I A BRETON TOWN AND MANSION

France, especially in Brittany, still possesses certain towns

completely outside of the movement which gives to the nineteenth

century its peculiar characteristics. For lack of quick and regular

communication with Paris, scarcely connected by wretched roads with

the sub-prefecture, or the chief city of their own province, these

towns regard the new civilization as a spectacle to be gazed at; it

amazes them, but they never applaud it; and, whether they fear or

scoff at it, they continue faithful to the old manners and customs

which have come down to them. Whoso would travel as a moral

archaeologist, observing men instead of stones, would find images of

the time of Louis XV. in many a village of Provence, of the time of

Louis XIV. in the depths of Pitou, and of still more ancient times in

the towns of Brittany. Most of these towns have fallen from states of

splendor never mentioned by historians, who are always more concerned

with facts and dates than with the truer history of manners and

customs. The tradition of this splendor still lives in the memory of

the people,as in Brittany, where the native character allows no

forgetfulness of things which concern its own land. Many of these

towns were once the capitals of a little feudal State,a county or

duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, if the male

line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads became arms;

and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate.

For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient times

are beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for the

masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of

which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan.

Nowadays we have /products/, we no longer have /works/. Public

buildings, monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of

retrospection; but the monuments of modern industry are freestone

quarries, saltpetre mines, cotton factories. A few more years and even

these old cities will be transformed and seen no more except in the

pages of this iconography.

One of the towns in which may be found the most correct likeness of

the feudal ages is Guerande. The name alone awakens a thousand

memories in the minds of painters, artists, thinkers who have visited

the slopes on which this splendid jewel of feudality lies proudly

posed to command the flux and reflux of the tides and the dunes,the

summit, as it were, of a triangle, at the corners of which are two

other jewels not less curious: Croisic, and the village of Batz. There

are no towns after Guerande except Vitre in the centre of Brittany,

and Avignon in the south of France, which preserve so intact, to the

very middle of our epoch, the type and form of the middle ages.

Guerande is still encircled with its doughty walls, its moats are full

of water, its battlements entire, its loopholes unencumbered with

vegetation; even ivy has never cast its mantle over the towers, square

or round. The town has three gates, where may be seen the rings of the

portcullises; it is entered by a drawbridge of iron-clamped wood, no

longer raised but which could be raised at will. The mayoralty was

blamed for having, in 1820, planted poplars along the banks of the

moat to shade the promenade. It excused itself on the ground that the

long and beautiful esplanade of the fortifications facing the dunes

had been converted one hundred years earlier into a mall where the

inhabitants took their pleasure beneath the elms.

The houses of the old town have suffered no change; and they have

neither increased nor diminished. None have suffered upon their

frontage from the hammer of the architect, the brush of the plasterer,

nor have they staggered under the weight of added stories. All retain

their primitive characteristics. Some rest on wooden columns which

form arcades under which foot-passengers circulate, the floor planks

bending beneath them, but never breaking. The houses of the merchants

are small and low; their fronts are veneered with slate. Wood, now

decaying, counts for much in the carved material of the window-casings

and the pillars, above which grotesque faces look down, while shapes

of fantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great

thought of Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature.

These relics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those

dusky tones and half-blurred features in which the artistic brush

delights.

The streets are what they were four hundred years ago,with one

exception; population no longer swarms there; the social movement is

now so dead that a traveller wishing to examine the town (as beautiful

as a suit of antique armor) may walk alone, not without sadness,

through a deserted street, where the mullioned windows are plastered

up to avoid the window-tax. This street ends at a postern, flanked

with a wall of masonry, beyond which rises a bouquet of trees planted

by the hands of Breton nature, one of the most luxuriant and fertile

vegetations in France. A painter, a poet would sit there silently, to

taste the quietude which reigns beneath the well-preserved arch of the

postern, where no voice comes from the life of the peaceful city, and

where the landscape is seen in its rich magnificence through the loop-

holes of the casemates once occupied by halberdiers and archers, which

are not unlike the sashes of some belvedere arranged for a point of

view.

It is impossible to walk about the place without thinking at every

step of the habits and usages of long-past times; the very stones tell

of them; the ideas of the middle ages are still there with all their

ancient superstitions. If, by chance, a gendarme passes you, with his

silver-laced hat, his presence is an anachronism against which your

sense of fitness protests; but nothing is so rare as to meet a being

or an object of the present time. There is even very little of the

clothing of the day; and that little the inhabitants adapt in a way to

their immutable customs, their unchangeable physiognomies. The public

square is filled with Breton costumes, which artists flock to draw;

these stand out in wonderful relief upon the scene around them. The

whiteness of the linen worn by the /paludiers/ (the name given to men

who gather salt in the salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the

blues and browns of the peasantry and the original and sacredly

preserved jewelry of the women. These two classes, and that of the

sailors in their jerkins and varnished leather caps are as distinct

from one another as the castes of India, and still recognize the

distance that parts them from the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the

clergy. All lines are clearly marked; there the revolutionary level

found the masses too rugged and too hard to plane; its instrument

would have been notched, if not broken. The character of immutability

which science gives to zoological species is found in Breton human

nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830, Guerande is still a

town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic, silent, self-

contained,a place where modern ideas have little access.

