OVER STRAND AND FIELD

A Record of Travel through Brittany

by

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Simon P. MageePublisherChicago, Ill. 

1904

OVER STRAND AND FIELD[1]

A Trip through Brittany

CHAPTER I. 

CHÂTEAU DE CHAMBORD. 

We walked through the empty galleries and deserted rooms where spidersspin their cobwebs over the salamanders of Francis the First. One isovercome by a feeling of distress at the sight of this poverty which hasno grandeur. It is not absolute ruin, with the luxury of blackened andmouldy débris, the delicate embroidery of flowers, and the drapery ofwaving vines undulating in the breeze, like pieces of damask. It is aconscious poverty, for it brushes its threadbare coat and endeavours toappear respectable. The floor has been repaired in one room, while inthe next it has been allowed to rot. It shows the futile effort topreserve that which is dying and to bring back that which has fled. Strange to say, it is all very melancholy, but not at all imposing. 

And then it seems as if everything had contributed to injure poorChambord, designed by Le Primatice and chiselled and sculptured byGermain Pilon and Jean Cousin. Upreared by Francis the First, on hisreturn from Spain, after the humiliating treaty of Madrid (1526), it isthe monument of a pride that sought to dazzle itself in order to forgetdefeat. It first harbours Gaston d'Orléans, a crushed pretender, who isexiled within its walls; then it is Louis XIV, who, out of one floor, builds three, thus ruining the beautiful double staircase which extendedwithout interruption from the top to the bottom. Then one day, on thesecond floor, facing the front, under the magnificent ceiling coveredwith salamanders and painted ornaments which are now crumbling away, Molière produced for the first time _Le Bourgeois gentilhomme_. Then itwas given to the Maréchal de Saxe; then to the Polignacs, and finally toa plain soldier, Berthier. It was afterwards bought back by subscriptionand presented to the Duc de Bordeaux. It has been given to everybody, asif nobody cared to have it or desired to keep it. It looks as if it hadhardly ever been used, and as if it had always been too spacious. It islike a deserted hostelry where transient guests have not left even theirnames on the walls. 

When we walked through an outside gallery to the Orléans staircase, inorder to examine the caryatids which are supposed to represent Francisthe First, M. De Chateaubriand, and Madame d'Étampes, and turned aroundthe celebrated lantern that terminates the big staircase, we stuck ourheads several times through the railing to look down. In the courtyardwas a little donkey nursing its mother, rubbing up against her, shakingits long ears and playfully jumping around. This is what we found in thecourt of honour of the Château de Chambord; these are its present hosts:a dog rolling in the grass, and a nursing, braying donkey frolicking onthe threshold of kings!

CHÂTEAU D'AMBOISE. 

The Château d'Amboise, which dominates the whole city that appears to bethrown at its feet like a mass of pebbles at the foot of a rock, lookslike an imposing fortress, with its large towers pierced by long, narrowwindows; its arched gallery that extends from the one to the other, andthe brownish tint of its walls, darkened by the contrast of the flowers, which droop over them like a nodding plume on the bronzed forehead of anold soldier. We spent fully a quarter of an hour admiring the tower onthe left; it is superb, imbrowned and yellowish in some places andcoated with soot in others; it has charming charlocks hanging from itsbattlements, and is, in a word, one of those speaking monuments thatseem to breathe and hold one spellbound and pensive under their gaze, like those paintings, the originals of which are unknown to us, but whomwe love without knowing why. 

The Château is reached by a slight incline which leads to a gardenelevated like a terrace, from which the view extends on the wholesurrounding country. It was of a delicate green; poplar trees lined thebanks of the river; the meadows advanced to its edge, mingling theirgrey border with the bluish and vapourous horizon, vaguely enclosed byindistinct hills. The Loire flowed in the middle, bathing its islands, wetting the edge of the meadows, turning the wheels of the mills andletting the big boats glide peacefully, two by two, over its silverysurface, lulled to sleep by the creaking of the heavy rudders; and inthe distance two big white sails gleamed in the sun. 

Birds flew from the tops of the towers and the edge of themachicolations to some other spot, described circles in the air, chirped, and soon passed out of sight. About a hundred feet below uswere the pointed roofs of the city, the empty courtyards of the oldmansions, and the black holes of the smoky chimneys. Leaning in theniche of a battlement, we gazed and listened, and breathed it all in, enjoying the beautiful sunshine and balmy air impregnated with thepungent odour of the ruins. And there, without thinking of anything inparticular, without even phrasing inwardly about something, I dreamed ofcoats of mail as pliable as gloves, of shields of buffalo hide soakedwith sweat, of closed visors through which shot bloodthirsty glances, ofwild and desperate night attacks with torches that set fire to thewalls, and hatchets that mutilated the bodies; and of Louis XI, of thelover's war, of D'Aubigné and of the charlocks, the birds, the polishedivy, the denuded brambles, tasting in my pensive and idle occupation--whatis greatest in men, their memory;--and what is most beautiful in nature, her ironical encroachments and eternal youth. 

In the garden, among the lilac-bushes and the shrubs that droop over thealleys, rises the chapel, a work of the sixteenth century, chiselled atevery angle, a perfect jewel, even more intricately decorated insidethan out, cut out like the paper covering of a _bonbonnière_, andcunningly sculptured like the handle of a Chinese parasol. On the dooris a _bas-relief_ which is very amusing and ingenuous. It represents themeeting of Saint Hubert with the mystic stag, which bears a crossbetween its antlers. The saint is on his knees; above him hovers anangel who is about to place a crown on his cap; near them stands thesaint's horse, watching the scene with a surprised expression; the dogsare barking and on the mountain, the sides and facets of which are cutto represent crystals, creeps the serpent. You can see its flat headadvancing toward some leafless trees that look like cauliflowers. Theyare the sort of trees one comes upon in old Bibles, spare of foliage, thick and clumsy, bearing blossoms and fruit but no leaves; thesymbolical, theological, and devout trees that are almost fantastical onaccount of their impossible ugliness. A little further, SaintChristopher is carrying Jesus on his shoulders; Saint Antony is in hiscell, which is built on a rock; a pig is retiring into its hole andshows only its hind-quarters and its corkscrew tail, while a rabbit issticking its head out of its house. 

Of course, it is all a little clumsy and the moulding is not faultless. But there is so much life and movement about the figure and the animals, so much charm in the details, that one would give a great deal to beable to carry it away and take it home. 

Inside of the Château, the insipid Empire style is reproduced in everyapartment. Almost every room is adorned with busts of Louis-Philippe andMadame Adélaïde. The present reigning family has a craze for beingportrayed on canvas. It is the bad taste of a parvenu, the mania of agrocer who has accumulated money and who enjoys seeing himself in red, white, and yellow, with his watch-charms dangling over his stomach, hisbewhiskered chin and his children gathered around him. 

On one of the towers, and in spite of the most ordinary common sense, they have built a glass rotunda which is used for a dining-room. True, the view from it is magnificent. But the building presents so shockingan appearance from the outside, that one would, I should think, preferto see nothing of the environs, or else to eat in the kitchen. 

In order to go back to the city, we came down by a tower that was usedby carriages to approach the Château. The sloping gravelled walk turnsaround a stone axle like the steps of a staircase. The arch is dark andlighted only by the rays that creep through the loop-holes. The columnson which the interior end of the vault rests, are decorated withgrotesque or vulgar subjects. A dogmatic intention seems to havepresided over their composition. It would be well for travellers tobegin the inspection at the bottom, with the _Aristoteles equitatus_ (asubject which has already been treated on one of the choir statues inthe Cathedral of Rouen) and reach by degrees a pair embracing in themanner which both Lucretius and _l'Amour Conjugal_ have recommended. Thegreater part of the intermediary subjects have been removed, to thedespair of seekers of comical things, like ourselves; they have beenremoved in cold blood, with deliberate intent, for the sake of decency, and because, as one of the servants of his Majesty informed usconvincingly, "a great many were improper for the lady visitors to see. "

CHÂTEAU DE CHENONCEAUX. 

A something of infinite suavity and aristocratic serenity pervades theChâteau de Chenonceaux. It is situated outside of the village, whichkeeps at a respectful distance. It can be seen through a large avenue oftrees, and is enclosed by woods and an extensive park with beautifullawns. Built on the water, it proudly uprears its turrets and its squarechimneys. The Cher flows below, and murmurs at the foot of its arches, the pointed corners of which form eddies in the tide. It is all verypeaceful and charming, graceful yet robust. Its calm is not wearying andits melancholy has no tinge of bitterness. 

One enters through the end of a long, arched hallway, which used to be afencing-room. It is decorated with some armours, which, in spite of theobvious necessity of their presence, do not shock one's taste or appearout of place. The whole scheme of interior decoration is tastefullycarried out; the furniture and hangings of the period have beenpreserved and cared for intelligently. The great, venerable mantel-piecesof the sixteenth century do not shelter the hideous and economical Germanstoves, which might easily be hidden in some of them. 

In the kitchen, situated in a wing of the castle, which we visitedlater, a maid was peeling vegetables and a scullion was washing dishes, while the cook was standing in front of the stove, superintending areasonable number of shining saucepans. It was all very delightful, andbespoke the idle and intelligent home life of a gentleman. I like theowners of Chenonceaux. 

In fact, have you not often seen charming old paintings that make yougaze at them indefinitely, because they portray the period in whichtheir owners lived, the ballets in which the farthingales of all thosebeautiful pink ladies whirled around, and the sword-thrusts which thosenoblemen gave each other with their rapiers? Here are some temptationsof history. One would like to know whether those people loved as we do, and what difference existed between their passions and our own. Onewould like them to open their lips and tell their history, tell useverything they used to do, no matter how futile, and what their caresand pleasures used to be. It is an irritating and seductive curiosity, adreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past lifeof a mistress. . . . But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put tothem, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and wepass on. The moths attack their canvases, but the latter arerevarnished; and the pictures will smile on when we are buried andforgotten. And others will come and gaze upon them, till the day theycrumble to dust; then people will dream in the same old way before ourown likenesses, and ask themselves what used to happen in our day, andwhether life was not more alluring then. 

I should not have spoken again of those handsome dames, if the large, full-length portrait of Madame Deshoulières, in an elaborate white_dêshabille_, (it was really a fine picture, and, like the much decriedand seldom read efforts of the poetess, better at the second look thanat the first), had not reminded me, by the expression of the mouth, which is large, full, and sensual, of the peculiar coarseness of Madamede Staël's portrait by Gérard. When I saw it two years ago, at Coppet, in bright sunshine, I could not help being impressed by those red, vinous lips and the wide, aspiring nostrils. George Sand's face offers asimilar peculiarity. In all those women who were half masculine, spirituality revealed itself only in the eyes. All the rest remainedmaterial. 

In point of amusing incidents, there is still at Chenonceaux, in Dianede Poitiers's room, the wide canopy bedstead of the royal favourite, done in white and red. If it belonged to me, it would be very hard forme not to use it once in a while. To sleep in the bed of Diane dePoitiers, even though it be empty, is worth as much as sleeping in thatof many more palpable realities. Moreover, has it not been said that allthe pleasure in these things was only imagination? Then, can youconceive of the peculiar and historical voluptuousness, for one whopossesses some imagination, to lay his head on the pillow that belongedto the mistress of Francis the First, and to stretch his limbs on hermattress? (Oh! how willingly I would give all the women in the world forthe mummy of Cleopatra!) But I would not dare to touch, for fear ofbreaking them, the porcelains belonging to Catherine de Médicis, in thedining-room, nor place my foot in the stirrup of Francis the First, forfear it might remain there, nor put my lips to the mouth-piece of thehuge trumpet in the fencing-room, for fear of rupturing my lungs. 

CHAPTER II. 

CHÂTEAU DE CLISSON. 

On a hill at the foot of which two rivers mingle their waters, in afresh landscape, brightened by the light colours of the inclined roofs, that are grouped like many sketches of Hubert, near a waterfall thatturns the wheel of a mill hidden among the leaves, the Château deClisson raises its battered roof above the tree-tops. Everything aroundit is calm and peaceful. The little dwellings seem to smile as if theyhad been built under softer skies; the waters sing their song, andpatches of moss cover a stream over which hang graceful clusters offoliage. The horizon extends on one side into a tapering perspective ofmeadows, while on the other it rises abruptly and is enclosed by awooded valley, the trees of which crowd together and form a green ocean. 

After one crosses the bridge and arrives at the steep path which leadsto the Château, one sees, standing upreared and bold on the moat onwhich it is built, a formidable wall, crowned with batteredmachicolations and bedecked with trees and ivy, the luxuriant growth ofwhich covers the grey stones and sways in the wind, like an immensegreen veil which the recumbent giant moves dreamily across hisshoulders. The grass is tall and dark, the plants are strong and hardy;the trunks of the ivy are twisted, knotted, and rough, and lift up thewalls as with levers or hold them in the network of their branches. Inone spot, a tree has grown through the wall horizontally, and, suspendedin the air, has let its branches radiate around it. The moats, the steepslope of which is broken by the earth which has detached itself from theembankments and the stones which have fallen from the battlements, havea wide, deep curve, like hatred and pride; and the portal, with itsstrong, slightly arched ogive, and its two bays that raise thedrawbridge, looks like a great helmet with holes in its visor. 

When one enters, he is surprised and astonished at the wonderful mixtureof ruins and trees, the ruins accentuating the freshness of the trees, while the latter in turn, render more poignant the melancholy of theruins. Here, indeed, is the beautiful, eternal, and brilliant laughterof nature over the skeleton of things; here is the insolence of herwealth and the deep grace of her encroachments, and the melodiousinvasions of her silence. A grave and pensive enthusiasm fills one'ssoul; one feels that the sap flows in the trees and that the grass growswith the same strength and the same rhythm, as the stones crumble andthe walls cave in. A sublime art, in the supreme accord of secondarydiscordances, has contrasted the unruly ivy with the sinuous sweep ofthe ruins, the brambles with the heaps of crumbling stones, theclearness of the atmosphere with the strong projections of the masses, the colour of the sky with the colour of the earth, reflecting each onein the other: that which was, and that which is. Thus history and naturealways reveal, though they may accomplish it in a circumscribed spot ofthe world, the unceasing relation, the eternal hymen of dying humanityand the growing daisy; of the stars that glow, and the men who expire, of the heart that beats and the wave that rises. And this is so clearlyindicated here, is so overwhelming, that one shudders inwardly, as ifthis dual life centred in one's own body; so brutal and immediate is theperception of these harmonies and developments. For the eye also has itsorgies and the mind its delights. 

At the foot of two large trees, the trunks of which are intersected, astream of light floods the grass and seems like a luminous river, brightening the solitude. Overhead, a dome of leaves, through which onecan see the sky presenting a vivid contrast of blue, reverberates abright, greenish light, which illuminates the ruins, accentuating thedeep furrows, intensifying the shadows, and disclosing all the hiddenbeauties. You advance and walk between those walls and under the trees, wander along the barbicans, pass under the falling arcades from whichspring large, waving plants. The vaults, which contain corpses, echounder your footfalls; lizards run in the grass, beetles creep along thewalls, the sky is blue, and the sleepy ruins pursue their dream. 

With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, itsmachicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one uponthe other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancientChâteau of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed. Thememory of past existences exudes from its walls with the emanations ofthe nettles and the coolness of the ivy. In that castle, men altogetherdifferent from us were swayed by passions stronger than ours; theirhands were brawnier and their chests broader. 

Long black streaks still mark the walls, as in the time when logs blazedin the eighteen-foot fireplaces. Symmetrical holes in the masonryindicate the floors to which one ascended by winding staircases nowcrumbling in ruins, while their empty doors open into space. Sometimes abird, taking flight from its nest hanging in the branches, would passwith spread wings through the arch of a window, and fly far away intothe country. 

At the top of a high, bleak wall, several square bay-windows, of unequallength and position, let the pure sky shine through their crossed bars;and the bright blue, framed by the stone, attracted my eye withsurprising persistency. The sparrows in the trees were chirping, and inthe midst of it all a cow, thinking, no doubt, that it was a meadow, grazed peacefully, her horns sweeping over the grass. 

There is a window, a large window that looks out into a meadow called_la prairie des chevaliers_. It was there, from a stone bench carved inthe wall, that the high-born dames of the period watched the knightsurge their iron-barbed steeds against one another, and the lances comedown on the helmets and snap, and the men fall to the ground. On a finesummer day, like to-day, perhaps, when the mill that enlivens the wholelandscape did not exist, when there were roofs on the walls, and Flemishhangings, and oil-cloths on the window-sills, when there was less grass, and when human voices and rumours filled the air, more than one heartbeat with love and anguish under its red velvet bodice. Beautiful whitehands twitched with fear on the stone, which is now covered with moss, and the embroidered veils of high caps fluttered in the wind that playswith my cravat and that swayed the plumes of the knights. 

We went down into the vaults where Jean V was imprisoned. In the men'sdungeon we saw the large double hook that was used for executions; andwe touched curiously with our fingers the door of the women's prison. Itis about four inches thick and is plated with heavy iron bars. In themiddle is a little grating that was used to throw in whatever wasnecessary to prevent the captive from starving. It was this gratingwhich opened instead of the door, which, being the mouth of the mostterrible confessions, was one of those that always closed but neveropened. In those days there was real hatred. If you hated a person, andhe had been kidnapped by surprise or traitorously trapped in aninterview, and was in your power, you could torture him at your ownsweet will. Every minute, every hour, you could delight in his anguishand drink his tears. You could go down into his cell and speak to himand bargain with him, laugh at his tortures, and discuss his ransom; youcould live on and off him, through his slowly ebbing life and hisplundered treasures. Your whole castle, from the top of the towers tothe bottom of the trenches, weighed on him, crushing, and burying him;and thus family revenges were accomplished by the family itself, a factwhich constituted their potency and symbolised the idea. 

Sometimes, however, when the wretched prisoner was an aristocrat and awealthy man, and he near death, and one was tired of him, and his tearshad acted upon the hatred of his master like refreshing bleedings, therewas talk of releasing him. The captive promised everything; he wouldreturn the fortified towns, hand over the keys to his best cities, givehis daughter in marriage, endow churches and journey on foot to the HolySepulchre. And money! Money! Why, he would have more of it coined by theJews! Then the treaty would be signed and dated and counter-signed; therelics would be brought forth to be sworn on, and the prisoner would bea free man once more. He would jump on his horse, gallop away, and whenhe reached home he would order the drawbridge hoisted, call his vassalstogether, and take down his sword from the wall. His hatred would findan outlet in terrific explosions of wrath. It was the time of frightfulpassions and victorious rages. The oath? The Pope would free him fromit, and the ransom he simply ignored. 

When Clisson was imprisoned in the Château de l'Hermine, he promised forhis freedom a hundred thousand francs' worth of gold, the restitution ofthe towns belonging to the duke of Penthièvre, and the cancelling of hisdaughter Marguerite's betrothal to the Duke of Penthièvre. But as soonas he was set free, he began by attacking Chateladren, Guingamp, Lamballe and St. Malo, which cities either were taken or theycapitulated. But the people of Brittany paid for the fun. 

When Jean V. Was captured by the Count of Penthièvre at the bridge ofLoroux, he promised a ransom of one million; he promised his eldestdaughter, who was already betrothed to the King of Sicily. He promisedMontcontour, Sesson and Jugan, etc. , but he gave neither his daughternor the money, nor the cities. He had promised to go to the HolySepulchre. He acquitted himself of this by proxy. He had taken an oaththat he would no longer levy taxes and subsidies. The Pope freed himfrom this pledge. He had promised to give Nôtre-Dame de Nantes hisweight in gold; but as he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, he remainedgreatly indebted. With all that he was able to pick up or snatch away, he quickly formed a league and compelled the house of Penthièvre to buythe peace which they had sold to him. 

