The vast monastic edifices of
Treguier were once more peopled, and the former seminary served for
the establishment of an ecclesiastical college, very highly esteemed
throughout the province. Treguier again became in a few years' time
what St. Tudwal had made it thirteen centuries before, a town of
priests, cut off from all trade and industry, a vast monastery within
whose walls no sounds from the outer world ever penetrated, where
ordinary human pursuits were looked upon as vanity and vexation of
spirit, while those things which laymen treated as chimerical were
regarded as the only realities.
It was amid associations like these that I passed my childhood, and
it gave a bent to my character which has never been removed. The
cathedral, a masterpiece of airy lightness, a hopeless effort to
realise in granite an impossible ideal, first of all warped my
judgment. The long hours which I spent there are responsible for my
utter lack of practical knowledge. That architectural paradox made me
a man of chimeras, a disciple of St. Tudwal, St. Iltud, and St. Cadoc,
in an age when their teaching is no longer of any practical use.
When I went to the more secular town of Guingamp, where I had some
relatives of the middle class, I felt very ill at ease, and the only
pleasant companion I had there was an aged servant to whom I used
to read fairy tales. I longed to be back in the sombre old place,
overshadowed by its cathedral, but a living protest, so to speak,
against all that is mean and commonplace.
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