Nova Scotia -- Cape Breton: Bagpipes Blend With Lilt Of French

CAPE BRETON, Nova Scotia - It has been a long, hot summer and I've just reached the end of the road.

More specifically, I've come to the end of a lane that winds through the Cape Breton fishing village of Little Anse. This road ends more gently than some roads I've reached the ends of, at a tattered point of land lapped by salt water.

In contrast to the miasma at home in New England, the sky is clear and the breeze is brisk. A woman slips out of a nearby house with a basket of laundry, ready to take advantage of a good drying day. "Bonjour," she calls to me, and "Bonjour," I respond, although I'm at least half sure that we both speak English.

Then I take my book into a field of wildflowers, reciting to myself the doggerel poem about Cape Breton that begins,

In Isle Madame and Arichat

They always put out the welcome mat.

`Mais oui,' `Bonjour' is where it's at

Along the shores of Cape Breton.

True to the tourist brochure illustrations, Cape Breton is kilts and bagpipes, Celtic fiddlers, gatherings of the clans and Highland games where men of tree-trunk girth toss cabers the size of utility poles. But it's also fricot au poulet, black-eyed French fiddlers, place names like Isle Madame (in honor of Mme. de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV) and family names like Boudreau, my own grandmother's maiden name - her nom de jeune fille.

For, while Cape Breton's majority culture - transplanted from the Highlands and islands of Scotland - is better known to the outside world, its second largest population group also retains colorful traditions, reaching back to the Channel Islands and medieval France.

Cape Breton, now part of Nova Scotia, is an island at the northern end of that Canadian province. Separated from the rest of Nova Scotia by history and by the narrow Strait of Canso, it was geographically linked by an automobile causeway after World War II.

Most travelers driving up from the United States cross the Canso Causeway and remain on Route 105 for another 110 miles until they reach Cape Breton Highlands National Park and the dramatic sweep of the Cabot Trail. Or they head for North Sydney, terminus for ferries that plow through the fog to Newfoundland, or for the Bras d'Or Lakes and Baddeck, home of the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site and center of Cape Breton's resort area.

Isle Madame, just 38 miles east of the causeway, remains mostly undiscovered. As its name suggests, it, too, is an island, reached by a bridge across the Lennox Passage. Rich in French history, 10-by-5-mile Isle Madame is also a pretty corner of the region, with quiet beaches, lighthouses and fishing villages.

With the Boudreaus at Arichat

I've settled in for a few days at Arichat, Isle Madame's largest town and one of Nova Scotia's oldest.

There, I'm staying with the Boudreaus, at L'Auberge Acadienne, owned by Beverly Boudreau, wife of a merchant ship captain.

L'Auberge is a comfortable, newish inn with an attached motel wing. In the country French dining room, waitresses in Acadian long skirts and laced vests serve Acadian soups and stews, haddock, chowder full of nubbins of lobster and hot, crusty bread.

My first sightseeing expedition on Isle Madame was to Le Noir Forge Museum on the waterfront. This museum of local history is located, as the name suggests, in a restored blacksmith shop.

There, among exhibits including hand-hammered iron hinges, foot-long ship nails, cowbells and even a complete and convincing prison cell door, I met Steve Boudreau. A local college student working at the museum for the summer, he told me that, yes, Boudreaus are everywhere on Isle Madame. "There's even a Boudreauville near Petit-de-Grat." ( Petit-de-Grat, pronounced "petty-de-graw," is said to be a combination of French and Basque words meaning "place where cod is dried," an allusion to this coast's early history.)

Like Landry, LeBlanc and Theriault, Boudreau is an Acadian name, signifying descent from the French families rousted from Nova Scotia by the British in the 18th century. Scattered from New Brunswick to Louisiana and Martinique during what's still called le grand derangement, the Acadians were the subject of Longfellow's poem, Evangeline.

Other Isle Madame family names - Robin, Jones, Janvrin, Hubert - have their roots in the Channel island of Jersey, from which many local families came early in the 19th century.

French fortress

I learned that Isle Madame was settled soon after the fortress town of Louisbourg was built in 1713. The French constructed that elaborate military base and fishing port on the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton, then called Ile Royale. The town was enclosed by fortifications: high walls, seven bastions, five guardhouses, four monumental gates, two outlying batteries, more than 100 cannon.

By the 1750s, 4,000 people - men, women and children; fishermen, tradesmen, bureaucrats, aristocrats and, of course, soldiers - lived in Louisbourg and more in outports like Arichat. Louisbourg's docks received cargoes of everything from French wines and Chinese porcelains to the 500 pounds of flour needed to sustain each adult Louisbourger for a year. Ships departed heavy with cod for the tables of Catholic Europe.