On the other side of the Sèvre, a forest covers the hill with its fresh, green maze of trees; it is _La Garenne_, a park that is beautiful initself, in spite of the artificial embellishments that have beenintroduced. M. Semot, (the father of the present owner), was a painterof the Empire and a laureate, and he tried to reproduce to the best ofhis ability that cold Italian, republican, Roman style, which was sopopular in the time of Canova and of Madame de Staël. In those dayspeople were inclined to be pompous and noble. They used to placechiselled urns on graves and paint everybody in a flowing cloak, andwith long hair; then Corinne sang to the accompaniment of her lyrebeside Oswald, who wore Russian boots; and it was thought proper to haveeverybody's head adorned with a profusion of dishevelled locks and tohave a multitude of ruins in every landscape. 

This style of embellishment abounds throughout La Garenne. There is atemple erected to Vesta, and directly opposite it another erected toFriendship. . . . 

Inscriptions, artificial rocks, factitious ruins, are scatteredlavishly, with artlessness and conviction. . . . But the poetical richescentre in the grotto of Héloïse, a sort of natural dolmen on the bank ofthe Sèvre. 

Why have people made Héloïse, who was such a great and noble figure, appear commonplace and silly, the prototype of all crossed loves and thenarrow ideal of sentimental schoolgirls? The unfortunate mistress of thegreat Abélard deserved a better fate, for she loved him with devotedadmiration, although he was hard and taciturn at times and spared herneither bitterness nor blows. She dreaded offending him more than shedreaded offending God, and strove harder to please him. She did not wishhim to marry her, because she thought that "it was wrong and deplorablethat the one whom nature had created for all . . . Should be appropriatedby one woman. " She found, she said, "more happiness in the appellationof mistress or concubine, than in that of wife or empress, " and byhumiliating herself in him, she hoped to gain a stronger hold over hisheart. 

 * * * * *

The park is really delightful. Alleys wind through the woods andclusters of trees bend over the meandering stream. You can hear thebubbling water and feel the coolness of the foliage. If we wereirritated by the bad taste displayed here, it was because we had justleft Clisson, which has a real, simple, and solid beauty, and after all, this bad taste is not that of our contemporaries. But what is, in fact, bad taste? Invariably it is the taste of the period which has precededours. Bad taste at the time of Ronsard was represented by Marot; at thetime of Boileau, by Ronsard; at the time of Voltaire, by Corneille, andby Voltaire in the day of Chateaubriand, whom many people nowadays beginto think a trifle weak. O men of taste in future centuries, let merecommend you the men of taste of to-day! You will laugh at theircramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, andthe faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is servedto them. Everything that is beautiful will then appear ugly; everythingthat is graceful, stupid; everything that is rich, poor; and oh! how ourdelightful boudoirs, our charming salons, our exquisite costumes, ourpalpitating plays, our interesting novels, our serious books will all beconsigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure! Oposterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, ourRenaissance furniture, M. Pasquier's discourses, the shape of our hats, and the aesthetics of _La Revue des Deux Mondes!_

While we were pondering upon these lofty philosophical considerations, our wagon had hauled us over to Tiffanges. Seated side by side in a sortof tin tub, our weight crushed the tiny horse, which swayed to and frobetween the shafts. It was like the twitching of an eel in the body of amusk-rat. Going down hill pushed him forward, going up hill pulled himbackward, while uneven places in the road threw him from side to side, and the wind and the whip lashed him alternately. The poor brute! Icannot think of him now without a certain feeling of remorse. 

The road down hill is curved and its edges are covered with clumps ofsea-rushes or large patches of a certain reddish moss. To the right, onan eminence that starts from the bottom of the dale and swells in themiddle like the carapace of a tortoise, one perceives high, unequalwalls, the crumbling tops of which appear one above another. 

One follows a hedge, climbs a path, and enters an open portal which hassunken into the ground to the depth of one third of its ogive. The menwho used to pass through it on horseback would be obliged to bend overtheir saddles in order to enter it to-day. When the earth is tired ofsupporting a monument, it swells up underneath it, creeps up to it likea wave, and while the sky causes the top to crumble away, the groundobliterates the foundations. The courtyard was deserted and the calmwater that filled the moats remained motionless and flat under thepond-lilies. 

The sky was white and cloudless, but without sunshine. Its bleak curveextended far away, covering the country with a cold and cheerlessmonotony. Not a sound could be heard, the birds did not sing, even thehorizon was mute, and from the empty furrows came neither the scream ofthe crows as they soar heavenward, nor the soft creaking of plough-wheels. We climbed down through brambles and underbrush into a deep and darktrench, hidden at the foot of a large tower, which stands in the watersurrounded by reeds. A lone window opens on one side: a dark squarerelieved by the grey line of its stone cross-bar. A capricious clusterof wild honeysuckle covers the sill, and its maze of perfumed blossomscreeps along the walls. When one looks up, the openings of the bigmachicolations reveal only a part of the sky, or some little, unknownflower which has nestled in the battlement, its seed having been waftedthere on a stormy day and left to sprout in the cracks of the stones. 

Presently, a long, balmy breeze swept over us like a sigh, and the treesin the moats, the moss on the stones, the reeds in the water, the plantsamong the ruins, and the ivy, which covered the tower from top to bottomwith a layer of shining leaves, all trembled and shook their foliage;the corn in the fields rippled in endless waves that again and againbent the swaying tops of the ears; the pond wrinkled and welled upagainst the foot of the tower; the leaves of the ivy all quivered atonce, and an apple-tree in bloom covered the ground with pink blossoms. 

Nothing, nothing! The open sky, the growing grass, the passing wind. Noragged child tending a browsing cow; not even, as elsewhere, somesolitary goat sticking its shaggy head through an aperture in the wallsto turn at our approach and flee in terror through the bushes; not asong-bird, not a nest, not a sound! This castle is like a ghost: muteand cold, it stands abandoned in this deserted place, and looks accursedand replete with terrifying recollections. Still, this melancholydwelling, which the owls now seem to avoid, was once inhabited. In thedungeon, between four walls as livid as the bottom of an olddrinking-trough, we were able to discover the traces of five floors. Achimney, with its two round pillars and black top, has remainedsuspended in the air at a height of thirty feet. Earth has accumulatedon it, and plants are growing there as if it were a jardinière. 

Beyond the second enclosure, in a ploughed field, one can recognise theruins of a chapel by the broken shafts of an ogive portal. Grass hasgrown around it, and trees have replaced the columns. Four hundred yearsago, this chapel was filled with ornaments of gold cloth and silk, censers, chandeliers, chalices, crosses, precious stones, gold vesselsand vases, a choir of thirty singers, chaplains, musicians, and childrensang hymns to the accompaniment of an organ which they took along withthem when they travelled. They were clad in scarlet garments lined withpearl grey and vair. There was one whom they called archdeacon, andanother whom they called bishop, and the Pope was asked to allow them towear mitres like canons, for this chapel was the chapel, and this castleone of the castles of Gilles de Laval, lord of Rouci, of Montmorency, ofRetz and of Craon, lieutenant-general of the Duke of Brittany andfield-marshal of France, who was burned at Nantes on the 25th of October, 1440, in the Prée de la Madéleine for being a counterfeiter, a murderer, a magician, an atheist and a Sodomite. 

He possessed more than one hundred thousand crowns' worth of furniture;an income of thirty thousand pounds a year, the profits of his fiefs andhis salary as field-marshal; fifty magnificently appointed horsemenescorted him. He kept open house, served the rarest viands and theoldest wines at his board, and gave representations of mysteries, ascities used to do when a king was within their gates. When his moneygave out, he sold his estates; when those were gone, he looked aroundfor more gold, and when he had destroyed his furnaces, he called on thedevil. He wrote him that he would give him all that he possessed, excepting his life and his soul. He made sacrifices, gave alms andinstituted ceremonies in his honour. At night, the bleak walls of thecastle lighted up by the glare of the torches that flared amid bumpersof rare wines and gipsy jugglers, and blushed hotly under the unceasingbreath of magical bellows. The inhabitants invoked the devil, joked withdeath, murdered children, enjoyed frightful and atrocious pleasures;blood flowed, instruments played, everything echoed with voluptuousness, horror, and madness. 

When he expired, four or five damsels had his body removed from thestake, laid out, and taken to the Carmelites, who, after performing thecustomary services, buried him in state. 

On one of the bridges of the Loire, relates Guépin, opposite the Hôtelde la Boule-d'Or, an expiatory monument was erected to his memory. Itwas a niche containing the statue of the _Bonne Vierge de crée lait_, who had the power of creating milk in nurses; the good people offeredher butter and similar rustic products. The niche still exists, but thestatue is gone; the same as at the town-house, where the casket whichcontained the heart of Queen Anne is also empty. But we did not care tosee the casket; we did not even give it a thought. I should havepreferred gazing upon the trousers of the marshal of Retz to looking atthe heart of Madame Anne de Bretagne. 

CHAPTER III. 

CARNAC. 

The field of Carnac is a large, open space where eleven rows of blackstones are aligned at symmetrical intervals. They diminish in size asthey recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four thousandof these rocks and Fréminville has counted twelve hundred of them. Theyare certainly very numerous. 

What was their use? Was it a temple?

One day Saint Cornille, pursued along the shore by soldiers, was aboutto jump into the ocean, when he thought of changing them all into stone, and forthwith the men were petrified. But this explanation was good onlyfor fools, little children, and poets. Other people looked for betterreasons. 

In the sixteenth century, Olaüs Magnus, archbishop of Upsal (who, banished to Rome, wrote a book on the antiquities of his country thatmet with widespread success except in his native land, Sweden, where itwas not translated), discovered that, when these stones form one long, straight row, they cover the bodies of warriors who died while fightingduels; that those arranged in squares are consecrated to heroes thatperished in battle; that those disposed in a circle are family graves, while those that form corners or angular figures are the tombs ofhorsemen or foot-soldiers, and more especially of those fighters whoseparty had triumphed. All this is quite clear, but Olaüs Magnus hasforgotten to tell us how two cousins who killed each other in a duel onhorseback could have been buried. The fact of the duel required that thestones be straight; the relationship required that they be circular; butas the men were horsemen, it seems as if the stones ought to have beenarranged squarely, though this rule, it is true, was not formal, as itwas applied only to those whose party had triumphed. O good OlaüsMagnus! You must have liked Monte-Pulciano exceeding well! And how manydraughts of it did it take for you to acquire all this wonderfulknowledge?

According to a certain English doctor named Borlase, who had observedsimilar stones in Cornouailles, "they buried soldiers there, in the veryplace where they died. " As if, usually, they were carted to thecemetery! And he builds his hypothesis on the following comparison:their graves are on a straight line, like the front of an army on plainsthat were the scene of some great action. 

Then they tried to bring in the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the CochinChinese! There is a Karnac in Egypt, they said, and one on the coast ofBrittany. Now, it is probable that this Karnac descends from theEgyptian one; it is quite certain! In Egypt they are sphinxes; here theyare rocks; but in both instances they are of stone. So it would seemthat the Egyptians (who never travelled), came to this coast (of theexistence of which they were ignorant), founded a colony (they neverfounded any), and left these crude statues (they produced such beautifulones), as a positive proof of their sojourn in this country (whichnobody mentions). 

People fond of mythology thought them the columns of Hercules; peoplefond of natural history thought them a representation of the python, because, according to Pausanias, a similar heap of stones, on the roadfrom Thebes to Elissonte, was called "the serpent's head, " andespecially because the rows of stones at Carnac present the sinuositiesof a serpent. People fond of cosmography discovered a zodiac, like M. DeCambry, who recognised in those eleven rows of stones the twelve signsof the zodiac, "for it must be stated, " he adds, "that the ancient Gaulshad only eleven signs to the zodiac. "

Subsequently, a member of the Institute conjectured that it mightperhaps be the cemetery of the Venetians, who inhabited Vannes, situatedsix miles from Carnac, and who founded Venice, as everybody knows. Another man wrote that these Venetians, conquered by Cæsar, erected allthose rocks solely in a spirit of humility and in order to honour theirvictor. But people were getting tired of the cemetery theory, theserpent and the zodiac; they set out again and this time found a Druidictemple. 

The few documents that we possess, scattered through Pliny and DionysiusCassius, agree in stating that the Druids chose dark places for theirceremonies, like the depths of the woods with "their vast silence. " Andas Carnac is situated on the coast, and surrounded by a barren country, where nothing but these gentlemen's fancies has ever grown, the firstgrenadier of France, but not, in my estimation, the cleverest man, followed by Pelloutier and by M. Mahé, (canon of the cathedral ofVannes), concluded that it was "a Druidic temple in which politicalmeetings must also have been held. "

But all had not been said, and it still remained to be discovered ofwhat use the empty spaces in the rows could have been. "Let us look forthe reason, a thing nobody has ever thought of before, " cried M. Mahé, and, quoting a sentence from Pomponius Mela: "The Druids teach thenobility many things and instruct them secretly in caves and forests;"and this one from Tucain: "You dwell in tall forests, " he reached theconclusion that the Druids not only officiated at the sanctuaries, butthat they also lived and taught in them. "So the monument of Carnacbeing a sanctuary, like the Gallic forests, " (O power of induction! whereare you leading Father Mahé, canon of Vannes and correspondent of theAcademy of Agriculture at Poitiers?), there is reason to believe thatthe intervals, which break up the rows of stones, held rows of houseswhere the Druids lived with their families and numerous pupils, andwhere the heads of the nation, who, on state days, betook themselves tothe sanctuary, found comfortable lodgings. Good old Druids! Excellentecclesiastics! How they have been calumnied! They lived there sorighteously with their families and numerous pupils, and even wereamiable enough to prepare lodgings for the principals of the nation!

But at last came a man imbued with the genius of ancient things anddisdainful of trodden paths. He was able to recognize the rests of aRoman camp, and, strangely enough, the rests of one of the camps ofCæsar, who had had these stones upreared only to serve as support forthe tents of his soldiers and prevent them from being blown away by thewind. What gales there must have been in those days, on the coasts ofArmorica!

The honest writer who, to the glory of the great Julius, discovered thissublime precaution, (thus returning to Cæsar that which never belongedto Cæsar), was a former pupil of l'École Polytechnique, an engineer, aM. De la Sauvagère. The collection of all these data constitutes what iscalled _Celtic Archæology_, the mysteries of which we shall presentlydisclose. 

A stone placed on another one is called a "dolmen, " whether it behorizontal or perpendicular. A group of upright stones covered bysucceeding flat stones, and forming a series of dolmens, is a "fairygrotto, " a "fairy rock, " a "devil's stable, " or a "giant's palace"; for, like the people who serve the same wine under different labels, theCelto-maniacs, who had almost nothing to offer, decorated the samethings with various names. When these stones form an ellipse, and haveno head-covering, one must say: There is a "cromlech"; when oneperceives a stone laid horizontally upon two upright stones, one isconfronted by a "lichaven" or a "trilithe. " Often two enormous rocks areput one on top of the other, and touch only at one point, and we readthat "they are balanced in such a way that the wind alone is sufficientto make the upper rock sway perceptibly, " an assertion which I do notdispute, although I am rather suspicious of the Celtic wind, andalthough these swaying rocks have always remained unshaken in spite ofthe fierce kicks I was artless enough to give them; they are called"rolling or rolled stones, " "turned or transported stones, " "stones thatdance or dancing stones, " "stones that twist or twisting stones. " Youmust still learn what a _pierre fichade_, a _pierre fiche_, a _pierrefixée_ are, and what is meant by a _haute borne_, a _pierre latte_ and a_pierre lait_; in what a _pierre fonte_ differs from a _pierre fiette_, and what connection there is between a _chaire à diable_ and a _pierredroite_; then you will be as wise as ever were Pelloutier, Déric, Latourd'Auvergne, Penhoet and others, not forgetting Mahé and Fréminville. Now, all this means a _pulvan_, also called a _men-hir_, and designatesnothing more than a stone of greater or lesser size, placed by itself inan open field. 

I was about to forget the tumuli! Those that are composed of silica andsoil are called "barrows" in high-flown language, while the simple heapsof stones are "gals-gals. "

People have pretended that when they were not tombs the "dolmens" and"trilithes" were altars, that the "fairy rocks" were assembling placesor sepultures, and that the business meetings at the time of the Druidswere held in the "cromlechs. " M. De Cambry saw in the "swaying rocks"the emblems of the suspended world. The "barrows" and "gals-gals" haveundoubtedly been tombs; and as for the "men-hirs, " people went so far asto pretend that they had a form which led to the deduction that acertain cult reigned throughout lower Brittany. O chaste immodesty ofscience, you respect nothing, not even a peulven!

A reverie, no matter how undefined, may lead up to splendid creations, when it starts from a fixed point. Then the imagination, like a soaringhippogriff, stamps the earth with all its might and journeys straightwaytowards infinite regions. But when it applies itself to a subject devoidof plastic art and history, and tries to extract a science from it, andto reconstruct a world, it remains even poorer and more barren than therough stone to which the vanity of some praters has lent a shape anddignified with a history. 

To return to the stones of Carnac (or rather, to leave them), if anyoneshould, after all these opinions, ask me mine, I would emit anirresistible, irrefutable, incontestable one, which would make the tentsof M. De la Sauvagère stagger, blanch the face of the Egyptian Penhoët, break up the zodiac of Cambry and smash the python into a thousand bits. This is my opinion: the stones of Carnac are simply large stones!

 * * * * *

So we returned to the inn and dined heartily, for our five hours' tramphad sharpened our appetites. We were served by the hostess, who hadlarge blue eyes, delicate hands, and the sweet face of a nun. It was notyet bedtime, and it was too dark to work, so we went to the church. 

This is small, although it has a nave and side-aisles like a citychurch. Short, thick stone pillars support its wooden roof, painted inblue, from which hang miniature vessels, votive offerings that werepromised during raging storms. Spiders creep along their sails and theriggings are rotting under the dust. No service was being held, and thelamp in the choir burned dimly in its cup filled with yellow oil;overhead, through the open windows of the darkened vault, came broadrays of white light and the sound of the wind rustling in the tree-tops. A man came in to put the chairs in order, and placed two candles in aniron chandelier riveted to the stone pillar; then he pulled into themiddle of the aisle a sort of stretcher with a pedestal, its black woodstained with large white spots. Other people entered the church, and apriest clad in his surplice passed us. There was the intermittenttinkling of a bell and then the door of the church opened wide. Thejangling sound of the little bell mingled with the tones of another andtheir sharp, clear tones swelled louder as they came nearer and nearerto us. 

A cart drawn by oxen appeared and halted in front of the church. It helda corpse, whose dull white feet protruded from under the winding-sheetlike bits of washed alabaster, while the body itself had the uncertainform peculiar to dressed corpses. The crowd around was silent. The menbared their heads; the priest shook his holy-water sprinkler and mumbledorisons, and the pair of oxen swung their heads to and fro under theheavy, creaking yoke. The church, in the background of which gleamed astar, formed one huge shadow in the greenish outdoor atmosphere of arainy twilight, and the child who held a light on the threshold had tokeep his hand in front of it to prevent the wind from blowing it out. 

They lifted the body from the cart, and in doing so struck its headagainst the pole. They carried it into the church and placed it on thestretcher. A crowd of men and women followed. They knelt on the floor, the men near the corpse, and the women a little farther away, near thedoor; then the service began. 

