Who does not know, particularly in Brittany, the Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, this masterpiece? But it should be remembered that the whole of the first part, ‘childhood’, is the fruit of the collaboration between Renan and his mother. Indeed, one cannot better introduce this presentation on ‘Renan and the Breton language’ than by evoking, from the outset, this role of the Lannionaise Manon Féger. The Memoirs tell us that in the evening, to distract himself from his austere scholarly work, Renan made it a pleasure and a duty to listen to his mother, whom he had brought to Paris in 1857, talk to him about the old stories of the old country. She did so in Breton, a language that she knew, said the son, ‘wonderfully’. A compliment that the son could have addressed to himself.