Bretonne by Jacques Fréhel is a novel written in the late 19th century. Set in a small Norman town battered by an iron winter, it follows the Breton Trégar-Creachmeur women—Jeffik and her younger sister Anne—who, under their devout, ailing mother, run the newly installed telegraph office while enduring provincial scorn and precarious poverty. Around them orbit a petty, cruel schoolmaster, his neglected centenarian aunt, a sly concierge-family, and a young Norwegian lodger
whose arrival hints at change and nascent romance. The book reads as a regional social portrait that blends satire of local mores with lyrical evocations of sea, marsh, and wind. The opening of the novel paints the town's harsh season and its people: boys sliding on frozen ditches, bourgeois hunters boasting, and a one-eyed commissary mocked for fishing frogs—signs of the locals’ contempt for “outsider” functionaries. The telegraph post is given to widows’ daughters, bringing the Trégar-Creachmeurs—with their sea-worn heirlooms—into the drafty municipal château, where Jeffik (20) and Anne (9) gaze out at the river traffic and dream. We meet the sour schoolmaster Boscher, his money-making boarding scheme, the gentle factotum Saussaie, and the shady concierge Ledormeur; a Norwegian youth, Arvid Swevenmor, arrives as Boscher’s boarder. A nocturnal crisis strikes when Boscher’s very old aunt Perpétue is found hanging from a window ledge; she is rescued by Arvid and the girls’ mother, only for Boscher and his wife to respond with callousness. The section closes with Jeffik’s dream-lit reverie and a sharp sketch of Ledormeur’s petty graft and carousing, setting the social tensions and emotional stakes that will drive the story. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Polona digital library)
Reading Level
Reading ease score: 72.0 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read.