It did not last very long, at least it impressed us that way, for thelow psalmodies were recited rapidly and drowned now and then by astifled sob which came from under the black hoods near the door. A handtouched me and I drew aside to let a bent woman pass. With her clenchedfists on her breast, and face averted, she advanced without appearing tomove her feet, eager to see, yet trembling to behold, and reached therow of lights which burned beside the bier. Slowly, very slowly, liftingup her arm as if to hide herself under it, she turned her head on hershoulder and sank in a heap on a chair, as limp as her garments. 

By the light of the candles, I could see her staring eyes, framed bylids that looked as if they had been scalded, so red were they; heridiotic and contracted mouth, trembling with despair, and her wholepitiful face, which was drenched with tears. 

The corpse was that of her husband, who had been lost at sea; he hadbeen washed ashore and was now being laid to rest. 

The cemetery adjoined the church. The mourners passed into it through aside-door, while the corpse was being nailed in its coffin, in thevestry. A fine rain moistened the atmosphere; we felt cold; the earthwas slippery and the grave-diggers who had not completed their task, found it hard to raise the heavy soil, for it stuck to their shovels. Inthe background, the women kneeling in the grass, throwing back theirhoods and their big white caps, the starched wings of which fluttered inthe wind, appeared at a distance like an immense winding-sheet hoveringover the earth. 

When the corpse reappeared, the prayers began again, and the sobs brokeout anew, and could be heard through the dropping rain. 

Not far from us, issued, at regular intervals, a sort of subdued gurglethat sounded like laughter. In any other place, a person hearing itwould have thought it the repressed explosion of some overwhelming joyor the paroxysm of a delirious happiness. It was the widow, weeping. Then she walked to the edge of the grave, as did the rest of themourners, and little by little, the soil assumed its ordinary level andeverybody went home. 

As we walked down the cemetery steps, a young fellow passed us and saidin French to a companion: "Heavens! didn't the fellow stink! He isalmost completely mortified! It isn't surprising, though, after being inthe water three weeks!"

 * * * * *

One morning we started as on other mornings; we chose the same road, andpassed the hedge of young elms and the sloping meadow where the daybefore we had seen a little girl chasing cattle to the drinking-trough;but it was the last day, and the last time perhaps, that we should passthat way. 

A muddy stretch of land, into which we sank up to our ankles, extendsfrom Carnac to the village of Pô. A boat was waiting for us; we enteredit, and they hoisted the sail and pushed off. Our sailor, an old manwith a cheerful face, sat aft; he fastened a line to the gunwale and lethis peaceful boat go its own way. There was hardly any wind; the bluesea was calm and the narrow track the rudder ploughed in the waterscould be seen for a long time. The old fellow was talkative; he spoke ofthe priests, whom he disliked, of meat, which he thought was a goodthing to eat even on fast days, of the work he had had when he was inthe navy, and of the shots he had received when he was a customsofficer. . . . The boat glided along slowly, the line followed us and theend of the _tape-cul_ hung in the water. 

The mile we had to walk in order to go from Saint-Pierre to Quiberon wasquickly covered, in spite of a hilly and sandy road, and the sun, whichmade our shoulders smart beneath the straps of our bags, and a number of"men-hirs" that were scattered along the route. 

CHAPTER IV. 

QUIBERON. 

In Quiberon, we breakfasted at old Rohan Belle-Isle's, who keeps theHôtel Penthièvre. This gentleman had his bare feet stuck in oldslippers, on account of the heat, and was drinking with a mason, a factwhich does not prevent him from being the descendant of one of the firstfamilies of Europe; an aristocrat of the old stock! a real aristocrat!_Vive Dieu!_ He immediately set to work to pound a steak and to cook ussome lobsters. Our pride was flattered to its innermost fibre. 

The past of Quiberon is concentrated in a massacre. Its greatestcuriosity is a cemetery, which is filled to its utmost capacity andoverflows into the street. The head-stones are crowded together andinvade and submerge one another, as if the corpses were uncomfortable intheir graves and had lifted up their shoulders to escape from them. Itsuggests a petrified ocean, the tombs being the waves, and the crossesthe masts of shipwrecked vessels. 

In the middle, an open ossuary contains skeletons that have been exhumedin order to make room for other corpses. Who has said: "Life is ahostelry, and the grave is our home?" But these corpses do not remain intheir graves, for they are only tenants and are ejected at theexpiration of the lease. Around this charnel-house, where the heaps ofbones resemble a mass of fagots, is arranged, breast-high, a series oflittle black boxes, six inches square, surmounted by a cross and cut outin the shape of a heart in front, so that one can see the skulls inside. Above the heart-shaped opening are the following words in paintedletters: "This is the head of ---- ----, deceased on such and such aday, in such and such a year. " These heads belonged to persons of acertain standing, and one would be considered an ungrateful son if, after seven years, he did not give his parents' skulls the luxury of oneof these little black boxes. The remainder of the bodies is thrown intothe bone-house, and twenty-five years afterwards the heads are sent tojoin them. A few years ago they tried to abolish the custom; but a riotensued and the practice continued. 

Perhaps it is wicked to play with those round skulls which oncecontained a mind, with those empty circles in which passion throbbed. Those boxes surrounding the ossuary and scattered over the graves, overthe wall and in the grass, without any attempt at order, may appearhorrible to a few and ridiculous to many; but those black cases rottingeven as the bones blanch and crumble to dust; those skulls, with noseseaten away and foreheads streaked by the slimy trails of snails, andhollow, staring eyes; those thigh-bones piled up as in the greatcharnel-houses mentioned in the Bible; those pieces of skulls lyingaround filled with earth, in which a flower springs up sometimes andgrows through the holes of the eyes; even the vulgarity of thoseinscriptions, which are as similar as the corpses they identify--allthis human rottenness appeared beautiful to us, and procured us asplendid sight. 

If the post of Auray had arrived, we should have started at once forBelle-Isle; but they were waiting for it. Transient sailors with barearms and open shirts sat in the kitchen of the inn, drinking to passaway the time. 

"At what time is the post due here in Auray?"

"That depends; usually at ten o'clock, " replied the innkeeper. 

"No, at eleven, " put in a man. 

"At twelve, " said M. De Rohan. 

"At one. "

"At half-past one. "

"Sometimes it doesn't reach here until two o'clock. "

"It isn't very regular!"

We were aware of that; it was already three. We could not start beforethe arrival of this ill-fated messenger, which brings Belle-Isle thedespatches from _terra firma_, so we had to resign ourselves. Once in awhile some one would get up, go to the door, look out, come back, andstart up again. Oh! he will not come to-day. --He must have stopped onthe way. --Let's go home. --No, let's wait for him. --If, however, you aretired of waiting gentlemen. . . . After all, there may not be anyletters. . . . No, just wait a little longer. --Oh! here he comes!--But itwas some one else, and the dialogue would begin all over again. 

At last we heard the beating of tired hoofs on the cobblestones, thetinkling of bells, the cracking of a whip and a man's voice shouting:"Ho! Ho! Here's the post! Here's the post!"

The horse stopped in front of the door, hunched its back, stretched itsneck, opened its mouth, disclosed its teeth, spread its hind legs androse on its hocks. 

The animal was lean and tall, and had a moth-eaten mane, rough hoofs andloose shoes; a seton bobbed up and down on its breast. Lost in a saddlethat swallowed him up, supported at the back by a valise and in front bythe mail-bag, which was passed through the saddle-bow, its rider sathuddled on it like a monkey. His small face, adorned with stragglingblond whiskers and as wrinkled and rough as a winter apple, was hiddenby a large oil-cloth hat lined with felt; a sort of gray coutil coat wasdrawn up to his hips and bagged around his stomach, while his trousersstopped at the knees and disclosed his bare legs reddened by the rubbingof the stirrup-straps, and his blue hose, which hung over his shoes. Theharness was held together with strings, the rider's clothes had beenmended with threads of different colours; all sorts of patches and allkinds of spots, torn linen, greasy leather, dried mud, recent dust, hanging straps, bright rags, a dirty man and a mangy horse, the formersickly and perspiring, the latter consumptive and almost spent; the onewith his whip and the other with its bells--all this formed but oneobject which had the same colour and movement and executed almost thesame gestures, which served the same purpose, the conducting of theAuray post. 

After another hour, when all the packages and commissions had beenattended to and we had waited for several passengers who were to come, we finally left the inn and went aboard. At first there was nothing buta confused mass of people and luggage, oars that caused us to stumble, sails that dropped on our heads, men falling over each other and notknowing where to go; then everything quieted down, each one found hisnook, the luggage was put in the bottom of the boat, the sailors got onthe benches, and the passengers seated themselves as best they could. 

There was no breeze and the sails clung limply to the masts. The heavyboat hardly moved over the almost motionless sea, which swelled andsubsided with the gentle rhythm of a sleeping breast. 

Leaning against one of the gunwales, we gazed at the water, which was asblue and calm as the sky, and listened to the splashing of the oars;sitting in the shadow of the sail, the six rowers lifted their oarsregularly to make the forward stroke, and when they dipped them into thewater and brought them up again, drops of crystal clung to theirpaddles. Reclining on the straw, or sitting on the benches, with theirlegs dangling and their chins in their hands, or leaning against thesides of the boat, between the big jambs of the hull, the tar of whichwas melting in the heat, the silent passengers hung their heads andclosed their eyes to shut out the glare of the sun, that shone on theflat ocean as on a mirror. 

A white-haired man was sleeping at my feet, a gendarme was swelteringunder his three-cornered hat, and two soldiers had unfastened theirknapsacks and used them as pillows. Near the bowsprit stood a cabin-boylooking into the stay-sail and whistling for wind, while the skipperremained aft and managed the tiller. Still no wind arose. Orders weregiven to haul in the sails; slowly and gently they came down and fell ina heap on the benches; then each sailor took off his waistcoat, stowedit away under the bow of the boat, and the men began to row again withall their might. 

 * * * * *

Our departure had been so delayed that there was hardly any water leftin the harbour and we had great difficulty in landing. Our boat gratedon the pebbles, and in order to leave it, we were compelled to walk onan oar as if it were a tight-rope. 

Ensconced between the citadel and its ramparts, and cut in two by analmost empty port, the Palay appeared to us a useless little townovercome with military ennui, and put me in mind, I do not know why, ofa gaping _sous-officier_. 

One fails to see the low-crowned, broad-brimmed black felt hats of LeMorbihan, that give protection to the shoulders as well as the head. Thewomen do not affect the big, white caps that stand out from their faces, and reach down their backs like those worn by the nuns, so that whenworn by little girls they cover half of their bodies. Their gowns aremade without the wide stripe of velvet applied on each shoulder androunding away under the arms. Nor do they wear the low shoes with squaretoes, high heels, and long black ribbon streamers. Here, as elsewhere, we found faces that resemble other faces, costumes that really are nocostumes at all, cobblestones, and even a sidewalk. 

Was it worth while to expose ourselves to seasickness (which, by theway, we escaped, a fact that inclined us to leniency), only to see acitadel that we do not admire, a lighthouse that did not appeal to us inthe least, and a rampart built by Vauban, of whom we were alreadyheartily tired? But people had spoken to us of Belle-Isle's rocks. So westarted at once, and taking a short cut across the fields, walked to thebeach. 

We saw one grotto, only one (the day was near its close), but itappeared so beautiful to us (it was draped with sea-weed and decoratedwith shells, and water dripped from the top), that we resolved to spenda day in Belle-Isle, in order to discover more of them, if there wereany, and feast our eyes leisurely upon their beauties. 

The following day, at dawn, having filled our flasks and put somesandwiches in our knapsacks, we decided to go where we pleased; so, without a guide or information of any sort (this is the best way), weset out to walk, having resolved that we would go anywhere, provided itwere far, and would return home at any time, provided it were late. 

We began by a path which led to the top of a cliff, then followed itsasperities and valleys and continued around the whole island. When wereached places where landslips had obliterated it, we struck out intothe country and let our eyes roam over the horizon of the sea, the deepblue line of which touched the sky; then we walked back to the edge ofthe rocks, which had suddenly reappeared at our side. The perpendicularcliff, the top of which we were treading, concealed the flank of therocks, and we could only hear the roaring of the breakers below us. 

Sometimes the rock was split in its entire length, disclosing its twoalmost straight sides, streaked with layers of silica, with tufts ofyellow flowers scattered here and there. If we threw a stone, itappeared suspended in the air for a time, would then strike the sides ofthe cliff, rebound from the one to the other, break into a thousandbits, scattering earth and pebbles in its course, and finally land atthe bottom of the pit, where it frightened the cormorants, whichshrieked and took flight. 

Frequent storms and thaws have pushed a part of the upper grounds intothese gorges, and so their steep slope has grown less abrupt, and one isable to climb down to the bottom. We attempted to do so by sliding downlike children, holding ourselves back with our hands and feet, andfinally we landed safely on the soft, wet sand. 

The tide was going out, but in order to be able to pass, we had to waituntil the breakers receded. We watched them approach us. They dashedagainst the rocks, swirled in the crevices, rose like scarfs on thewind, fell back in drops and sprays, and with one long, sweepinglibration, gathered their green waters together and retreated. When onewave left the sand, its currents immediately joined, and sought lowerlevels. The sea-weed moved its slimy branches; the water bubbled betweenthe pebbles, oozed through the cracks of the rocks and formed a thousandrivulets and fountains. The drenched sand absorbed it all, and soon itsyellow tint grew white again through the drying action of the sun. 

As soon as we could, we jumped over the rocks and continued on our way. Soon, however, they increased in numbers, their weird groups beingcrowded together, piled up and overturned on one another. We tried tohold on with our hands and feet, but we slid on their slipperyasperities. The cliff was so very high that it quite frightened us tolook up at it. Although it crushed us by its formidable placidity, stillit fascinated us, for we could not help looking at it and it did nottire our eyes. 

A swallow passed us and we watched its flight; it came from the sea; itascended slowly through the air, cutting the luminous, fluid atmospherewith its sharp, outstretched wings that seemed to enjoy being absolutelyuntrammelled. The bird ascended higher and higher, rose above the cliffand finally disappeared. 

Meanwhile we were creeping over the rocks, the perspective of which wasrenewed by each bend of the coast. Once in a while, when the rocksended, we walked on square stones that were as flat as marble slabs andseamed by almost symmetrical furrows, which appeared like the tracks ofsome ancient road of another world. 

In some places were great pools of water as calm as their greenishdepths and as limpid and motionless as a woodland stream on its bed ofcresses. Then the rocks would reappear closer than before and morenumerous. On one side was the ocean with its breakers foaming around thelower rocks; on the other, the straight, unrelenting, impassive coast. 

Tired and bewildered, we looked about us for some issue; but the cliffstretched out before us, and the rocks, infinitely multiplying theirdark green forms, succeeded one another until their unequal crags seemedlike so many tall, black phantoms rising out of the earth. 

We stumbled around in this way until we suddenly perceived an undulatingseries of rough steps which enabled us to climb up to flat land again. 

It is always a pleasure, even when the country is ugly, to walk with afriend, to feel the grass under one's feet, to jump over fences andditches, to break thistles with one's stick, to pull leaves from thebushes and wheat from the fields, to go where one's fancy dictates, whistling, singing, talking, dreaming, without strange ears to listen toone's conversation, and the sound of strange footsteps behind one, asabsolutely free as if one were in the desert!

Ah! Let us have air! air! And more space! Since our contracted soulssuffocate and die on the window-sill, since our captive spirits, likethe bear in its cage, turn around and around, and stagger against thewalls of their prison, why not, at least, let our nostrils breathe thedifferent perfumes of all the winds of the earth, why not let our eyesrove over every horizon?

No steeple shone in the distance, no hamlet with thatched roofs andsquare yards framed by clusters of trees, appeared on the side of ahill; not a soul was to be seen, not even a peasant, a grazing sheep, ora stray dog. 

All those cultivated fields look uninhabited; the peasants work in them, but they do not live there. One is led to believe that they benefit bythem but do not care about them in the least. 

We saw a farm and walked in; a ragged woman served us some ice-cold milkin earthen cups. The silence all around was peculiar. The woman watchedus eagerly, and we soon took our departure. 

We walked into a valley, the narrow gorge of which appeared to extend tothe ocean. Tall grass with yellow flowers reached up to our waists, andwe had to take long strides in order to advance. We could hear themurmur of flowing water near by, and we sank ankle-deep into the marshysoil. Presently the two hills parted; their barren sides were coveredwith short, stubby grass and here and there were big yellow patches ofmoss. At the foot of one hill a stream wends its way through thedrooping boughs of the stunted shrubs that grow on its edges, and losesitself in a quiet pond where long-legged insects disport themselves onthe leaves of the water-lilies. The sun beat down on us. The gnatsrubbed their wings together and bent the slender ends of the reeds withthe weight of their tiny bodies. We were alone in the tranquillity ofthis desert. 

At this point, the valley curved and widened and formed a sharp bend. Weclimbed a little hill, in order to locate ourselves, but the horizoneither ended abruptly, enclosed by another hill, or else stretched outover new plains. We did not lose courage, however, and continued toadvance, while we thought of the travellers on desert islands who climbon promontories in the hope of sighting some vessel setting sail towardsthem. 

The soil was growing less moist, and the grass less high; presently theocean came in view, ensconced in a narrow bay, and soon the shore, strewn with débris of shells and madrepores, crunched beneath ourfootsteps. We let ourselves drop to the ground and as we were exhausted, we soon fell asleep. An hour later the cold woke us up, and we startedhomeward without any fear of losing our way this time. We were on thecoast facing France, and Palay was on our left. It was here, the daybefore, that we had discovered the grotto we admired so much. It did nottake us long to find others, higher and deeper even than the first one. 

They always opened through large, pointed arches which were eitherupright or inclined, their bold columns supporting enormous pieces ofrock. Black, veined with purple, fiery red, or brown streaked withwhite, these beautiful grottoes displayed for their visitors theinfinite variety of their shapes and colouring, their graces and theirgrand caprices. There was one all of silver veined with deep red; inanother, tufts of flowers resembling periwinkles had grown on glazingsof reddish granite, and drops of water fell from the ceiling on the finesand with never-ceasing regularity. In the background of another grotto, beneath a long semi-circle, a bed of polished white gravel, which thetide no doubt turns and makes fresh every day, seemed to be waiting toreceive the body of a mermaid; but the bed is empty and has lost herforever! Only the moist seaweed remains on which she used to stretch herdelicate nude limbs when she was tired of swimming, and on which shereclined till daybreak, in the pale light of the moon. 

The sun was setting, and the tide was coming in over the rocks thatmelted in the blue evening mist, which was blanched on the level of theocean by the foam of the tumbling waves. In the other part of thehorizon, the sky streaked with orange stripes looked as if it had beenswept by a gale. Its light reflected on the waters and spread a gleamingsheen over them, and projected on the sand, giving it a brownish tingeand making it glitter like steel. 

Half a mile to the south, the coast is covered by a line of rocks thatextends to the sea. In order to reach them, we should have beencompelled to tramp as we had already done that morning. We were tired, and it was far; but a temptation seemed to push us forward. The breezeplayed in the cracks of the rocks and wrinkled the surface of the pools;the sea-weed, cleaving to the sides of the cliff, shook in the wind, andfrom the part of the sky where the moon was to rise, a pale light spreadover the waters. It was the hour when the shadows lengthen. The rocksappeared larger, and the breakers a deeper green. The sky seemed toexpand, and all nature assumed a different appearance. 

