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The Chapel of Saint Guirec, Ploumanac'h
rights by a process that virtually amounted to changing them at birth. From the long Roman list a saint was picked out with a name more or less like that of the Keltic saint who was to be "bounced"—and this Eastern personage insidiously was slipped into the Western berth.
That was what happened to Saint Guirec. At home in Wales—where he was Bishop of Llanbadarn before he set out on his missionary travels—he was known as Curig, or Curie, a name that was Latinized into Cyriacus. The nearest name to this in the Roman calendar was Quiricus—and so Saint Quiricus was foisted into his place. It was a notable misfit. Saint Quiricus was an ill-tempered child of three years old who was martyred in the fourth century, when the Edicts of Diocletian were in force and martyrs were being made by the dozen every day. Along with his mother, the holy Julitta, he was brought before the Governor of Seleucia: who good-naturedly—while the mother was being scourged—"took the child upon his knees and endeavored to kiss him and pacify him." But the innocent babe, having his eyes still fixed upon his mother, and striving to get back to her, scratched the face of the inhuman judge. And when the mother under her torments cried out that she was a Christian, he repeated as loud as he was able, 'I am a Christian'"—whereupon the variously irritated Governor "took him by the foot and, throwing him to the ground from off the tribune, dashed out his brains."
It is the blending of the bishop and the baby in a single personality that makes the history of Saint Guirec a nut not easily cracked by the unlearned. In Wales the queer couple are muddled hopelessly. Six very ancient Welsh hymns in honor of "the martyr Curig" survive, and in them he figures sometimes as a man and sometimes as a boy in a fashion that to the last degree is bewildering. Very generally in Brittany he equally is a badly mixed lot; but at Ploumanac'h, while his personality is in a fine tangle, his Episcopal status is clear: because his holy image, representing him in his Bishop's robes, has been preserved there from his own time.
For more than a thousand years Saint
