Bretonne by Jacques Fréhel
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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.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Fréhel, Jacques, 1861-1918 |
|---|---|
| Title | Bretonne |
| Original Publication | Paris: Plon, 1891. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at 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. |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | French fiction -- 19th century |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 76256 |
| Release Date | Jun 9, 2025 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 297 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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