So we started, without giving a thought to the incoming tide or whetheror not we should find later a way to get back to land. We wished toenjoy our pleasure to the fullest extent. We seemed lighter than in themorning, and ran and jumped without the slightest feeling of fatigue. Anabundance of animal spirits impelled us onward and we felt a peculiarlyrobust twitching in our muscles. We shook our heads in the wind andtouched the grasses with our fingers. We breathed the salt air of theocean, and noted and assimilated every color, every sunbeam, everysound, the design of the seaweed, the softness of the sand, the hardnessof the rocks that echoed under our footsteps, the height of the cliffs, the fringe of the waves, the accidents of the coast, and the voice ofthe horizon; and the breeze that passed over our faces like intangiblekisses, the sky with its passing clouds, the rising moon, the peepingstars. Our souls bathed in all this splendour, and our eyes feasted onit; we opened our ears and nostrils wide; something of the very life ofthe elements, forced from them undoubtedly by the attraction of oureyes, reached us and was assimilated, so that we were able to comprehendthem in a closer relation and feel them more keenly, thanks to thiscomplex union. 

By thus entering and penetrating into nature, we became a part of it, diffused ourselves in it, and were claimed by it once more; we felt thatit was overpowering us, and we rejoiced; we desired to be lost in it, tobe borne away, or to carry it away with us. As in the raptures of love, one wishes more hands with which to caress, more lips with which tokiss, more eyes with which to see, more soul with which to worship;spreading ourselves out in nature, with a joyful and delirious abandon, we regretted that our eyes could not penetrate to the innermost parts ofthe rocks, to the bottom of the sea, to the end of the heavens, in orderto see how the stones grow, how the breakers are made, how the stars arelighted; we regretted that our ears could not catch the rumour of thefermentation of the granite in the bowels of the earth, could not hearthe sap circulate in the plants and the coral roll in the solitudes ofthe ocean. And while we were under the spell of that contemplativeeffusion, we wished that our souls, radiating everywhere, might live allthese different lives, assume all these different forms, and, varyingunceasingly, accomplish their metamorphoses under an eternal sun!

But man was made to enjoy each day only a small portion of food, colours, sounds, sentiments and ideas. Anything above the allottedquantity tires or intoxicates him; it becomes the idiocy of the drunkardor the ravings of the ecstatic. O, God! How small is our glass and howlarge is our thirst! What weak heads we have!

CHAPTER V. 

RETURN. 

In order to return to Quiberon, we were compelled, on the following day, to arise before seven o'clock, a feat which required some courage. Whilewe were still stiff from fatigue and shivering with sleep, we got into aboat along with a white horse, two drummers, the same one-eyed gendarmeand the same soldier who, this time, however, did not lecture anybody. As drunk as a lord, he kept slipping under the benches and had all hecould do to keep his shako on his head and extricate his gun frombetween his feet. I could not say which was the sillier of the two. Thegendarme was sober, but he was very stupid. He deplored the soldier'slack of manners, enumerated the punishments that would be dealt out tohim, was scandalised by his hiccoughs and resented his demeanour. Viewedfrom the side of the missing eye, with his three-cornered hat, his sabreand his yellow gloves, the gendarme presented one of the sorriestaspects of human life. Besides, there is something so essentiallygrotesque about gendarmes that I cannot help laughing at them; theseupholders of the law always produce the same comic effect on me, and sodo attorneys for the king, magistrates, and professors of literature. 

Tipped to one side, the boat skimmed lightly through the foaming waves. The three sails were comfortably swelled; the masts creaked and the windrattled the pulleys. A cabin-boy stood at the helm singing. We could notcatch the words, but it was some slow, monotonous lay which neither rosenor fell and was repeated again and again, with long-drawn-outinflections and languid refrain. And it swept softly and sadly out overthe ocean, as some confused memory sweeps through one's mind. 

The horse stood as straight as it could on its four legs and pulled at abundle of hay. The sailors, with folded arms, looked absently at thesails and smiled a far-away smile. 

 * * * * *

So we journeyed on without speaking a word and as best we could, withoutreaching the edge of the bay, where it looked as if Plouharnel might be. However, after a while we arrived there. But when we did, we wereconfronted by the ocean, for we had followed the right side of the coastinstead of the left, and were forced to turn back and go over a part ofthe route. 

A muffled sound was heard. A bell tinkled and a hat appeared. It was theAuray post. Again the same man, the same horse, the same mail-bag. Hewas ambling quietly towards Quiberon; he would be back directly andreturn again the next day. He is the guest of the coast; he passes inthe morning and again at night. His life is spent going from one pointto another; he is the only one who gives the coast some animation, something to look forward to, and, I was almost going to say, somecharm. 

He stopped and talked to us for a few minutes, then lifted his hat andwas off again. 

What an ensemble! What a horse, and what a rider! What a picture! Callotwould probably have reproduced it, but it would take Cervantes to writeit. 

After passing over large pieces of rock that have been placed in the seain order to shorten the route by cutting the back of the bay in two, wefinally arrived at Plouharnel. 

The village was quiet; chickens cackled and scratched in the streets, and in the gardens enclosed by stone walls, weeds and oats grew side byside. 

While we were sitting in front of the host's door, an old beggar passedus. He was as red as a lobster, dirty and unkempt and covered with ragsand vermin. The sun shone on his dilapidated garments and on his purpleskin; it was almost black and seemed to transude blood. He keptbellowing in a terrible voice, while beating a tattoo on the door of aneighbouring house. 

CHAPTER VI. 

QUIMPER. 

Quimper, although it is the centre of the real Brittany, is distinctlydifferent from it. The elm-tree promenade that follows the windingriver, which has quays and boats, renders the town very pretty and thebig Hôtel de la Préfecture, which alone covers the little western delta, gives it a thoroughly administrative and French appearance. You areaware that you are in the _chef-lieu_ of a department, a fact broughthome to you by the latter's division in _arrondissements_, with theirlarge, medium, and small parishes, its committee of primary instruction, its saving banks, its town council and other modern inventions, whichrob the cities of local colour, dear to the heart of the innocenttourist. 

With all due deference to the people who pronounce the name ofQuimper-Corentin as the synonyme of all that is ridiculous andprovincial, it is a most delightful place, and well worth other morerespected ones. You will not, it is true, find the charms and riotouswealth of colouring possessed by Quimperlé; still, I know of few thingsthat can equal the charming appearance of that alley following the edgeof the river and shaded by the escarpment of a neighbouring mountain, which casts the dark shadows of its luxuriant foliage over it. 

It does not take long to go through cities of this kind, and to knowtheir most intimate recesses, and sometimes one stumbles across placesthat stay one's steps and fill one's heart with gladness. 

Small cities, like small apartments, seem warmer and cosier to live in. But keep this illusion! There are more draughts in such apartments thanin a palace, and a city of this kind is more deadly monotonous than thedesert. 

Returning to the hotel by one of those paths we dearly love, that risesand falls and winds, sometimes through a field, sometimes through grassand brambles, sometimes along a wall, which are filled in turn withdaisies, pebbles and thistles, a path made for light thoughts andbantering conversation, --returning, I said, to the city, we heard criesand plaintive wails issue from under the slated roof of a squarebuilding. It was the slaughter-house. 

At that moment I thought of some terrible city, of some frightful andimmense place like Babylon or Babel, filled with cannibals andslaughter-houses, where they butchered men instead of animals; and Itried to discover a likeness to human agonies in those bleating andsobbing voices. I thought of groups of slaves brought there with ropesaround their necks, to be tied to iron rings, and killed in order tofeed their masters, who would eat their flesh from tables of carvedivory and wipe their lips on fine linen. Would their attitudes be moredejected, their eyes sadder or their prayers more pitiful?

While we were in Quimper, we went out one day through one side of thetown and came back through the other, after tramping about eight hours. 

Our guide was waiting for us under the porch of the hotel. He started infront of us and we followed. He was a little white-haired man, with alinen cap and torn shoes, and he wore an old brown coat that was manysizes too large for him. He stuttered when he spoke, and when he walkedhe knocked his knees together; but in spite of all this, he managed toadvance very quickly, with a sort of nervous, almost febrileperseverance. From time to time, he would pull a leaf off a tree andclap it over his mouth to cool his lips. His business consists in goingfrom one place to another, attending to letters and errands. He goes toDouarnenez, Quimperlé, Brest and even to Rennes, which is forty milesaway (a journey which he accomplished in four days, including going andcoming). His whole ambition, he said, was to return to Rennes once moreduring his lifetime. And only for the purpose, mind you, of going back, of making the trip, and being able to boast of it afterwards. He knowsevery road and every _commune_ that has a steeple; he takes short cutsacross the fields, opens gates, and when he passes in front of a farm, he never fails to greet its owners. Having listened to the birds all hislife, he has learned to imitate their chirpings, and when he walks alongthe roads, under the trees, he whistles as his feathered friends do, inorder to charm his solitude. 

Our first stop was at Loc-Maria, an ancient monastery, given in oldentimes by Conan III to the abbey of Fontevrault; it is situated a quarterof a mile from the town. This monastery has not been shamefully utilisedlike the abbey of poor Robert d'Arbrissel. [2] It is deserted, but hasnot been sullied. Its Gothic portal does not re-echo the voices ofjailers, and though there may not be much of it, one experiences neitherdisgust nor rebellion. In that little chapel, of a rather severe Romancestyle, the only curious thing is a large granite holy-water basin whichstands on the floor and is almost black. It is wide and deep andrepresents to perfection the real Catholic holy-water basin, made toreceive the entire body of an infant, and not in the least like thosenarrow shells in our churches in which you can only dip your fingers. With its clear water rendered more limpid by the contrast of a greenishbed, the vegetation which has grown all around it during the religiouscalm of centuries, its crumbling angles, and its great mass of bronzedstone, it looks like one of those hollowed rocks which contain saltwater. 

After we had inspected the chapel carefully, we walked to the river, crossed it in a boat, and plunged into the country. 

It is absolutely deserted and strangely empty. Trees, bushes, sea-rushes, tamarisks, and heather grow on the edge of the ditches. We came to broadstretches of land, but we did not see a soul anywhere. The sky was bleakand a fine rain moistened the atmosphere and spread a grey veil over thecountry. The paths we chose were hollow and shaded by clusters offoliage, the branches of which, uniting, drooped over our heads andalmost prevented us from walking erect. The light that filtered throughthe dome of leaves was greenish, and as dim as on a winter evening. Butfarther away, it was brilliant, and played around the edges of the leavesand accentuated their delicate pinking. Later we reached the top of abarren slope, which was flat and smooth, and without a blade of grass torelieve the monotony of its colour. Sometimes, however, we came upon along avenue of beech-trees with moss growing around the foot of theirthick, shining trunks. There were wagon-tracks in these avenues, as ifto indicate the presence of a neighbouring castle that we might see atany moment; but they ended abruptly in a stretch of flat land thatcontinued between two valleys, through which it would spread its greenmaze furrowed by the capricious meanderings of hedges, spotted here andthere by a grove, brightened by clumps of sea-rushes, or by some fieldbordering the meadows which rose slowly to meet the hills and lostthemselves in the horizon. Above these hills, far away in the mist, stretched the blue surface of the ocean. 

The birds are either absent or they do not sing; the leaves are thick, the grass deadens one's footfalls, and the country gazes at you likesome melancholy countenance. It looks as if it had been createdexpressly to harbour ruined lives and shattered hopes, and to fostertheir bitterness beneath its weeping sky, to the low rustling of thetrees and the heather. On winter nights, when the fox creeps stealthilyover the dry leaves, when the tiles fall from the pigeon-house and thereeds bend in the marshes, when the beech-trees stoop in the wind, andthe wolf ambles over the moonlit snow, while one is alone by the dyingembers listening to the wind howl in the empty hallways, how charming itmust be to let one's heart dwell on its most cherished despairs and longforgotten loves!

We spied a hovel with a Gothic portal; further on was an old wall withan ogive door; a leafless bush swayed there in the breeze. In thecourtyard the ground is covered with heather, violets, and pebbles; youwalk in, look around and go out again. This place is called "The templeof the false gods, " and used to be, it is thought, a commandery ofTemplars. 

Our guide started again and we followed him. Presently a steeple roseamong the trees; we crossed a stubble-field, climbed to the top of aditch and caught a glimpse of a few of dwellings: the village ofPomelin. A rough road constitutes the main street and the villageconsists of several houses separated by yards. What tranquillity! orrather what forlornness! The thresholds are deserted; the yards areempty. 

Where are the inhabitants? One would think that they had all left thevillage to lie in wait behind the furze-bushes to catch a glimpse of the_Blues_ who are about to pass through the ravine. 

The church is poor and perfectly bare. No beautiful painted saints, nopictures on the walls or on the roof, no hanging lamp oscillating at theend of a long, straight cord. In a corner of the choir, a wick wasburning in a glass filled with oil. Round wooden pillars hold up theroof, the blue paint of which has been freshened recently. The brightlight of the fields, filtering through the green foliage which coversthe roof of the church, shines through the white window-panes. The door, a little wooden door that closes with a latch, was open; a flight ofbirds came in, chirping and beating their wings against the walls; theyfluttered for awhile beneath the vault and around the altar, two orthree alighted upon the holy-water basin, to moisten their beaks, andthen all flew away as suddenly as they had come. 

It is not an unusual thing to see birds in the Breton churches; manylive there and fasten their nests to the stones of the nave; they arenever disturbed. When it rains, they all gather in the church, but assoon as the sun pierces the clouds and the rain-spouts dry up, theyrepair to the trees again. So that during the storm two frail creaturesoften enter the blessed house of God together; man to pray and allay hisfears, and the bird to wait until the rain stops and to warm the nakedbodies of its frightened young. 

A peculiar charm pervades these churches. It is not their poverty thatmoves us, because even when they are empty, they appear to be inhabited. Is it not, then, their modesty that appeals to us? For, with theirunpretentious steeples, and their low roofs hiding under the trees, theyseem to shrink and humiliate themselves in the sight of God. They havenot been upreared through a spirit of pride, nor through the pious fancyof some mighty man on his death-bed. On the contrary, we feel that it isthe simple impression of a need, the ingenuous cry of an appetite, and, like the shepherd's bed of dried leaves, it is the retreat the soul hasbuilt for itself where it comes to rest when it is tired. These villagechurches represent better than their city sisters the distinctivefeatures of the places where they are built, and they seem toparticipate more directly in the life of the people who, from father toson, come to kneel at the same place and on the same stone slab. Everyday, every Sunday, when they enter and when they leave, do they not seethe graves of their parents, are these not near them while they pray, and does it not seem to them as if the church was only a larger familycircle from which the loved ones have not altogether departed? Theseplaces of worship thus have a harmonious sense, and the life of thesepeople is influenced by it from the baptismal font to the grave. It isnot the same with us, because we have relegated eternity to theoutskirts of the city, have banished our dead to the faubourgs and laidthem to rest in the carpenter's quarter, near the soda factories andnight-soil magazines. 

About three o'clock in the afternoon, we arrived at the chapel ofKerfeunteun, near the entrance to Quimper. At the upper end of thechapel is a fine glass window of the sixteenth century, representing thegenealogical tree of the Holy Trinity. Jacob forms the trunk, and thetop is figured by the Cross surmounted by the Eternal Father with atiara on His head. On each side, the square steeple represents aquadrilateral pierced by a long straight window. This steeple does notrest squarely on the roof, but instead, by means of a slender basis, thenarrow sides of which almost touch, it forms an obtuse angle near theridge of the roof. In Brittany, almost every church has a steeple ofthis kind. 

Before returning to the city, we made a détour in order to visit thechapel of _La Mère-Dieu_. As it is usually closed, our guide summonedthe custodian, and the latter accompanied us with his little niece, whostopped along the road to pick flowers. The young man walked in front ofus. His slender and flexible figure was encased in a jacket of lightblue cloth, and the three velvet streamers of his black hat, which wascarefully placed on the back of his head, over his knotted hair, hungdown his back. 

At the bottom of a valley, or rather a ravine, can be seen the church of_La Mère-Dieu_, veiled by thick foliage. In this place, amid the silenceof all these trees and because of its little Gothic portal (whichappears to be of the thirteenth century, but which, in reality, is ofthe sixteenth), the church reminds one of the discreet chapels mentionedin old novels and old melodies, where they knighted the page startingfor the Holy Land, one morning when the stars were dim and the larktrilled, while the mistress of the castle slipped her white hand throughthe bars of the iron gate and wept when he kissed her goodbye. 

We entered the church. The young custodian took off his hat and knelt onthe floor. His thick, blond hair uncoiled and fell around his shoulders. It clung a moment to the coarse cloth of his jacket, and then, little bylittle, it separated and spread like the hair of a woman. It was partedin the middle and hung on both sides over his shoulders and neck. Thegolden mass rippled with light every time he moved his head bent inprayer. 

The little girl kneeled beside him and let her flowers fall to theground. For the first time in my life, I understood the beauty of aman's locks and the fascination they may have for bare and playful arms. A strange progress, indeed, is that which consists in curtailingeverywhere the grand superfetations nature has bestowed upon us, so thatwhenever we discover them in all their virgin splendour, they are arevelation to us. 

CHAPTER VII. 

PONT-L'ABBÉ. 

At five o'clock in the evening, we arrived at Pont-l'Abbé, covered withquite a respectable coating of mud and dust, which fell from ourclothing upon the floor of the inn with such disastrous abundance, everytime we moved, that we were almost mortified at the mess we made. 

Pont-l'Abbé is a peaceful little town, cut in two in its entire lengthby a broad, paved street. Its modest inhabitants cannot possibly lookany more stupid or insignificant than the place itself. 

For those who must see something wherever they go, there are theunimportant remains of the castle and the church, an edifice that wouldbe quite passable were it not for the thick coat of paint that coversit. The chapel of the Virgin was a bower of flowers; bunches ofjonquils, pansies, roses, jessamine, and honeysuckle were arranged inblue glasses or white china vases and spread their bright colours overthe altar and upward between the two tall candlesticks framing theVirgin's face and her silver crown, from which fell a long veil caughton the gold star of the plaster Infant she held in her arms. One couldsmell the odour of the holy water and the flowers. It was a perfumed, mysterious little nook all by itself, a hidden retreat decorated byloving hands, and peculiarly adapted for the exhalation of mysticaldesires and long, heart-broken orisons. All his heart's sensuousness, compressed by the climate and numbed by misery, is brought here by manand laid at the feet of Mary, the Divine Mother, and he is thus able tosatisfy his unquenchable longing for love and enjoyment. No matter ifthe roof leaks and there are no benches or chairs in the rest of thechurch, you will always find the chapel of the Virgin bright withflowers and lights, for it seems as if all the religious tenderness ofBrittany has concentrated there; it is the softest spot of its heart; itis its weakness, its passion, its treasure. Though there are no flowersin these parts, there are flowers in the church; though the people arepoor, the Virgin is always sumptuous and beautiful. She smiles at you, and despairing souls go to warm themselves at her knees as at ahearthstone that is never extinguished. One is astonished at the waythese people cling to their belief; but does one know the pleasure andvoluptuousness they derive from it? Is not asceticism superiorepicureanism, fasting, refined gormandising? Religion can supply onewith almost carnal sensations; prayer has its debauchery andmortification its raptures; and the men who come at night and kneel infront of this dressed statue, feel their hearts beat thickly and a sortof vague intoxication, while in the streets of the city, the children ontheir way home from school stop and gaze dreamily at the woman whosmiles at them from the stained window of the church. 

