Ar Goen Yann Vari

Le Guen (Jean-Marie), son of Pierre Le Guen and Marie Henry, was born in Plougrescant on December 24, 1774. He was about three years old when his parents left this municipality to settle in Plouguiel: "Yan ar Guen has lived in Plouguiel for 710 months," he wrote in the last verse of a song composed in 1836 (See No. 959).

Yan's parents were modest day labourers and their gain was certainly very small. Was the child - blind since the age of seven months - been, for at least a few years, reduced to begging, as two of his biographers tell us (1)? It is possible, but I prefer to believe that, as the Bretons in general are towards the deprived of life, the people of Plouguiel who employed Yan's parents authorised the father or mother to be accompanied by their little blind, and this with all the more eagerness as the child, given his infirmity, should hardly be turbulent, and that he may already manifest this cheerfulness of character, this alertness of mind that was later reported to him. These qualities were not to displease these benefiting housewives, if we add that the child, as he grew up, sought to render them small services to the extent that his infirmity allowed him.

At the age of twelve, in the company of his father, he began his apprenticeship as a day labourer, and this profession he practised for the following fifteen years, without having any other concern, as he teaches us in a gwerz that he composed " voar e vue"