright-hued, rustic dinnerware looked all right in country cottages but was far inferior to Limoges, British Wedgwood and Asian china. But after seeing the Kerazan cello, I decided to visit the Musee de la Fa-ence in Quimper.

At the museum, English- and French-speaking guides provide details on the techniques of leading artists and craftsmen over several centuries of local ceramics production. Many of the vases, plates and cups I saw were decorated with floral designs and mythological characters in vivid yellows, blues and reds, shaped and colored with single brush strokes. The problem was that such high-quality pieces weren’t available in Quimper’s numerous souvenir shops.

I spent my final day in the village of Locmariaquer, inspecting some of Europe’s most ancient ruins--megaliths erected between 4500 and 2000 BC by offshoots of the Druids. Technically, Locmariaquer, a 90-minute drive southeast of Quimper, is part of the adjoining region of the Morbihan, well beyond the Finistere confines I had imposed upon myself. But I certainly wasn’t going to let that stop me from visiting monuments that were a thousand years older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The land around the Gulf of Morbihan has more menhirs (stone pillars), cairns (stone heaps) and dolmens (stone tables that form the roofs of funeral chambers) than any other patch of Europe.

The Locmariaquer area alone contains a half-dozen major sites. I drove to the best known, parking at the Archeological Information Center. The first of the three ruins that caught my eye was the Grand Menhir, a toppled stone obelisk with an estimated weight of 280 tons. When upright (and nobody knows when that last was), it stood almost 60 feet. Sculpting, transporting and erecting the monument must have been an incredible feat for a Neolithic people--all the more amazing because the menhir is made of a stone, orthogneiss, not found in the area. The assumption among scholars is that the phallus-shaped Grand Menhir had something to do with fertility or sun worship, though nobody is certain. Another ruin, called the Table des Marchand, consists of a funeral chamber with a 75-foot-long access tunnel.

The third ruin, at the opposite end of the site, is known as the D’Er Grah Tumulus. It’s topped by a stone slab that covers a funeral chamber. The site is on the summit of a wooded hill, with panoramic views of the village of Locmariaquer below and the Atlantic beyond. But the Finistere weather was its usual unstable self. Translucent skies suddenly darkened with clouds. A fog moved in from the ocean and up the hill, covering the ruins in an eerie shroud so thick that I couldn’t see more than a dozen yards. Yet by the time I drove down to the shore, the sun was shining again, and the water was a deep, soothing blue.

At a cafe on the edge of Locmariaquer’s beach, I ordered a dozen fresh belons--the flat-shelled oysters of the region that have become famous around the world. It was like eating the sea itself.

GUIDEBOOK: Getting Away From It All in the Finistere

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for France is 33; the regional code for the Finistere is 298. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 7.10 francs to the dollar. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: From Los Angeles International Airport, Air France offers nonstop service to Paris, as does United during the summer months. Direct service is offered on U.S. Airways, and connecting service is available on Continental, Northwest, TWA, Lufthansa, Delta, Swissair, KLM and British Airways.

From the Paris-Montparnasse train station, the super-express train (TGV) takes four hours to Quimper. Cars can be rented at Quimper station.

Where to stay: Manoir du Stang, 29940 La Foret-Fouesnant, telephone and fax 569-737. Spacious, well-appointed rooms. Rates: $70 to $129, plus $7 per person for breakfast. Closed Oct. 1 through May 2. The hotel will open for large groups in April and October.

Manoir de Kerhuel, 29720 Ploneour-Lanvern, telephone 826-057, fax 826-179, e-mail manoirkerhuel@wanadoo.fr, on Internet perso.wanadoo.fr/manoirkerhuel. Large, comfortable rooms. Closed Jan. 2 through March 15, and Nov. 11 through Dec. 15. Rates: $53 to $80, plus $9 per person for breakfast.

Roz-Aven, 11 Quai Theodore-Botrel, 29930 Pont-Aven, tel. 061-306, fax 060-389, e-mail rozaven@wanadoo.fr., on Internet www.hotelpontaven.free.fr. A thatched-roof inn on the banks of the Aven River. Ask for reservations in the main building, even though the rooms are cramped. Rates: $42 to $84, plus $6 per person for breakfast. Closed Nov. 4 through March 1.

Where to eat: The following four restaurants have been awarded one star by Michelin. La Taupiniere, Route de Concarneau/Croissant Saint-Andre, Pont-Aven, tel. 060-312, fax 061-646. Arguably the best restaurant in the Finistere. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays; $80 to $141. Moulin de Rosmadec, Venelle de Rosmadec, Pont-Aven, tel. 060-022, fax 061-800. An elegant converted mill. Closed Wednesdays; $55 to $127. L’Ambroisie, 49 Rue Elie-Freron, in Quimper, tel. 950-002, fax 958-806 e-mail ambroisie@wanadoo.fr. An excellent lunch spot after a walk through the Medieval quarter. Closed Mondays; $35 to $91. La Ferme du Letty, 5 Rue du Letty, tel. 570-127, fax 527-529, e-mail j.marie.guilbault@wanadoo.fr. This restored farmhouse about a mile southeast of the village Benodet off Route D44 serves exciting, innovative cuisine using Breton produce. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays; $60 to $125.

What to see and do: For an early morning guided tour of la criee in Concarneau, call or fax 505-510. To visit the gardens of the Chateau de Lanniron in Quimper, call 906-202 or fax 521-556. To tour the rooms of the Manoir de Kerazan, in Loctudy, tel. 874-040 or fax 874-383.

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90212-2967; tel. (310) 271-6665 or (410) 286-8310 (France-on-Call hotline), fax (310) 276-2835, www.francetourism.com.