But you must attend a fête in order to gain an insight into the gloomycharacter of these people. They don't dance; they merely turn; theydon't sing; they only whistle. That very evening we went to aneighbouring village to be present at the inauguration of athreshing-floor. Two _biniou_ players were stationed on top of the wallsurrounding the yard, and played continuously while two long lines ofmen and women, following in one anothers' footsteps, trotted around theplace and described several figures. The lines would turn, break up andform again at irregular intervals. The heavy feet of the dancers struckthe ground without the slightest attempt at rhythm, while the shrillnotes of the music succeeded one another rapidly and with desperatemonotony. The dancers who tired withdrew without interrupting the dance, and when they had rested, they re-entered it. During the whole time wewatched this peculiar performance, the crowd stopped only once, whilethe musicians drank some cider; then, when they had finished, the linesformed anew and the dance began again. At the entrance of the yard was atable covered with nuts; beside it stood a pitcher of brandy and on theground was a keg of cider; near by stood a citizen in a green frock coatand a leather cap; a little farther away was a man wearing a jacket anda sword suspended from a white shoulder-belt; they were the _commissairede police_, of Pont-l'Abbé and his _garde-champêtre_. Suddenly, M. Lecommissaire pulled out his watch and motioned to the _garde_. The latterdrew several peasants aside, spoke to them in a low tone, and presentlythe assembly broke up. 

All four of us returned to the city together, which afforded us theopportunity of again admiring mother of the harmonious combinations ofProvidence which had created this _commissaire de police_ for this_garde-champêtre_ and this _garde-champêtre_ for his _commissaire depolice_. They were made for each other. The same fact would give rise inboth of them to the same reflections; from the same idea both would drawparallel conclusions. When the _commissaire_ laughed, the _garde_grinned; when he assumed a serious expression, his shadow grew gloomy;if the frock-coat said, "This must be done, " the jacket replied, "Ithink so, too;" if the coat added, "It is necessary;" the waistcoataffirmed: "It is indispensable. " Notwithstanding this inwardcomprehension, their outward relations of rank and authority remainedunchanged. For the _garde_ spoke in a lower tone than the _commissaire_, and was a trifle shorter and walked behind him. The _commissaire_ waspolished, important, fluent; he consulted himself, ruminated, talked tohimself, and smacked his tongue; the _garde_ was deferential, attentive, pensive and observing, and would utter an exclamation from time to timeand scratch his nose. On the way, he inquired about the news, asked the_commissaire's_ advice, and solicited his orders, while his superiorquestioned, meditated, and issued commands. 

We had just come in sight of the first houses of the city, when we heardshrieks issue from one of them. The street was blocked by an excitedcrowd, and several persons rushed up to the _commissaire_ and exclaimed:"Come, come quickly, Monsieur, they're having a fight! Two women arebeing killed!"

"By whom?"

"We don't know. "

"Why?"

"They are bleeding. "

"But with what?"

"With a rake. "

"Where's the murderer?"

"One on the head and the other on the arm. Go in, they're waiting foryou; the women are there. "

So the _commissaire_ went in and we followed. We heard sobs, screams, and excited conversation and saw a jostling, curious mob. People steppedon one another's toes, dug one another's ribs, cursed, and causedgeneral confusion. 

The _commissaire_ got angry; but as he could not speak Breton, the_garde_ got angry for him and chased the crowd out, taking eachindividual by his shoulders and shoving him through the door into thestreet. 

When the room had been cleared of all except a dozen persons, we managedto discover in a corner, a piece of flesh hanging from an arm and a massof black hair dripping with blood. An old woman and a young girl hadbeen hurt in the fight. The old woman was tall and angular and had skinas yellow and wrinkled as parchment; she was standing up, groaning andholding her left arm with her right hand; she did not seem to besuffering much, but the girl was crying. She was sitting on a chair withher hands spread out on her knees and her head bent low; she wastrembling convulsively and shaking with low sobs. As they replied bycomplaints to all our questions, and as the testimony of the witnesseswas conflicting, we could not ascertain who had started the fight orwhat it was about. Some said that a husband had surprised his wife;others, that the women had started the row and that the owner of thehouse had tried to kill them in order to make them stop. But no one knewanything definite. M. _le commissaire_ was greatly perplexed and the_garde_ perfectly nonplussed. 

As the doctor was away, and as it might be that the good people did notwish his services, because it meant expense, we had the audacity tooffer the help of our limited knowledge and rushed off for our satchels, a piece of cerecloth, and some linen and lint which we had brought withus in anticipation of possible accidents. 

It would really have been an amusing sight for our friends, had theybeen able to see us spread out our bistoury, our pincers, and threepairs of scissors, one with gold branches, on the table of this hut. The_commissaire_ praised our philanthropy, the women watched us in awedsilence, and the tallow candle melted and ran down the iron candle-stickin spite of the efforts of the _garde_, who kept trimming the wick withhis fingers. We attended to the old woman first. The cut had been givenconscientiously; the bare arm showed the bone, and a triangle of fleshabout four inches long hung over it like a cuff. We tried to put thisback in its place by adjusting it carefully over the edge of the gapingwound and bandaging the arm. It is quite possible that the violentcompression the member was subjected to caused mortification to set in, and that the patient may have died. 

We did not know exactly what ailed the girl. The blood trickled throughher hair, but we could not see whence it came; it formed oily blotchesall over it and ran down into her neck. The _garde_, our interpreter, bade her remove the cotton band she wore on her head, and her tressestumbled down in a dull, dark mass and uncoiled like a cascade full ofbloody threads. We parted the thick, soft, abundant locks, and found aswelling as large as a nut and pierced by an oval hole on the back ofher head. We shaved the surrounding parts; and after we had washed andstanched the wound, we melted some tallow and spread it over some lint, which we adapted to the swelling with strips of diachylum. Over this weplaced first a bandage, then the cotton band, and then the cap. Whilethis was taking place, the justice of the peace arrived. The first thinghe did was to ask for the rake, and the only thing he seemed to careabout was to examine it. He took hold of the handle, counted the teeth, waved it in the air, tested the iron and bent the wood. 

"Is this, " he demanded, "the instrument with which the assault wascommitted? Jérôme, are you sure it is?"

"They say so, Monsieur. "

"You were not present, Monsieur le commissaire?"

"No, Monsieur le juge de paix. "

"I would like to know whether the blows were really dealt with a rake orwhether they were given with a blunt instrument. Who is the assailant?And did the rake belong to him or to some one else? Was it really withthis that these women were hurt? Or was it, I repeat, with a bluntinstrument? Do they wish to lodge a complaint? What do you think aboutit, Monsieur le commissaire?"

The victims said little, remarking only that they suffered great pain;so they were given over night to decide whether or not they wished toseek redress by law. The young girl could hardly speak, and the oldwoman's ideas were muddled, seeing that she was drunk, according to whatthe neighbours intimated, --a fact which explained her insensibility whenwe had endeavoured to relieve her suffering. 

After they had looked at us as keenly as they could in order toascertain who we were, the authorities of Pont-l'Abbé bade us good nightand thanked us for the services we had rendered the community. We putour things back into our satchel, and the _commissaire_ departed withthe _garde_, the _garde_ with his sword, and the justice of the peacewith the rake. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

ROAMING. 

En route! the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and our feet are eager totread on the grass. From Crozon to Leudevenec the country is quite flat, and there is not a house nor a tree to be seen. As far as the eye canreach, reddish moss spreads over the ground. Sometimes fields of ripewheat rise above the little stunted sea-rushes. The latter areflowerless now, and look as they did before the springtime. Deepwagon-tracks, edged by rolls of dried mud, make their appearance andcontinue for a long time; then they suddenly describe a bend and are lostto the eye. Grass grows in large patches between these sunken furrows. The wind whistles over the flats; we walk on; a welcome breeze driesthe beads of perspiration on our cheeks, and when we halted we were ableto hear, above the sound of our beating arteries, the rustling of thewind in the grass. 

From time to time, a mill with rapidly revolving wheels would rise upand point the way. The creaking wooden fans descended, grazed the groundand then rose. Standing erect in the open garret-window, the millerwatched us pass. 

We walked on; coming to a hedge of elm-trees which probably concealed avillage, we caught sight of a man standing in a tree, at the foot ofwhich was a woman with her blue apron spread out to catch the plums hewas throwing to her. I recollect a crop of dark hair falling in massesover her shoulders, two uplifted arms, the movement of the supple neckand the sonorous laughter that floated over the hedge to me. 

The path we were following grew narrower. Presently the plaindisappeared and we found ourselves on the crest of a promontorydominating the ocean. Looking towards Brest, it seemed to extendindefinitely; but on the other side, it projected its sinuosities intothe land, between short hills covered with underwood. Each gulf isensconced between two mountains; each mountain is flanked by two gulfs, and nothing can equal the beauty of those vast green slopes risingalmost in a straight line out of the sea. The hills have rounded topsand flattened bases, and describe a wide, curved chain which joins theplateaux with the graceful sweep of a Moorish arch; following so closelyupon one another, the colour of their foliage and their formation arealmost exactly alike. Propelled by the sea-breeze, the breakers dashedup against the foot of these hills, and the sun, falling on them, madethem gleam; the whole surface of the ocean was blue and glittering withsilver, and we could not get enough of its beauty. Then we watched thesunbeams glide over the hills. One of the latter had already beendeserted by them, and appeared more indistinct than the rest, while abroad black shadow was rapidly gathering over another. As we approachedthe level of the shore the mountains that faced us a moment ago seemedto grow loftier; the gulfs deepened and the ocean expanded. We walkedon, oblivious to everything, and let our eyes roam at will, and thepebbles that our feet dislodged rolled down the hill quickly anddisappeared in the bushes edging the road. 

The roads followed hedges that were as compact and thick as walls; weclimbed up and we climbed down; meanwhile, it was growing dark, and thecountry was settling into the deep silence characteristic of midsummerevenings. 

As we failed to meet anybody who could show us the way, the few peasantswe had questioned having responded by unintelligible cries, we producedour map and our compass, and, locating ourselves by the setting sun, weresolved to head straight for Daoulas. Instantly our vigour returned, and we started across the fields, vaulting fences and ditches, anduprooting, tearing and breaking everything in our way, without giving athought to the stiles we left open or the damaged crops. 

At the top of a slope, we discovered the village of l'Hôpital lying in ameadow watered by a stream. A bridge spans the latter and on this bridgeis a mill; beyond the meadow is a hill, which we started to climbnimbly, when suddenly we saw, by a ray of light, a beautiful yellow andblack salamander creeping along the edge of a ditch with its slendertail dragging in the dust and undulating with every motion of itsspeckled body. It had come from its retreat under a big stone coveredwith moss, and was hunting insects in the rotten trunks of oldoak-trees. 

A pavement of uneven cobblestones echoed beneath our feet, and a streetstretched out before us. We had arrived in Daoulas. There was lightenough to enable us to distinguish a square sign swinging on an iron rodon one of the houses. We should have recognised the inn even without thesign, as houses, like men, have their professions stamped on theirfaces. So we entered, for we were ravenous, and told the host above allthings not to keep us waiting. 

While we were sitting in front of the door, waiting for our dinner, alittle girl in rags came along with a basket of strawberries on herhead. She entered the inn and came out again after a short while, holding a big loaf of bread in both hands. Uttering shrill cries, shescampered off with the alertness of a kitten. Her dusty hair flutteredin the wind and stood out straight from her wizened face, and her barelegs, which she lifted high in the air when running, disappeared underthe rags that covered her form. 

After our meal, which comprised, besides the unavoidable omelet and thefatal veal, the strawberries the little girl had brought, we went up toour rooms. 

The winding staircase with its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath ourweight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was aroom with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there. The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams ofthe ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on thewindow-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece ofunpolished glass. The beds, four walnut boards carelessly put together, had big, round, worm-eaten knobs, and the wood was split by the dryness. On each bed was a mattress and a matting, covered with a ragged greenspread. A piece of mirror in a varnished frame, an old game-bag on anail, and a worn silk cravat which showed the crease of its folds, indicated that the room belonged to some one who probably slept thereevery night. 

Under one of the red cotton pillows I discovered a hideous object, a capof the same color as the coverlet, but coated with a greasy glazingwhich prevented its texture from being recognisable; a worn, shapeless, clammy, oily thing. I am sure that its owner prizes it highly and thathe finds it warmer than any other cap. A man's life, the perspiration ofan entire existence, is secreted in this layer of mouldy cerate. Howmany nights it must have taken to make it so thick! How many nightmareshave galloped under this cap? How many dreams have been dreamed beneathit? And charming ones, too, perhaps, --why not?

If you are neither an engineer, nor a blacksmith, nor a builder, Brestwill not interest you very much. The port is magnificent, I admit;beautiful, if you say so; gigantic, if you wish. It is imposing, youknow, and gives the impression of a powerful nation. But those piles ofcannons and anchors and cannon-balls, the infinite extension of thosequays, which enclose a calm, flat sea that appears to be chained down, and those big workshops filled with grinding machinery, the never-ceasingclanking of galley chains, the convicts who pass by in regular gangs andwork in silence, --this entire, pitiless, frightful, forced mechanism, this organized defiance, quickly disgusts the soul and tires the eye. Thelatter can rest only on cobblestones, shells, piles of iron, madriers, dry docks containing the naked hulls of vessels, and the grey walls ofthe prison, where a man leans out of the windows and tests the iron barswith a hammer. 

Nature is absent and more completely banished from this place, than fromany other spot on the face of the earth; everywhere can be seen denialand hatred of it, as much in the crowbar which demolishes the rocks, asin the sabre of the _garde-chiourme_ who watches over the convicts. 

Outside of the arsenal and the penitentiary, there is nothing butbarracks, corps-de-garde, fortifications, ditches, uniforms, bayonets, sabres and drums. From morning until night, military music sounds underyour windows, soldiers pass through the streets, come, go, and drill;the bugle sounds incessantly and the troops file past. You understand atonce that the arsenal constitutes the real city and that the other iscompletely swallowed up by it. Everywhere and in every form reappeardiscipline, administration, ruled paper. Factitious symmetry and idioticcleanliness are much admired. In the navy hospital for instance, thefloors are so highly polished that a convalescent trying to walk on hismended leg would probably fall and break the other. But it looks nice. Between each ward is a yard, but the sun never shines in it, and thegrass is carefully kept out. The kitchens are beautiful, but aresituated so far from the main building that in winter the food must becold before it reaches the patients. But who cares about them? Aren'tthe saucepans like polished suns? We saw a man who had broken his skullin falling from a vessel, and who for eighteen hours had received nomedical assistance whatsoever; but his sheets were immaculate, for thelinen department is very well kept. 

In the prison ward I was moved like a child by the sight of a litter ofkittens playing on a convict's bed. He made them little paper balls, andthey would chase them all over the bed-spread, and cling to its edgeswith their claws. Then he would turn them over, stroke them, kiss themand cuddle them to his heart. More than once, when he is put back towork and sits tired and depressed on his bench, he will dream of thequiet hours he spent alone with the little animals, and of the softnessof their fur on his rough hands and the warmth of their little bodiesagainst his breast. I believe, though, that the rules forbid this kindof recreation and that probably he had them through the kindness of thesister in charge. 

But here, as well as elsewhere, rules have their exceptions, for, in thefirst place, the distinction of caste does not disappear (equality beinga lie, even in the penitentiary). Delicately scented locks sometimesshow beneath the numbered caps, just as the sleeve of the red blouseoften reveals a cuff surrounding a well-kept hand. Moreover, specialfavours are shown toward certain professions, certain men. How have theybeen able, in spite of the law and the jealousy of their fellow-prisoners, to attain this eccentric position which makes them almost amateurconvicts, and keep it without anybody trying to wrest it from them? Atthe entrance to the workshop, where boats are built, you will find adentist's table filled with instruments. In a pretty frame on the wall, rows of plates are exhibited, and when you pass, the artist utters alittle speech to advertise his ability. He stays in his place all day, polishing his instruments and stringing teeth; he can talk to visitorswithout feeling the restraint of being watched, be informed of what isgoing on in the medical world, and practise his profession like alicensed dentist. At the present time, I daresay, he must use ether. More than that, he may have pupils and give lectures. But the man whohas the most enviable position of all is the curé Delacollonge. [3] He isthe mediator between the convicts and the ban; the authorities use hisascendency over the prisoners, and they, in turn, address themselves tohim when they want to obtain any favours. 

He lives apart from the rest of them in a neat little room, has a man towait on him, eats big bowls of Plougastel strawberries, takes his coffeeand reads the newspapers. 

If Delacollonge is the head of the penitentiary, Ambroise is its arm. Ambroise is a superb negro almost six feet tall, who would have made afine servant for a sixteenth century man of quality. Heliogobalus musthave kept some such fellow to furnish amusement for himself and hisguests by strangling lions and fighting gladiators single-handed. Hispolished skin is quite black, with steely reflections; his body is wellknit and as vigorous as a tiger's, and his teeth are so white that theyalmost frighten one. 

King of the penitentiary by right of strength, all the convicts fear andadmire him; his athletic reputation compels him to test every newcomer, and up to the present time, all these contests have turned out in hisfavour. He can bend iron rods over his knee, carry three men with onehand, and knock down eight by opening his arms; he eats three times asmuch as an ordinary man, for he has an enormous appetite and a heroicconstitution. 

When we saw him, he was watering the plants in the botanical garden. Heis always hanging around the hot-house behind the plants and thepalm-trees, digging the soil and cleansing the wood-work. 

On Thursday, when the public is admitted, Ambroise receives hismistresses behind the boxed orange-trees; he has several of them, infact, more than he wishes. He knows how to procure them, whether by hischarms, his strength or his money, which he always carries in quantitiesabout his person and spends lavishly whenever he wishes to enjoyhimself. So he is very popular among a certain class of women, and thepeople who have put him where he is, have never perhaps been loved asmuch as Ambroise. 

In the middle of the garden, in a little lake shaded by a willow-treeand bordered by plants, is a swan. With one stroke of its leg it canswim from one side of the pond to the other, and although it crosses ita hundred times a day and catches gold fishes to while away the time, itnever thinks of wandering away. 

Further on, in a line against the wall, are some cages for rare animalsfrom foreign lands destined for the Museum of Paris. Most of the cages, however, were empty. In front of one, in a narrow grated yard, a convictwas teaching a young wild-cat to obey commands like a dog. Hasn't thisman had enough of slavery himself? Why does he torment this poor littlebeast? The lashes with which he is threatened he gives the wild-cat, which, some day, will probably take its revenge by jumping over the ironrailing and killing the swan. 

One moonlit evening, we decided to take a stroll through the streetsknown to be frequented by _filles de joie_. They are very numerous. Thenavy, the artillery, the infantry, each has its own particular streets, without mentioning the penitentiary, which covers a whole district ofthe city. Seven parallel streets ending at its walls, compose what iscalled Keravel, and are filled by the mistresses of jailers andconvicts. They are old frame houses, crowded together, with every doorand window closed tight. No sound issues from them, nobody is seencoming out, and there are no lights in the windows; at the end of eachstreet is a lamp-post which the wind sways from side to side, thusmaking its long yellow rays oscillate on the sidewalk. The rest of thequarter is in absolute darkness. In the moonlight, these silent houseswith their uneven roofs projected fantastic glimmerings. 

When do they open? At unknown hours, at the most silent time of thedarkest nights. Then comes the jailer who has slipped away from hiswatch, or the convict who has managed to escape from the prison, thoughsometimes they arrive together, aiding and abetting each other; then, when daylight dawns, the jailer turns his head away and nobody is thewiser. 

