"Aux jardins enchantés de Cornouaille" by François Ménez is a regionalist travelogue and cultural essay collection written in the early 20th century. It offers a lyrical, corrective portrait of Brittany’s Cornouaille, blending landscape writing, local history, customs, costumes, and social character, with a special attention to its towns and seaboard. The likely focus is the spirit, color, and vitality of the region’s varied “pays,” culminating in a nuanced evocation of Quimper as its gentle, pleasure-loving capital.
The opening of the work overturns the stereotype of a bleak, mournful Brittany by countering famous gloomy depictions with a bright, sensuous panorama of Cornouaille’s evolving prosperity, lively ports, and exuberant people. It tours the region’s micro-lands—the Daoulas and Aulne valleys, the glazik country, Bigouden, Cap-Sizun, the softer pays duik, and the stern Poher—linking each to distinctive costumes, temperaments, and landscapes. The narrative then centers on Quimper: its strategic riverside setting, ancient roots, medieval defenses, and role as a meeting point of diverse Cornouaille populations. Ménez lingers along the Odet’s manors and gardens (such as Lanniron), weaving legend, anecdote, and travel-sketch. He sketches eighteenth-century society—elegant yet cash-poor nobles, a lively salon world (captured through an epistolary hostess), worldly clergy and curious canons, and a rising bourgeoisie fueled by textiles, faience, and trade—alongside the city’s popular pleasures of feasting, gaming, theater, and promenades. The section closes by portraying the modern Quimpérois as moderate, sociable, and fond of measured joys, with a religion more habitual than fervent. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