Cod was what brought the early explorers, French and Basque fishermen to maritime Canada, and the sturdy fish has sustained generations of maritimers. At the old blacksmith shop, Steve Boudreau told me that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father manages a fish processing plant. But young Steve is studying business. Everyone can see there's no future in fishing now that stocks are depleted.

As I poked around the museum, he was on the phone describing a truck for sale: "It doesn't smell at all. It was never used for fish."

Down the coast from Louisbourg, Arichat's deep harbor and strategic location made this a natural port for ships bringing tar, pitch and planks from New England, traded for rum and molasses arriving from French colonies in the West Indies.

Arichat's economy peaked about the time of the American Civil War. The furling of the sail era and the imposition of tariffs pushed the port into slow decline.

But Louisbourg had been wiped off the map a century earlier, razed by the British in 1760. The Fortress fell only after a siege by 27,000 British soldiers and sailors but once it was gone, Atlantic fog was the only regular visitor to its site for 200 years.

Colonial reconstruction

By the time I got there during this trip, the fog still hung like a scrim across the shore, but a new Louisbourg loomed ghostlike behind it. This was the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, where the Canadian government has meticulously reconstructed one-fifth of the original colonial town. The project was completed only a dozen years ago, after 21 years of work.

I'd rather spend a day in Newark than a day in the improbable tidiness of Colonial Williamsburg. I'd rather be dive bombed by Australian flying foxes than tour an old fort, and something in me wants to scream "Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!" when some pretend Pilgrim tells me that Myles Standish has just stepped out for a chat with Squanto.

So how can I explain it? Louisbourg is a reconstruction. It's basically a big fort. And it is staffed with "interpreters" pretending to be 18th-century French people. And I fell totally in love with Louisbourg. Loved the salt smell, the kitchen gardens, the tavern waitress who served haddock in buttery cream sauce, then creme brulee for dessert; loved the bonnets, leather aprons, the soldiers in justaucorps, vests and breeches.

There is a mysterious beauty about the place - something to do, perhaps, with its lonely isolation on a jut of land in the Atlantic, with the fog - that swept me away.

After a walking tour in air that seemed too sweet to be of this century, I sat for a while on the wharf near the massive harbor gate. Only one small shallop occupied the once-busy harbor. I could hear distant drum beats and the shouts of costumed children playing Le Pont (London Bridge)

And I realized that this is just how it must have felt to them, to some forgotten Boudreaus, perhaps, far from home, clinging to the rim of an unknown continent.

At Cheticamp

Another center of French culture on Cape Breton is the town of Cheticamp on the western shore. Cheticamp's known for its hooked rugs, its crab fishing fleet and a couple of armory-size bars. Hundreds of fans show up on Saturday afternoons to listen to traditional music played by the likes of fiddler Donnie LeBlanc.

Here, I found quiet pleasures, from the provincial picnic park at Pondville Beach to the road to Janvrin Island, which embraces small coves and rough beaches.

Today, I've wandered along the road from Petit-de-Grat to Little Anse, picking blueberries on hillsides, admiring the tangles of nasturtiums in a window box, walking onto a gravelly beach to rest on an overturned boat, admiring a home-made anchor, made of heavy stone in a wooden cage, of the sort that Capers and Newfoundlanders call a "killick."

Now, at the end of the road, I sit on the shore, reading my book, listening to the gurgle of a rising tide creeping into rock pools, smelling the rugosa roses. Right now, Isle Madame is where it's at. ----------------------------------------------------------------- IF YOU GO A visit to Cape Breton

Fall is a popular time to visit Cape Breton. While the dramatic heights of the Cabot Trail offers the most spectacular views of autumn foliage, the colors are also lovely when reflected in the mirrorlike waters of interior lakes.

The Canso Causeway is 840 miles from Boston, via Route 95 and the Trans Canada Highway through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Arichat is 102 miles from Fortress Louisbourg, 126 miles from Cheticamp.

Air Canada flies to Halifax, N.S. and Sydney, Cape Breton's largest city. On Isle Madame, L'Auberge Acadienne, located in Arichat, is open May to mid-October. Rooms in the main inn are $80 (Cnd.) per night for two, plus tax; motel units are $70. L'Auberge Acadienne, P.O. Box 59, Arichat, N.S. Canada. B0E 1AO. (902) 226-2200.

For more information on things to do and where to stay and eat in Cape Breton, write Enterprise Cape Breton, P.O. Box 1750, Sydney, N.S., Canada B1P 6T7; (800) 565-9464.