In the sailor's district, on the contrary, everything is open andabove-board. The disreputable houses are full of noise and light; thereis dancing and shouting and fighting. On the ground floors, in the lowrooms, women in filmy attire sit on the benches that line thewhite-washed walls lighted by an oil lamp; others, in the doorway, beckon to you, and their animated faces stand out in relief on thebackground of the lighted resort, from which issues the sound ofclinking glasses and coarse caresses. You can hear the kisses which fallon the opulent shoulders of the women and the laughter of the girl whois sitting on some tanned sailor's lap, her unruly locks slipping fromunder her cap and her bare shoulders issuing from her chemise. Thestreet is thronged, the place is packed, the door is wide open, anybodywho wishes may go in. Men come and peep through the windows or talk inan undertone to some half-clad creature, who bends eagerly over theirfaces. Groups stand around and wait their turn. It is all quite informaland unrestrained. 

Being conscientious travellers, and desiring to see and study everythingat close range, we entered. 

In a room papered in red, three or four girls were sitting at a roundtable, and a man with a cap on his head and a pipe in his mouth wasreclining on the sofa; he bowed politely when we entered. The women woreParisian dresses and were modest in their demeanour. The mahoganyfurniture was covered with red plush, the floor was polished andengravings of battles decorated the walls. O Virtue! you are beautiful, for very stupid is vice. The woman who was sitting by my side had handswhich were sufficient in themselves to make a man forget her sex, andnot knowing how to spend our time we treated the whole company todrinks. Then I lighted a cigar, stretched out on the divan, and, sad anddepressed, while the voices of the women rose shrilly and the glasseswere being drained, I said to myself:

Where is she? Where can she be? Is she dead to the world, and will mennever see her again?

She was beautiful, in olden times, when she walked up the steps leadingto the temple, when on her shell-like feet fell the golden fringe of hertunic, or when she lounged among Persian cushions, twirling her collarof cameos and chatting with the wise men and the philosophers. 

She was beautiful when she stood naked on the threshold of her _cella_in the street of Suburra, under the rosin torchlight that blazed in thenight, slowly chanting her Campanian lay, while from the Tiber came therefrains of the orgies. 

She was beautiful, too, in her old house of the _Cité_ behind the Gothicwindows, among the noisy students and dissipated monks, when, withoutfear of the sergeants, they struck the oaken tables with their pewtermugs, and the worm-eaten beds creaked beneath the weight of theirbodies. 

She was beautiful when she leaned over the green cloth and coveted thegold of the provincials; then she wore high heels and had a small waistand a large wig which shed its perfumed powder on her shoulders, a roseover her ear and a patch on her cheek. 

She was beautiful also among the goat-skins of the Cossacks and theEnglish uniforms, pushing her way through the throngs of men and lettingher bare shoulders dazzle them on the steps of the gambling houses, under the jewellers' windows, beneath the lights of the cafés, betweenstarvation and wealth. 

What are you regretting? I am regretting the _fille de joie_. 

On the boulevard, one evening, I caught a glimpse of her as she passedunder the gaslight, with watchful and eager eyes, dragging her feet overthe sidewalk. I saw her pale face on the street-corner, while the rainwet the flowers in her hair, and heard her soft voice calling to themen, while her flesh shivered in her low-necked bodice. 

It was her last day; after that she disappeared. 

Fear not that she will ever return, for she is dead, quite dead! Herdress is made high, she has morals, objects to coarse language, and putsthe sous she earns in a savings bank. 

Cleared of her presence, the street has lost the only poetry it stillretained; they have filtered the gutter and sorted the garbage. 

In a little while, the mountebanks will also have disappeared, in orderto make room for magnetic _séances_ and reform banquets, and therope-dancer with her spangled skirt and long balancing-pole will be asremote from us as the bayadère of the Ganges. 

Of all that beautiful, glittering world as flighty as fancy itself, somelancholy and sonorous, so bitter and yet so gay, full of inward pathosand glaring sarcasms, where misery was warm and grace was sad, the lastvestige of a lost age, a distant race, which, we are told, came from theother end of the earth and brought us in the tinkling of its bells theecho and vague memory of idolised joys; some covered wagon moving slowlyalong the road, with rolled tents on its roof and muddy dogs beneath it, a man in a yellow jacket, selling _muscade_ in tin cups, the poormarionnettes in the Champs-Elysées, and the mandolin players who visitthe cafés in the outskirts of the city, are all that is left. 

Since then, it is true, we have had a number of farces of a higher classof humour. But is the new as good as the old? Do you prefer Tom Thumb orthe Museum of Versailles?

On a wooden stand that formed a balcony around a square tent of greycanvas, a man in a blouse was beating a drum; behind him was a bigpainted sign representing a sheep and a cow, and some ladies, gentlemen, and soldiers. The animals were the two young phenomena from Guérande, with one arm and four shoulders. Their exhibitor, or editor, wasshouting himself hoarse and announcing that besides these two beautifulthings, battles between wild beasts would take place at once. Under thewooden stand stood a donkey and three bears, and the barking of thedogs, which proceeded from the interior of the tent, mingled with thebeating of the drum, the shouts of the owner of the two phenomena andthe cries of another fellow who was not as jovial and fat as the former, but tall and lanky, with a funereal expression and ragged clothes. Thiswas the partner; they had met on the road and had combined their shows. The lean one contributed his bears, his dogs and his donkey, while thefat man brought his two phenomena and a grey felt hat which was used intheir performance. 

The theatre was roofless and its walls were of grey canvas; theyfluttered in the wind and would have blown down had it not been for thepoles which held them. Along the sides of the ring was a railing, behindwhich was the audience, and in a reserved corner we perceived the twophenomena nibbling at a bundle of hay half concealed by a gorgeousblanket. In the middle of the ring a high post was sunk in the ground, and here and there, attached to smaller posts, were dogs, barking andtugging at their chains. The men continued to shout and beat the drum, the bears growled, and the crowd began to file in. 

First they brought out a poor, half-paralyzed bear, which seemedconsiderably bored. It wore a muzzle and had a big collar with an ironchain around its neck, a rope in its nose, to make it obey commandspromptly, and a sort of leather hood over its ears. They tied bruin tothe centre post, and the barks grew louder and fiercer. The dogs stoodup, a bristling, scratching crew, their hind-quarters elevated, theirsnouts near the ground, their legs spread, while their masters stood inopposite corners of the ring and yelled at them in order to increasetheir ferocity. They let three bull-dogs go and the brutes rushed at thebear, which began to dodge around the post. The dogs followed, crowdingand barking; sometimes the bear would upset them and trample them withits huge paws, but they would immediately scramble to their feet andmake a dash for its head, clinging to its neck so that it was unable toshake off their wriggling bodies. With watchful eye, the two masterswaited the moment when it looked as if the bear would be strangled; thenthey rushed at the dogs, tore them away, pulled their necks and bittheir tails to make them unlock their jaws. The brutes whined with pain, but they would not let go. The bear struggled to free itself from thedogs, the dogs bit the bear, and the men bit the dogs. One young bull-dogespecially, was remarkable for its ferocity; it clung to the bear's backand would not let go, though they chewed and bent its tail, and laceratedits ears. The men were compelled to get a mattock to loosen its jaws. When they had all been disentangled, everyone took a rest; the bear laydown on the ground, the gasping dogs hung their tongues out, and theperspiring men pulled the hairs from between their teeth, while the dustthat had arisen during the fight scattered in the atmosphere and settledon the heads of the spectators. 

Two more bears were led into the ring, and one acted the gardener of thefable, went on a hunting trip, waltzed, took off its hat, and playeddead. After this performance came the donkey. But it defended itselfwell; its kicks sent the dogs flying through the air like balloons; withits tail between its legs and its ears back, it ran around the ringtrying to get its foes under its forelegs while they endeavoured to runaround it and fasten their teeth in its throat. When the men finallyrescued it, it was completely winded and shaking with fright; it wascovered with drops of blood which trickled down its legs (on whichrepeated wounds had left scars), and, mingling with sweat, moistened itsworn hoofs. 

But the best of the performance was the general fight between the dogs;all took part in it, the big and the little ones, the bull-dogs, thesheep-dogs, the white ones, the black ones, the spotted ones, and therusset variety. Fully fifteen minutes were spent in bringing them to theproper pitch of excitement. The owners held them between their legs andpointing their heads in the direction of their adversaries, would knockthem together violently. The thin man, especially, worked with greatgusto. With much effort he succeeded in producing a ferocious, hoarsechest-note that maddened the whole irritated pack. As serious as anorchestra leader, he would absorb the discordant harmony, and direct andstrengthen its emission; but when the brutes were let loose and thehowling band tore one another to pieces, he would be in a frenzy ofenthusiasm and delight. He would applaud and bark and stamp his feet andimitate all the motions of the dogs; he would have enjoyed biting andbeing bitten, would gladly have been a dog himself with a snout, so thathe could wallow in the dust and blood, and sink his teeth in the hairyskins and warm flesh, and enjoy the fray to his heart's content. 

There was a critical moment when all the dogs, one on top of another, formed a wriggling mass of legs, backs, tails and ears, which oscillatedto and fro in the ring without separating, and in another instant hadtorn down the railing and threatened to harm the two young phenomena. The owner's face paled and he hastily sprang forward, while his partnerrushed to his side. Then tails were bitten, and kicks and blows weredistributed right and left! They grabbed the dogs everywhere, pulledthem away and flung them over their shoulders like bundles of hay. Itwas all over in a second, but I had seen the moment when the two youngphenomena were near being reduced to chopped meat, and I trembled forthe safety of the arm which grows on their back. 

Flustered, no doubt, by their narrow escape, they did not care to beshown off. The cow backed and the sheep bucked; but finally the greenblanket with yellow fringe was removed and their appendage was exhibitedto the public, and then the performance ended. . . . 

CHAPTER IX. 

BREST. 

At the light-house of Brest. Here the Old World ends. This is its mostadvanced point; its farthest limit. Behind you spread Europe and Asia;before you lies the entire ocean. As great as space appears to our eye, does it not always seem limited as soon as we know that it has aboundary? Can you not see from our shores, across the Channel, thestreets of Brighton and the fortresses of Provence; do you not alwaysthink of the Mediterranean as an immense blue lake ensconced in rocks, with promontories covered with falling monuments, yellow sands, swayingpalm-trees and curved bays? But here nothing stops your eye. Thought canfly as rapidly as the winds, spread out, divagate, and lose itself, without finding anything but water, or perhaps vague America, namelessislands, or some country with red fruits, humming-birds and savages; orthe silent twilight of the pole, with its spouting whales; or the greatcities lighted by coloured glass, Japan with its porcelain roofs, andChina with its sculptured staircases and its pagodas decorated withgolden bells. 

Thus does the mind people and animate this infinity, of which it tiresso soon, in order that it may appear less vast. One cannot think of thedesert without its caravans, of the ocean without its ships, of thebowels of the earth without evoking the treasures that they are supposedto conceal. 

We returned to Conquet by way of the cliff. The breakers were dashingagainst its foot. Driven by a sea-breeze, they would come rushing in, strike the rocks and cover them with rippling sheets of water. Half anhour later, in a _char-à-banc_ drawn by two sturdy little horses, wereached Brest, which we left with pleasure two days afterwards. When youleave the coast and approach the Channel, the country undergoes a markedchange; it becomes less wild, less Celtic; the dolmens become scarcer, the flats diminish as the wheat fields grow more numerous, and, littleby little, one reaches the fertile land of Léon, which is, as M. Pitre-Chevalier has gracefully put it, "the Attica of Brittany. "

Landerneau is a place where there is an elm-tree promenade, and where wesaw a frightened dog running through the streets with a pan attached toits tail. 

In order to go to the Château de la Joyeuse-Garde, one must first followthe banks of the Eilorn and then walk through a forest, in a hollowwhere few persons go. Sometimes, when the underwood thins out andmeadows appear between the branches, one catches sight of a boat sailingup the river. 

Our guide preceded us at quite a distance. Alone together we trod thegood old earth, flecked with bunches of purple heather and fallenleaves. The air was perfumed with the breath of violets andstrawberries; slender ferns spread over the trunks of the trees. It waswarm; even the moss was hot. A cuckoo, hidden in the foliage, now andthen gave out its long cry, and gnats buzzed in the glades. We walked onwith a feeling of inward peace, and let our conversation touch on manysubjects; we spoke of sounds and colours, of the masters and theirworks, and of the joys of the mind; we thought of different writings, offamiliar pictures and poses; we recited aloud some wonderful verses, thebeauty of which thrilled us so that we repeated the rhythm again andagain, accentuating the words and cadencing them so that they werealmost sung. Foreign landscapes and splendid figures rose before ourmind's eye, and we dwelt with rapture on soft Asiatic nights with themoon shining on the cupolas; or our admiration was aroused by somesonorous name; or we delighted in the artlessness of some sentencestanding out in relief in an ancient book. 

Stretched out in the courtyard of Joyeuse-Garde, near the filled-upsubterranean vaults, beneath the semi-circle of its unique ivy-coveredarcade, we talked of Shakespeare and wondered whether the stars wereinhabited. 

Then we started off again, having given but a hasty glance at thecrumbling home of good old Lancelot, the one a fairy stole from hismother and kept in a shining palace at the bottom of a lake. The dwarfshave disappeared, the drawbridge has flown away, and lizards now crawlwhere formerly the entrancing Geneviève dreamed of her lover gone tofight the giants in Trébizonde. 

We went back through the same paths to the forest; the shadows werelengthening, the flowers and shrubs were hardly visible, and the bluepeaks of the low mountains opposite seemed to grow taller against thefading sky. The river, which is bordered by artificial quays for half amile outside the city, now becomes free to spread its waters at willover the meadow; its wide curve stretched far away into the distance, and the pools of water coloured by the setting sun looked like immensegolden platters forgotten on the grass. 

Till it reaches Roche-Maurice, the Eilorn follows the road, which windsaround the foot of the rocky hills, the uneven eminences of which extendinto the valley. We were riding in a gig driven by a boy who sat on oneof the shafts. His hat had no strings and consequently blew offoccasionally, and during his efforts to catch it, we had plenty of timeto admire the landscape. 

The Château de la Roche-Maurice is a real burgrave's castle, a vulture'snest on the top of a mountain. It is reached by an almost perpendicularslope along which great blocks of stone are strewn in place Of steps. Atthe top is a wall built of huge stones laid one above another, and inthe wall are large windows, through which the whole surrounding countrycan be viewed; the woods, the fields, the river, the long, white road, the mountains with their uneven peaks, and the great meadow, whichseparates them through the middle. 

A crumbling flight of steps leads to a dilapidated tower. Here and therestones crop out among the grass, and the rock shows amid the stones. Sometimes it seems as if this rock assumed artificial shapes, and as ifthe ruins, on the contrary, by crumbling more and more, had taken on anatural appearance and gone back to original matter. 

A whole side of the wall is covered with ivy; it begins at the bottomand spreads out in an inverted pyramid, the color of which grows darkertowards the top. Through an aperture, the edges of which are concealedby the foliage, one can see a section of the blue sky. 

It was in these parts that the famous dragon lived, which was killed inolden times by knight Derrien, who was returning from the Holy Land withhis friend, Neventer. Derrien attacked it as soon as he had rescued theunfortunate Eilorn who, after giving over his slaves, his vassals andhis servants (he had no one left but his wife and son), had thrownhimself headlong from the top of the tower into the river; but themonster, mortally wounded, and bound by the sash of its conqueror, soondrowned itself in the sea, at Poulbeunzual, [4] like the crocodile ofBatz island, which obeyed the behest of Saint Pol de Léon and drowneditself with the stole of the Breton saint wound around it. The gargoyleof Rouen met a similar fate with the stole of Saint Romain. 

How beautiful those terrific old dragons were, with their gaping, fire-spitting jaws, their scales, their serpent-tails, their bat-wings, their lion-claws, their equine bodies and fantastic heads! And the knightwho overpowered them was a wonderfully fine specimen of manhood! First, his horse grew frightened and reared, and his lance broke on the scalesof the monster, whose fiery breath blinded him. Finally he alighted, andafter a day's battle, succeeded in sinking his sword up to the hilt inthe beasts belly. Black blood flowed in streams from the wound, theaudience escorted the knight home in triumph, and he became king andmarried a fair maiden. 

But where did the dragons come from? Are they a confused recollection ofthe monsters that existed before the flood? Were they conceived from thecontemplation of the carcasses of the ichthyosaurus and pteropod, anddid the terror of men hear the sound of their feet in the tall grass andthe wind howl when their voices filled the caves? Are we not, moreover, in the land of fairies, in the home of the Knights of the Round Tableand of Merlin, in the mythological birthplace of vanished epopees?These, no doubt, revealed something of the old worlds which have becomemythical, and told something of the cities that were swallowed up, of Isand Herbadilla, splendid and barbaric places, filled with the loves oftheir bewitching queens, but now doubly wiped out, first, by the oceanwhich has obliterated them and then by religion, which has cursed theirmemory. 

There is much to be said on this subject. And, indeed, what is there onwhich much cannot be said? It might perhaps be Landivisian, for even themost prolix man is obliged to be concise in his remarks, when there is alack of matter. I have noticed that good places are usually the ugliestones. They are like virtuous women; one respects them, but one passes onin search of others. Here, surely, is the most productive spot of allBrittany; the peasants are not as poor as elsewhere, the fields areproperly cultivated, the colza is superb, the roads are in goodcondition, and it is frightfully dreary. 

Cabbages, turnips, beets and an enormous quantity of potatoes, allenclosed by ditches, cover the entire country from Saint Pol de Léon toRoscoff. They are forwarded to Brest, Rennes, and even to Havre; it isthe industry of the place, and a large business is done with them. 

Roscoff has a slimy beach and a narrow bay, and the surrounding sea issprinkled with tiny black islands that rise like the backs of so manyturtles. 

The environs of Saint Pol are dreary and cheerless. The bleak tint ofthe flats mingles without transition with the paleness of the sky, andthe short perspective has no large lines in its proportions, nor changeof colour on the edges. Here and there, while strolling through thefields, you may come across some silent farm behind a grey stone wall, an abandoned manor deserted by its owners. In the yard the pigs aresleeping on the manure heap and the chickens are pecking at the grassthat grows among the loose stones; the sculptured shield above the doorhas worn away under the action of rain and atmosphere. The rooms areempty and are used for storage purposes; the plaster on the ceiling ispeeling off, and so are the remaining decorations, which, besides, havebeen tarnished by the cobwebs of the spiders one sees crawling aroundthe joists. Wild mignonette has grown on the door of Kersa-lion; nearthe turret is a pointed window flanked by a lion and a Hercules, whichstand out in bold relief on the wall like two gargoyles. At Kerland, Istumbled against a wolf-trap while I was ascending the large windingstaircase. Ploughshares, rusted shovels, and jars filled with driedgrain were scattered around the rooms or on the wide stone window-seats. 

Kerouséré has retained its three turrets with machicolations; in thecourtyard can still be seen the deep furrows of the trenches that havebeen filled up little by little, and are now on level with the ground;they are like the track of a bark, which spreads and spreads over thewater till it finally disappears. From the platform of one of the towers(the others have pointed roofs), one can see the ocean between two low, wooded hills. The windows on the first floor are half stopped up, so asto keep the rain out; they look out into a garden enclosed by a highwall. The grass is covered with thistles and wheat grows in theflower-beds surrounded by rose-bushes. 

