| L'Oeuvre 04 avril 1924 |
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IN THE BAY OF SAINT-MALO
The sea had recently receded so far that men advanced on dry ground on its sand. The lords, who, to contain it, had erected a dike of flat stones several leagues long and twenty cubits high, laughed to see it leave. And the emboldened fishermen planted their net stakes more than half a mile from the shore. It was a good time for an easy conquest. The old people, with skin tanned by the spray, tell how, on Méloir-des-Ondes, Father Lefos, a brave man, built a more advanced dike, seventy years ago, and, reassured by this enormous work, demolished the old dike to place his farm on the graspolder. At the time, we did not fear the fury of the sea. We believed it to be subdued forever. Then the tide swelled more than usual. The indomitable found strength to assault the new pastures and the other year, having eaten the dike, it drowned ninety hectares, which Mrs. Saqui, sister of Mr. Stern, had bought from the Lefos heirs. This was the breach that was never blinded and which continued to grow. Through this hole, the sea released its foam and carried away the pebble, digging a wider opening every day. Today, the ebb is touching the national road and tomorrow, when the height of the water reaches 113 meters, the railway from Paris to Dinard and its branches from Saint-Malo and Brest will in turn be submerged. Then the crops will be wiped out. The stones of the houses, attacked by the blade, will loosen and the walls will fall. We can count the damage in millions of francs, murmurs Mr. Martain, mayor of Saint-Maloir. Mr. Poivret, his colleague from Saint-Benoît, extends his arm and, with a circular gesture, traces the disproportionate limits of the next disaster. The water, he said, once it has entered, will only be able to exit through a single reach. It will take weeks to drain. However, we pay for maintenance, adds the mayor of Hirel. All owners, in fact, pay 8 francs per year per hectare to the State for the maintenance of drainage streams and dikes. But where does so much money go? Here and there, we observe the work of a cleaning worker who cleans a stream. As for the dike, nothing is done for it. The stone that fell at Méloir was not found and the breach remains open. In Hirel, under the round pebble, the scouring of the sand exceeds four meters and the catastrophe becomes inevitable. Who does this concern? We don't know, exactly. The Dykes and Marshes? The Department ? The State? The sum is large and, if it were necessary to repair everything, to raise the old dike by even a meter or two as would be appropriate, where would we stop? However, the danger is becoming pressing. Yesterday the sea was oily; This morning, a bitter east wind blows back roughly, and it spits foam. There is a way to deal with the most urgent situation; it is necessary to quickly fill the void left in front of the Niels farm and the Saqui mill. Thus, for a hundred thousand francs, instead of three or four million, we would protect an entire prosperous region and we would protect from damage woods, fields, buckwheat, oats and flowering brooms. But it's a matter of minutes. Tomorrow, the prefect and the chief engineer of the department will leave Rennes at dawn by car and will come to speak with the local authorities in Saint-Benoît. They must decide immediately what measures to take. There was already reason to fear, around here, the artillerymen who wanted to fire the cannon and the aerial bombers who wanted to drop shells. There was also the criminal silting of Mont Saint-Michel. And now the rock which supports the proud tomb of Chateaubriand is disintegrating. We can no longer procrastinate. The rampart demolished by the sea must be repaired before the tide carries all the stones out to sea. EMMANUEL BOURCIER: |
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