A narrow path wends its way between a field where the ripe wheat swaysin the breeze and a line of elm-trees growing on the edge of a ditch. Poppies gleamed here and there amongst the wheat; the ditch was edgedwith flowers, brambles, nettles, sweet-brier, long prickly stems, broadshining leaves, blackberries and purple digitalis, all of which mingledtheir colours and various foliage and uneven branches, and crossed theirshadows on the grey dust like the meshes of a net. 

When you have crossed a meadow where an old mill reluctantly turns itsclogged wheel, you follow the wall by stepping on large stones placed inthe water for a bridge; you soon come to the road that leads to Saint-Pol, at the end of which rises the slashed steeple of Kreisker; tall andslender, it dominates a tower decorated with a balustrade and produces afine effect at a distance; but the nearer one gets to it, the smallerand uglier it becomes, till finally one finds that it is nothing morethan an ordinary church with a portal devoid of statues. The cathedralalso is built in a rather clumsy Gothic style, and is overloaded withornaments and embroideries: but there is one notable thing, at least, inSaint-Pol, and that is the _table d'hôte_ of the inn. 

The girl who waits on it has gold earrings dangling against her whiteneck and a cap with turned up wings, like Molière's soubrettes, and hersparkling blue eyes would incline anyone to ask her for something morethan mere plates. But the guests! What guests! All _habitués_! At theupper end sat a creature in a velvet jacket and a cashmere waistcoat. Hetied his napkin around the bottles that had been uncorked, in order tobe able to distinguish them. He ladled the soup. On his left, sat a manin a light grey frock-coat, with the cuffs and collar trimmed with asort of curly material representing fur; he ate with his hat on and wasthe professor of music at the local college. But he has grown tired ofhis profession and is anxious to find some place that would bring himfrom eight to twelve hundred francs at the most. He does not care somuch about the salary, what he desires is the consideration thatattaches to such a place. As he was always late, he requested that thecourses be brought up again from the kitchen, and if he did not likethem, he would send them back untouched; he sneezed and expectorated androcked his chair and hummed and leaned his elbows on the table andpicked his teeth. 

Everybody respects him, the waitress admires everything he says, and is, I am sure, in love with him. The high opinion he has of himself shows inhis smile, his speech, his gestures, his silence, and in his way ofwearing his hair; it emanates from his entire obnoxious personality. 

Opposite to us sat a grey-haired, plump man with red hands and thick, moist lips, who looked at us so persistently and annoyingly, while hemasticated his food, that we felt like throwing the carafes at him. Theother guests were insignificant and only contributed to the picture. 

One evening the conversation fell upon a woman of the environs who hadleft her husband and gone to America with her lover, and who, theprevious week, and passed through Saint-Pol on her way home, and hadstopped at the inn. Everybody wondered at her audacity, and her name wasaccompanied by all sorts of unflattering epithets. Her whole life waspassed in review by these people, and they all laughed contemptuouslyand insulted her and grew quite hot over the argument. They would haveliked to have her there to tell her what they thought of her and seewhat she would say. Tirades against luxury, virtuous horror, moralmaxims, hatred of wealth, words with a double meaning, shrugs, everything, in fact, was used to crush this woman, who, judging by theferocity these ruffians displayed in their attacks, must have beenpretty, refined, and charming. Our hearts beat indignantly in ourbreasts, and if we had taken another meal in Saint-Pol, I am sure thatsomething would have happened. 

CHAPTER X. 

SAINT-MALO. 

Saint-Malo, which is built right on the ocean and is enclosed byramparts, looks like a crown of stones, the gems of which are themachicolations. The breakers dash against its walls, and when the tideis low they gently unfurl on the sand. Little rocks covered withsea-weed dot the beach and look like black spots on its light surface. The larger ones, which are upright and smooth, support thefortifications, thus making them appear higher than they really are. 

Above this straight line of walls, broken here and there by a tower orthe pointed ogive of a door, rise the roofs of the houses with theiropen garret-windows, their gyrating weather-cocks, and their redchimneys from which issue spirals of bluish smoke that vanishes in theair. 

Around Saint-Malo are a number of little barren islands that have not atree nor a blade of grass, but only some old crumbling walls, greatpieces of which are hurled into the sea by each succeeding storm. 

On the other side of the bay, opposite the city and connected with dryland by a long pier, which separates the port from the ocean, isSaint-Servan, a large, empty, almost deserted locality, which liespeacefully in a marshy meadow. At the entrance to Saint-Servan rise thefour towers of the Château de Solidor, which are connected by curtainsand are perfectly black from top to bottom. These alone are sufficientcompensation for having made that extended circuit on the beach, underthe broiling July sun, among the dock-yards and tar-pots and fires. 

A walk around the city, over the ramparts, is one of the finest that canbe taken. Nobody goes there. You can sit down in the embrasures of thecannons and dangle your feet over the abyss. In front of you lies themouth of the Rance, which flows between two green hills, the coast, theislands, the rocks, and the ocean. The sentinel marches up and downbehind you, and his even footsteps echo on the sonorous stones. 

One evening we remained out for a long time. The night was beautiful, atrue summer night, without a moon, but brilliant with stars and perfumedby the sea-breeze. The city was sleeping. One by one the lights went outin the windows, and the lighthouses shone red in the darkness, which wasquite blue above us and glittering with myriads of twinkling stars. Wecould not see the ocean, but we could hear and smell it, and thebreakers that lashed the walls flung drops of foam over us through thebig apertures of the machicolations. 

In one place, between the wall and the city houses, a quantity ofcannon-balls are piled up in a ditch. From that point you can see thesewords written on the second floor of one of the dwellings:"Chateaubriand was born here. "

Further on, the wall ends at the foot of a tower called Quiquengrogne;like its sister, La Générale, it is high, broad, and imposing, and isswelled in the middle like a hyperbola. 

Though they are as good as new and absolutely intact, these towers wouldno doubt be improved if they lost some of their battlements in the seaand if ivy spread its kindly leaves over their tops. Indeed, do notmonuments grow greater through recollection, like men and like passions?And are they not completed by death?

We entered the castle. The empty courtyard planted with a few sicklylime-trees was as silent as the courtyard of a monastery. The janitresswent and obtained the keys from the commander. When she returned, shewas accompanied by a pretty little girl who wished to see the strangers. Her arms were bare and she carried a large bunch of flowers. Her blackcurls escaped from beneath her dainty little cap, and the lace on herpantalettes rubbed against her kid shoes tied around the ankles withblack laces. She ran up stairs in front of us beckoning and calling. 

The staircase is long, for the tower is high. The bright daylight passesthrough the loop-holes like an arrow. When you put your head through oneof these openings, you can see the ocean, which seems to grow wider andwider, and the crude colour of the sky, which seems to grow larger andlarger, till you are afraid you will lose yourself in it. Vessels looklike launches and their masts like walking-sticks. Eagles must think welook like ants. I wonder whether they really see us. Do they know thatwe have cities and steeples and triumphal arches?

When we arrived on the platform, and although the battlement reached toour chest, we could not help experiencing the sensation one always feelsat a great height from the earth. It is a sort of voluptuous uneasinessmingled with fear and delight, pride and terror, a battle between one'smind and one's nerves. You feel strangely happy; you would like to jump, fly, spread out in the air and be supported by the wind; but your kneestremble and you dare not go too near the edge. 

Still, one night, in olden times, men climbed this tower with ropes. Butthen, it is not astonishing for those times, for that wonderfulsixteenth century, the epoch of fierce convictions and frantic loves!How the human instrument vibrated then in all its chords! Howliberal-minded, productive, and active men were! Does not this phrase ofFénelon apply wonderfully well to that period: "A sight well calculatedto delight the eye?" For, without making any reference to the foregroundof the picture, --beliefs crumbling at their foundation like totteringmountains, newly discovered worlds, lost worlds brought to light again, Michael-Angelo beneath his dome, laughing Rabelais, observantShakespeare, pensive Montaigne, --where can be found a greaterdevelopment in passions, a greater violence in courage, a greaterdetermination in willpower, in fine, a more complete expansion ofliberty struggling against all native fatalities? And with what a boldrelief the episode stands out in history, and still, how wonderfullywell it fits in, thereby giving a glimpse of the dazzling brightness andbroad horizons of the period. Faces, living faces, pass before youreyes. You meet them only once; but you think of them long afterwards, and endeavour to contemplate them in order that they may be impressedmore deeply upon your mind. Was not the type of the old soldiers whoserace disappeared around 1598, at the taking of Vervins, fine andterrible? It was a type represented by men like Lamouche, Heurtand deSaint-Offange, and La Tremblaye, who came back holding the heads of hisenemies in his hand; also La Fontenelle, of whom so much has been said. They were men of iron, whose hearts were no softer than their swords, and who, attracting hundreds of energies which they directed with theirown, entered towns at night, galloping madly at the heads of theircompanies, equipped corsairs, burned villages, and were dealt with likekings! Who has thought of depicting those violent governors of theprovinces, who slaughtered the people recklessly, committed rapes andswept in gold, like D'Epernon, an atrocious tyrant in Provence and aperfumed courtier at the Louvre; like Montluc, who strangled Huguenotswith his own hands, or Baligui, the king of Cambrai, who read Machiavelin order to copy the Valentinois, and whose wife went to war onhorseback, wearing a helmet and a cuirass. 

One of the forgotten men of the period, or at least one of those whommost historians mention only slightly, is the Duke of Mercoeur, theintrepid enemy of Henri IV, who defied him longer than Mayenne, theLigue, and Philip II. Finally he was disarmed, that is, won over andappeased (by terms that were such that twenty-three articles of thetreaty were not disclosed); then, not knowing what to do, he enlisted inthe Hungarian army and fought the Turks. One day, with five thousandmen, he attacked a whole army, and, beaten again, returned to France anddied of the fever in Nuremberg, at the age of forty-four. 

Saint-Malo put me in mind of him. He always tried to get it, but henever could succeed in making it his subject or his ally. They wished tofight on their own account, and to do business through their ownresources, and although they were really _ligueurs_, they spurned theduke as well as the Béarnais. 

When De Fontaines, the governor of the city, informed them of the deathof Henri III, they refused to recognize the King of Navarre. They armedthemselves and erected barricades; De Fontaines intrenched himself inthe castle and everybody kept upon the defensive. Little by little, thepeople encroached upon him; first, they requested him to declare that hewas willing to maintain their franchises. De Fontaines complied in thehope of gaining time. The following year (1589), they chose fourgenerals who were independent of the governor. A year later, theyobtained permission to stretch chains. De Fontaines acceded toeverything. The king was at Laval and he was waiting for him. The timewas close at hand when he would be able to take revenge for all thehumiliations he had suffered, and all the concessions he had been forcedto make. But he precipitated matters and was discovered. When the peopleof Saint-Malo reminded him of his promises, he replied that if the kingpresented himself, he (De Fontaines) would let him enter the city. Whenthey learned this, they decided to act. 

The castle had four towers. It was the highest one, La Générale, the oneon which De Fontaines relied the most, which they climbed. These boldattempts were not infrequent, as proved by the ascension of the cliffsof Fécamp by Bois-Rosé, and the attack of the Château de Blein, byGuebriant. 

The rebels connived and assembled during several evenings at the placeof a certain man named Frotet, sieur de La Lanbelle; they entered intoan understanding with a Scotch gunner, and one dark night they armedthemselves, went out to the rampart, let themselves down with ropes andapproached the foot of La Générale. 

There they waited. Soon a rustling sound was heard on the wall, and aball of thread was lowered, to which they fastened their rope ladder. The ladder was then hoisted to the top of the tower and attached to theend of a culverin which was levelled in an embrasure of the battlement. 

Michel Frotet was the first to ascend, and after him came CharlesAnselin, La Blissais and the others. The night was dark and the windwhistled; they had to climb slowly, to hold their daggers between theirteeth and feel for the rungs of the ladder with their hands and feet. Suddenly (they were midway between the ground and the top), they feltthemselves going down; the rope had slipped. But they did not utter asound; they remained motionless. Their weight had caused the culverin totip forward; it stopped on the edge of the embrasure and they slowlyresumed their ascension and arrived one after another on the platform ofthe tower. 

The sleepy sentinels did not have time to give the alarm. The garrisonwas either asleep or playing dice on the drums. A panic seized thesoldiers and they fled to the dungeon. The conspirators pursued them andattacked them in the hallways, on the staircase, and in the rooms, crushing them between the doors and slaughtering them mercilessly. Meanwhile the townspeople arrived to lend assistance; some put upladders, and entered the tower without encountering any resistance andplundered it. La Pérandière, lieutenant of the castle, perceiving LaBlissais, said to him: "This, sir, is a most miserable night. " But LaBlissais impressed upon him that this was not the time for conversation. The Count of Fontaines had not made his appearance. They went in searchof him, and found him lying dead across the threshold of his chamber, pierced by a shot from an arquebuse that one of the townspeople hadfired at him, as he was about to go out, escorted by a servant bearing alight. "Instead of rushing to face the danger, " says the author of thisaccount, [5] "he had dressed as leisurely as if he were going to awedding, without leaving one shoulder-knot untied. "

This outbreak in Saint-Malo, which so greatly harmed the king, did notin the least benefit the Duke de Mercoeur. He had hoped that the peoplewould accept a governor from his hands, his son, for example, a merechild, for that would have meant himself, but they obstinately refusedto listen to it. He sent troops to protect them, but they refused to letthem enter, and the soldiers were compelled to take lodgings outside ofthe city. 

Still, in spite of all this, they had not become more royalist, for sometime later, having arrested the Marquis of La Noussaie and the Viscountof Denoual, it cost the former twelve thousand crowns to get out ofprison and the latter two thousand. 

Then, fearing that Pont-Brient would interrupt commercial relations withDinan and the other cities in the Ligue, they attacked and subjected it. 

Presuming that their bishop, who was the temporal master of the city, might be likely to deprive them of the freedom they had just acquired, they put him in prison and kept him there for a year. 

The conditions at which they finally accepted Henri IV are well-known:they were to take care of themselves, not be obliged to receive anygarrison, be exempt from taxes for six years, etc. 

Situated between Brittany and Normandy, this little people seems to havethe tenacity and granite-like resistance of the former and the impulsesand dash of the latter. Whether they are sailors, writers, or travellerson foreign seas, their predominant trait is audacity; they have violentnatures which are almost poetical in their brutality, and often narrowin their obstinacy. There is this resemblance between these two sons ofSaint-Malo, Lamennais and Broussais: they were always equally extreme intheir systems and employed their latter years in fighting what they hadupheld in the earlier part of their life. 

In the city itself are little tortuous streets edged with high housesand dirty fishmongers' shops. There are no carriages or luxuries of anydescription; everything is as black and reeking as the hold of a ship. Asort of musty smell, reminiscent of Newfoundland, salt meat, and longsea voyages pervades the air. 

"The watch and the round are made every night with big English dogs, which are let loose outside of the city by the man who is in charge ofthem, and it is better not to be in their vicinity at that time. Butwhen morning comes, they are led back to a place in the city where theyshed all their ferocity which, at night, is so great. "[6]

Barring the disappearance of this four-legged police which at one timedevoured M. Du Mollet, the existence of which is confirmed by acontemporaneous text, the exterior of things has changed but little, nodoubt, and even the civilized people living in Saint-Malo admit that itis very much behind the times. 

The only picture we noticed in the church is a large canvas thatrepresents the battle of Lepante and is dedicated to Nôtre-Dame desVictoires, who can be seen floating above the clouds. In the foreground, all Christianity, together with crowned kings and princesses, iskneeling. The two armies can be seen in the background. The Turks arebeing hurled into the sea and the Christians stretch their arms towardsheaven. 

The church is ugly, has no ornamentation, and looks almost like aProtestant house of worship. I noticed very few votive offerings, a factthat struck me as being rather peculiar in this place of sea perils. There are no flowers nor candles in the chapels, no bleeding hearts norbedecked Virgin, nothing, in fact, of all that which causes M. Micheletto wax indignant. 

Opposite the ramparts, at a stone's throw from the city, rises thelittle island of Grand-Bay. There, can be found the tomb ofChateaubriand; that white spot cut in the rock is the place he hasdesignated for his body. 

We went there one evening when the tide was low and the sun setting inthe west. The water was still trickling over the sand. At the foot ofthe island, the dripping sea-weed spread out like the hair of antiquewomen over a tomb. 

The island is deserted; sparse grass grows in spots, mingled here andthere with tufts of purple flowers and nettles. On the summit is adilapidated casemate, with a courtyard enclosed by crumbling walls. Beneath this ruin, and half-way up the hill, is a space about ten feetsquare, in the middle of which rises a granite slab surmounted by aLatin cross. The tomb comprises three pieces: one for the socle, one forthe slab, and another for the cross. 

Chateaubriand will rest beneath it, with his head turned towards thesea; in this grave, built on a rock, his immortality will be like hislife--deserted and surrounded by tempests. The centuries and thebreakers will murmur a long time around his great memory; the breakerswill dash against his tomb during storms, or on summer mornings, whenthe white sails unfold and the swallow arrives from across the seas;they will bring him the melancholy voluptuousness of far-away horizonsand the caressing touch of the sea-breeze. And while time passes and thewaves of his native strand swing back and forth between his cradle andhis grave, the great heart of René, grown cold, will slowly crumble todust to the eternal rhythm of this never-ceasing music. 

We walked around the tomb and touched it, and looked at it as if itcontained its future host, and sat down beside it on the ground. 

The sky was pink, the sea was calm, and there was a lull in the breeze. Not a ripple broke the motionless surface of ocean on which the settingsun shed its golden light. Blue near the coast and mingled with theevening mist, the sea was scarlet everywhere else and deepened into adark red line on the horizon. The sun had no rays left; they had fallenfrom its face and drowned their brilliancy in the water, on which theyseemed to float. The red disc set slowly, robbing the sky of the pinktinge it had diffused over it, and while both the sun and the delicatecolor were wearing away, the pale blue shades of night crept over theheavens. Soon the sun touched the ocean and sank into it to the middle. For a moment it appeared cut in two by the horizon; the upper halfremained firm, while the under one vacillated and lengthened; then itfinally disappeared; and when the reflection died away from the placewhere the fiery ball had gone down, it seemed as if a sudden gloom hadspread over the sea. 

The shore was dark. The light in one of the windows in a city house, which a moment before was bright, presently went out. The silence grewdeeper, though sounds could be heard. The breakers dashed against therocks and fell back with a roar; long-legged gnats sang in our ears anddisappeared with a buzzing of their transparent wings, and theindistinct voices of the children bathing at the foot of the rampartsreached us, mingled with their laughter and screams. 

Young boys came out of the water, and, stepping gingerly on the pebbles, ran up the beach to dress. When they attempted to put on their shirts, the moist linen clung to their wet shoulders and we could see theirwhite torsos wriggling with impatience, while their heads and armsremained concealed and the sleeves flapped in the wind like flags. 

A man with his wet hair falling straight around his neck, passed infront of us. His dripping body shone. Drops trickled from his dark, curly beard, and he shook his head so as to let the water run out of hislocks. His broad chest was parted by a stubby growth of hair thatextended between his powerful muscles. It heaved with the exertion ofswimming and imparted an even motion to his flat abdomen, which was assmooth as ivory where it joined the hips. His muscular thighs were setabove slender knees and fine legs ending in arched feet, with shortheels and spread toes. He walked slowly over the beach. 

How beautiful is the human form when it appears in its original freedom, as it was created in the first day of the world! But where are we tofind it, masked as it is and condemned never to reappear. That greatword, Nature, which humanity has repeated sometimes with idolatry andsometimes with fear, which philosophers have sounded and poets havesung, how it is being lost and forgotten! If there are still here andthere in the world, far from the pushing crowd, some hearts which aretormented by the constant search of beauty, and forever feeling thehopeless need of expressing what cannot be expressed and doing what canonly be dreamed, it is to Nature, as to the home of the ideal, that theymust turn. But how can they? By what magic will they be able to do so?Man has cut down the forests, has conquered the seas, and the cloudsthat hover over the cities are produced by the smoke that rises from thechimneys. But, say others, do not his mission and his glory consist ingoing forward and attacking the work of God, and encroaching upon it?Man denies His work, he ruins it, crushes it, even in his own body, ofwhich he is ashamed and which he conceals like a crime. 

Man having thus become the rarest and most difficult thing in the worldto know (I am not speaking of his heart, O moralists!), it follows thatthe artist ignores his shape as well as the qualities that render itbeautiful. Where is the poet, nowadays, even amongst the most brilliant, who knows what a woman is like? Where could the poor fellow ever haveseen any? What has he ever been able to learn about them in the salons;could he see through the corset and the crinoline?

Better than all the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches thosewho study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in aword, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of theirexistence, left the mark of their noble attitudes and pure blood on theworks of the masters. In Juvenal, I can hear confusedly the death-rattlesof the gladiators; Tacitus has sentences that resemble the drapery of alaticlave, and some of Horace's verses are like the body of a Greek slave, with supple undulations, and short and long syllables that sound likecrotala. 

But why bother about these things? Let us not go so far back, and let usbe satisfied with what is manufactured. What is wanted nowadays israther the opposite of nudity, simplicity and truth? Fortune and successwill fall to the lot of those who know how to dress and clothe facts!The tailor is the king of the century and the fig-leaf is its symbol;laws, art, politics, all things, appear in tights! Lying freedom, platedfurniture, water-colour pictures, why! the public loves this sort ofthing! So let us give it all it wants and gorge the fool!

CHAPTER XI. 

MONT SAINT-MICHEL. 

The road from Pontorson to the Mont Saint-Michel is wearying on accountof the sand. Our post-chaise (for we also travel by post-chaise), wasdisturbed every now and then by a number of carts filled with the greysoil which is found in these parts and which is transported to someplace and utilised as manure. They became more numerous as we approachedthe sea, and defiled for several miles until we finally saw the desertedstrand whence they came. On this white surface, with its conical heapsof earth resembling huts, the fluctuating line of carts reminded us ofan emigration of barbarians deserting their native heath. 

The empty horizon stretches out, spreads, and finally mingles itsgreyish flats with the yellow sand of the beach. The ground becomesfirmer and a salt breeze fans your cheeks; it looks like a vast desertfrom which the waters have receded. Long, flat strips of sand, superposed indefinitely in indistinct planes, ripple like shadows, andthe wind playfully designs huge arabesques on their surfaces. The sealies far away, so far, in fact, that its roar cannot be heard, though wecould distinguish a sort of vague, aërial, imperceptible murmur, likethe voice of the solitude, which perhaps was only the effect produced bythe intense silence. 

Opposite us rose a large round rock with embattled walls and a church onits top; enormous counterparts resting on a steep slope support thesides of the edifice. Rocks and wild shrubs are strewn over the incline. Half-way up the slope are a few houses, which show above the white lineof the wall and are dominated by the brown church; thus some brightcolours are interspersed between the two plain tints. 

The post-chaise drove ahead of us and we followed it, guiding ourselvesby the tracks of the wheels; finally it disappeared in the distance, andwe could distinguish only its hood, which looked like some big crabcrawling over the sand. 

Here and there a swift current of water compelled us to move farther upthe beach. Or we would suddenly come upon pools of slime with raggededges framed in sand. 

Beside us walked two priests who were also going to the Mont Saint-Michel. As they were afraid of soiling their new cassocks, they gathered themup around their legs when they jumped over the little streams. Theirsilver buckles were grey with mud, and their wet shoes gaped and threwwater at every step they took. 

Meantime the Mount was growing larger. With one sweep of the eye we wereable to take in the whole panorama, and could see distinctly the tileson the roofs, the bunches of nettles on the rocks, and, a little higher, the green shutters of a small window that looks out into the governor'sgarden. 

The first door, which is narrow and pointed, opens on a sort of pebbleroad leading to the ocean; on the worn shield over the second door, undulating lines carved in the stone seem to represent water; on bothsides of the doors are enormous cannons composed of iron bars connectedby similar circular bands. One of them has retained a cannon-ball in itsmouth; they were taken from the English in 1423, by Louis d'Estouteville, and have remained here four hundred years. 

Five or six houses built opposite one another compose the street; thenthe line breaks, and they continue down the slopes and stairs leading tothe castle, in a sort of haphazard fashion. 

In order to reach the castle, you first go up to the curtain, the wallof which shuts out the view of the ocean from the houses below. Grassgrows between the cracked stones and the battlements. The rampartcontinues around the whole island and is elevated by successiveplatforms. When you have passed the watch-house, which is situatedbetween the two towers, you see a little straight flight of steps; whenyou climb them, the roofs of the houses, with their dilapidatedchimneys, gradually grow lower and lower. You can see the washing hungout to dry on poles fastened to the garret-windows, or a tiny gardenbaking in the sun between the roof of one house and the ground-floor ofanother, with its parched leeks drooping their leaves over the greysoil; but the other side of the rock, the side that faces the ocean, isbarren and deserted, and so steep that the shrubs that grow there have ahard time to remain where they are and look as if they were about totopple over every minute. 

When you are standing up there, enjoying as much space as the human eyecan possibly encompass and looking at the ocean and the horizon of thecoast, which forms an immense bluish curve, or at the wall of LaMerveille with its thirty-six huge counterparts upreared on aperpendicular cliff, a laugh of admiration parts your lips, and yousuddenly hear the sharp noise of the weaving-looms. The peoplemanufacture linen, and the shrill sound of the shuttles produces a verylively racket. 

Between two slender towers, which represent the uplifted barrels of twocannons, is the entrance to the castle, a long, arched hallway, at theend of which is a flight of stone steps. The middle of the hall isalways dark, being insufficiently lighted by two skylights one of whichis at the bottom of the hall and the other at the top, between theinterval of the drawbridge; it is like a subterranean vault. 

The guard-room is at the head of the stairs as you enter. The voice ofthe sergeants and the clicking of the guns re-echoed along the walls. They were beating a drum. 

Meanwhile a _garde-chiourme_ returned with our passports, which M. Legouverneur had wished to see; then he motioned us to follow him; heopened doors, drew bolts, and led us through a maze of halls, vaults andstaircases. Really, one can lose oneself in this labyrinth, for a singlevisit does not enable you to understand the complicated plan of thesecombined buildings, where a fortress, a church, an abbey, a prison and adungeon, are mingled, and where you can find every style ofarchitecture, from the Romance of the eleventh century to thebewildering Gothic of the sixteenth. We could catch only a glimpse ofthe knights' hall, which has been converted into a loom-room and is forthis reason barred to the public. We saw only four rows of columnssupporting a ceiling ornamented with salient mouldings; they weredecorated with clover leaves. The monastery is built over this hall, atan altitude of two hundred feet above the sea level. It is composed of aquadrangular gallery formed by a triple line of small granite, tufa, orstucco columns. Acanthus, thistles, ivy, and oak-leaves wind aroundtheir caps; between each mitred ogive is a cut-out rose; this gallery isthe place where the prisoners take the air. 

The cap of the _garde-chiourme_ now passes along these walls where, inolden times, passed the shaved heads of industrious friars; and thewooden shoes of the prisoners click on the slabs that used to be sweptby the trailing robes of monks and trodden by their heavy leathersandals. 

The church has a Gothic choir and a Romance nave, and the twoarchitectures seem to vie with each other in majesty and elegance. Inthe choir, the arches of the windows are pointed, and are as lofty asthe aspirations of love; in the nave, the arcades open their semi-circlesroundly, and columns as straight as the trunk of a palm-tree mount alongthe walls. They rest on square pedestals, are crowned with acanthusleaves, and continue in powerful mouldings that curve beneath theceiling and help support it. 

It was noon. The bright daylight poured in through the open door andrippled over the dark sides of the building. 

The nave, which is separated from the choir by a green curtain, isfilled with tables and benches, for it is used also as a dining-hall. When mass is celebrated, the curtain is drawn and the condemned men maybe present at divine service without removing their elbows from thetable. It is a novel idea. 

In order to enlarge the platform by twelve yards on the western side ofthe church, the latter itself has been curtailed; but as it wasnecessary to reconstruct some sort of entrance, one architect closed thenave by a façade in Greek style; then, perhaps, feeling remorseful, ordesiring (a presumption which will be accepted more readily), toembellish his work still further, he afterwards added some columns"which imitate fairly well the architecture of the eleventh century, "says the notice. Let us be silent and bow our heads. Each of the artshas its own particular leprosy, its mortal ignominy that eats its faceaway. Painting has the family group, music the ballad, literature thecriticism, and architecture the architect. 

The prisoners were walking around the platform, one after another, silent, with folded arms, and in the beautiful order we had theopportunity to admire at Fontevrault. They were the patients of thehospital ward taking the air. 

Tottering along with the file was one who lifted his feet higher thanthe rest and clung to the coat of the man ahead of him. He was blind. Poor, miserable wretch! God prevents him from seeing and his fellow-menforbid him to speak!

The following day, when the tide had again receded from the beach, weleft the Mount under a broiling sun which heated the hood of the carriageand made the horses sweat. They only walked; the harness creaked and thewheels sank deep into the sand. At the end of the beach, when grassappeared again, I put my eye to the little window that is in the back ofevery carriage, and bade goodbye to Mont Saint-Michel. 

CHAPTER XII. 

COMBOURG. 

A letter from the Viscount Vésin was to gain us entrance to the castle. So as soon as we arrived, we called on the steward, M. Corvesier. Theyushered us into a large kitchen where a young lady in black, marked bysmallpox and wearing horn spectacles over her prominent eyes, wasstemming currants. The kettle was on the fire and they were crushingsugar with bottles. It was evident that we were intruding. After severalminutes had elapsed, we were informed that M. Corvesier was confined tohis bed with a fever and was very sorry that he could not be of anyservice to us, but sent us his regards. In the meantime, his clerk, whohad just come in from an errand, and who was lunching on a glass ofcider and a piece of buttered bread, offered to show us the castle. Heput his napkin down, sucked his teeth, lighted his pipe, took a bunch ofkeys from the wall and started ahead of us through the village. 

After following a long wall, we entered through an old door into asilent farm-yard. Silica here and there shows through the beaten ground, on which grows a little grass soiled by manure. There was nobody aroundand the stable was empty. In the barns some chickens were roosting onthe poles of the wagons, with their heads under their wings. Around thebuildings, the sound of our footsteps was deadened by the dustaccumulated from the straw in the lofts. 

Four large towers connected by curtains showed battlements beneath theirpointed roofs; the openings in the towers, like those in the main partof the castle, are small, irregular windows, which form uneven blacksquares on the grey stones. A broad stoop, comprising about thirtysteps, reaches to the first floor, which has become the ground-floor ofthe interior apartments, since the trenches have been filled up. 

The yellow wall-flower does not grow here, but instead, one findsnettles and lentisks, greenish moss and lichens. To the left, next tothe turret, is a cluster of chestnut-trees reaching up to the roof andshading it. 

After the key had been turned in the lock and the door pushed open withkicks, we entered a dark hallway filled with boards and ladders andwheelbarrows. 

This passage led into a little yard enclosed by the thick interior wallsof the castle. It was lighted from the top like a prison yard. In thecorners, drops of humidity dripped from the stones. We opened anotherdoor. It led into a large, empty, sonorous hall; the floor was crackedin a hundred places, but there was fresh paint on the wainscoting. 

The green forest opposite sheds a vivid reflection on the white walls, through the large windows of the castle. There is a lake and underneaththe windows were clusters of lilacs, petunia-blossoms and acacias, whichhave grown pell-mell in the former parterre, and cover the hill thatslopes gradually to the road, following the banks of the lake and thencontinuing through the woods. 

The great, deserted hall, where the child who afterwards wrote _René_, used to sit and gaze out of the windows, was silent. The clerk smokedhis pipe and expectorated on the floor. His dog, which had followed him, hunted for mice, and its nails clicked on the pavement. 

We walked up the winding stairs. Moss covers the worn stone steps. Sometimes a ray of light, passing through a crack in the walls, strikesa green blade and makes it gleam in the dark like a star. 

We wandered through the halls, through the towers, and over the narrowcurtain with its gaping machicolations, which attract the eyeirresistibly to the abyss below. 

On the second floor is a small room which looks out into the insidecourtyard and has a massive oak door that closes with a latch. The beamsof the ceiling (you can touch them), are rotten from age; thewhitewashed walls show their lattice-work and are covered with bigspots; the window-panes are obscured by cobwebs and their frames areburied in dust. This used to be Chateaubriand's room. It faces the West, towards the setting sun. 

We continued; when we passed in front of a window or a loop-hole, wewarmed ourselves in the warm air coming from without, and this suddentransition rendered the ruins all the more melancholy and cheerless. Thefloors of the apartments are rotting away, and daylight enters throughthe fireplaces along the blackened slab where rain has left long greenstreaks. The golden flowers on the drawing-room ceiling are falling off, and the shield that surmounts the mantelpiece is broken into bits. Whilewe were looking around, a flight of birds entered, flew around for a fewminutes and passed out through the chimney. 

In the evening, we went to the lake. The meadow has encroached upon itand will soon cover it entirely, and wheat will grow in the place ofpond-lilies. Night was falling. The castle, flanked by its four turretsand framed by masses of green foliage, cast a dark shadow over thevillage. The setting sun made the great mass appear black; the dyingrays touched the surface of the lake and then melted in the mist on thepurplish top of the silent forest. 

We sat down at the foot of an oak and opened _René_. We faced the lakewhere he had often watched the nimble swallow on the bending reeds; wesat in the shadow of the forest where he had often pursued rainbows overthe dripping hills; we harkened to the rustling of the leaves and thewhisperings of the water that had added their murmur to the sad melodyof his youth. As the darkness gathered on the pages of the book, thebitterness of its words went to our hearts, and we experienced asensation of mingled melancholy and sweetness. 

A wagon passed in the road, and the wheels sank in the deep tracks. Asmell of new-mown hay pervaded the air. The frogs were croaking in themarshes. We went back. 

The sky was heavy and a storm raged all night. The front of aneighbouring house was illumined and flared like a bonfire at everyflash of lightning. Gasping, and tired of tossing on my bed, I arose, lighted a candle, opened the window and leaned out. 

The night was dark, and as silent as slumber. The lighted candle threwmy huge shadow on the opposite wall. From time to time a flash oflightning blinded me. 

I thought of the man whose early life was spent here and who filled halfa century with the clamouring of his grief. 

I thought of him first in these quiet streets, playing with the villageboys and looking for nests in the church-steeple and in the woods. Iimagined him in his little room, leaning his elbows on the table, andwatching the rain beating on the window-panes and the clouds passingabove the curtain, while his dreams flew away. I thought of the bitterloneliness of youth, with its intoxications, its nausea, and its burstsof love that sicken the heart. Is it not here that our own grief wasnourished, is this not the very Golgotha where the genius that fed ussuffered its anguish?

Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills whichfuture great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to seethe spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it hadretained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there. 

His room! his room! his childhood's poor little room! It was here thathe was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamouredfor birth: Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the softbreeze of Florida, Velléda running through the woods in the moonlight, Cymodocée protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, andfrail Amélie and pale René!

One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead, never to return. Now he is lost in the whirl of Paris and mingles withhis fellow-men; and then he feels an impulse to travel and he startsoff. 

I can see him leaning over the side of the ship, I can see him lookingfor a new world and weeping over the country he has left. He lands; helistens to the waterfalls and the songs of the Natchez; he watches theflowing rivers and the bright scales of the snakes and the eyes of thesavages. He allows his soul to be fascinated by the languor of theSavannah. They tell each other of their native melancholy and heexhausts its pleasures as he exhausted those of love. He returns, writes, and everyone is carried away by the charm of his magnificentstyle with its royal sweep and its supple, coloured, undulating phrase, as stormy as the winds that sweep over virgin forests, as brilliant asthe neck of a humming-bird, and as soft as the light of the moon shiningthrough the windows of a chapel. 

He travels again; this time he goes to ancient shores; he sits down atThermoplyæ and cries: Leonidas! Leonidas! visits the tomb of Achilles, Lacedæmon, and Carthage, and, like the sleepy shepherd who raises hishead to watch the passing caravans, all those great places awake when hepasses through them. 

Banished, exiled, laden with honours, this man who had starved in thestreets will dine at the table of kings; he will be an ambassador and aminister, will try to save the tottering monarchy, and after seeing theruin of all his beliefs, he will witness his own glorification as if hewere already counted among the dead. 

Born during the decline of one period and at the dawn of another, he wasto be its transition and the guardian of its memories and hopes. He wasthe embalmer of Catholicism and the proclaimer of liberty. Although hewas a man of old traditions and illusions, he was constitutional inpolitics and revolutionary in literature. Religious by instinct andeducation, it is he, who, in advance of everyone else, in advance ofByron, gave vent to the most savage pride and frightful despair. 

He was an artist, and had this in common with the artists of theeighteenth century: he was always hampered by narrow laws which, however, were always broken by the power of his genius. As a man, heshared the misery of his fellow-men of the nineteenth century. He hadthe same turbulent preoccupations and futile gravity. Not satisfied withbeing great, he wished to appear grandiose, and it seems that thisconceited mania did not in the least efface his real grandeur. Hecertainly does not belong to the race of dreamers who have made noincursion into life, masters with calm brows who have had neitherperiod, nor country nor family. But this man cannot be separated fromthe passions of his time; they made him what he was, and he in turncreated a number of them. Perhaps the future will not give him creditfor his heroic stubbornness and no doubt it will be the episodes of hisbooks that will immortalise their titles with the names of the causesthey upheld. 

I stayed at the window enjoying the night and feeling with delight thecold morning air on my lids. Little by little the day dawned; the wickof the candle grew longer and longer and its flame slowly faded away. The roof of the market appeared in the distance and a cock crowed; thestorm had passed; a few drops of water remained in the dust of the roadand made large round spots on it. As I was very tired, I went back tobed and slept. 

We felt very sad on leaving Combourg, and besides, the end of ourjourney was at hand. Soon this delightful trip which we had enjoyed forthree months would be over. The return, like the leave-taking, producesan anticipated sadness, which gives one a proof of the insipid life welead. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Gustave Flaubert was twenty-six years old when he startedon this journey. He travelled on foot and was accompanied by M. MaximeDucamp. When they returned, they wrote an account of their journey. Itis by far the most important of the unpublished writings, for in it theauthor gives his personal genius full sway and it abounds in picturesquedescriptions and historical reflections. ]

[Footnote 2: Founder of the abbey of Fontevrault, in 1099. ]

[Footnote 3: He strangled his mistress whose mutilated body was foundfloating in a sack on a pond. (See _Causes Célèbres_. )]

[Footnote 4: A contraction of Poulbeuzanneval, the swamp where the beastwas drowned. ]

[Footnote 5: Josselin Frotet, sieur de La Lanbelle, at whose place therebels congregated before the escalade. (Note on the manuscript ofG. F. )]

[Footnote 6: D'Argentré, _Hist. De Bretagne_. P. 62. ]