Its geographical position explains this phenomenon. The pretty town

overlooks a salt-marsh, the product of which is called throughout

Brittany the Guerande salt, to which many Bretons attribute the

excellence of their butter and their sardines. It is connected with

the rest of France by two roads only: that coming from Savenay, the

arrondissement to which it belongs, which stops at Saint-Nazaire; and

a second road, leading from Vannes, which connects it with the

Morbihan. The arrondissement road establishes communication by land,

and from Saint-Nazaire by water, with Nantes. The land road is used

only by government; the more rapid and more frequented way being by

water from Saint-Nazaire. Now, between this village and Guerande is a

distance of eighteen miles. which the mail-coach does not serve, and

for good reason; not three coach passengers a year would pass over it.

These, and other obstacles, little fitted to encourage travellers,

still exist. In the first place, government is slow in its

proceedings; and next, the inhabitants of the region put up readily

enough with difficulties which separate them from the rest of France.

Guerande, therefore, being at the extreme end of the continent, leads

nowhere, and no one comes there. Glad to be ignored, she thinks and

cares about herself only. The immense product of her salt-marshes,

which pays a tax of not less than a million to the Treasury, is

chiefly managed at Croisic, a peninsular village which communicates

with Guerande over quicksands, which efface during the night the

tracks made by day, and also by boats which cross the arm of the sea

that makes the port of Croisic.

This fascinating little town is therefore the Herculaneum of

feudality, less its winding sheet of lava. It is afoot, but not

living; it has no other ground of existence except that it has not

been demolished. If you reach Guerande from Croisic, after crossing a

dreary landscape of salt-marshes, you will experience a strong

sensation at sight of that vast fortification, which is still as good

as ever. If you come to it by Saint-Nazaire, the picturesqueness of

its position and the naive grace of its environs will please you no

less. The country immediately surrounding it is ravishing; the hedges

are full of flowers, honeysuckles, roses, box, and many enchanting

plants. It is like an English garden, designed by some great

architect. This rich, coy nature, so untrodden, with all the grace of

a bunch of violets or a lily of the valley in the glade of a forest,

is framed by an African desert banked by the ocean,a desert without

a tree, an herb, a bird; where, on sunny days, the laboring

/paludiers/, clothed in white and scattered among those melancholy

swamps where the salt is made, remind us of Arabs in their burrows.

Thus Guerande bears no resemblance to any other place in France. The

town produces somewhat the same effect upon the mind as a sleeping-

draught upon the body. It is silent as Venice. There is no other

public conveyance than the springless wagon of a carrier who carries

travellers, merchandise, and occasionally letters from Saint-Nazaire

to Guerande and /vice versa/. Bernus, the carrier, was, in 1829, the

factotum of this large community. He went and came when he pleased;

all the country knew him; and he did the errands of all. The arrival

of a carriage in Guerande, that of a lady or some invalid going to

Croisic for sea-bathing (thought to have greater virtue among those

rocks than at Boulogne or Dieppe) is still an immense event. The

peasants come in on horseback, most of them with commodities for

barter in sacks. They are induced to do so (and so are the

/paludiers/) by the necessity of purchasing the jewels distinctive of

their caste which are given to all Breton brides, and the white linen,

or cloth for their clothing.

For a circuit ten miles round, Guerande is always GUERANDE,the

illustrious town where the famous treaty was signed in 1365, the key

of the coast, which may boast, not less than the village of Batz, of a

splendor now lost in the night of time. The jewels, linen, cloth,

ribbon, and hats are made elsewhere, but to those who buy them they

are from Guerande and nowhere else. All artists, and even certain

bourgeois, who come to Guerande feel, as they do at Venice, a desire

(soon forgotten) to end their days amid its peace and silence, walking

in fine weather along the beautiful mall which surrounds the town from

gate to gate on the side toward the sea. Sometimes the image of this

town arises in the temple of memory; she enters, crowned with her

towers, clasped with her girdle; her flower-strewn robe floats onward,

the golden mantle of her dunes enfolds her, the fragrant breath of her

briony paths, filled with the flowers of each passing season, exhales

at every step; she fills your mind, she calls to you like some

enchanting woman whom you have met in other climes and whose presence

still lingers in a fold of your heart.

Near the church of Guerande stands a mansion which is to the town what

the town is to the region, an exact image of the past, the symbol of a

grand thing destroyed,a poem, in short. This mansion belongs to the

noblest family of the province; to the du Guaisnics, who, in the times

of the du Guesclins, were as superior to the latter in antiquity and

fortune as the Trojans were to the Romans. The Guaisqlains (the name

is also spelled in the olden time du Glaicquin), from which comes du

Guesclin, issued from the du Guaisnics.

Old as the granite of Brittany, the Guaisnics are neither Frenchmen

nor Gauls,they are Bretons; or, to be more exact, they are Celts.

Formerly, they must have been Druids, gathering mistletoe in the

sacred forests and sacrificing men upon their dolmens. Useless to say

what they were! To-day this race, equal to the Rohans without having

deigned to make themselves princes, a race which was powerful before

the ancestors of Hugues Capet were ever heard of, this family, pure of

all alloy, possesses two thousand francs a year, its mansion in

Guerande, and the little castle of Guaisnic. All the lands belonging

to the barony of Guaisnic, the first in Brittany, are pledged to

farmers, and bring in sixty thousand francs a year, in spite of

ignorant culture. The du Gaisnics remain the owners of these lands

although they receive none of the revenues, for the reason that for

the last two hundred years they have been unable to pay off the money

advanced upon them. They are in the position of the crown of France

towards its /engagistes/ (tenants of crown-lands) before the year

1789. Where and when could the barons obtain the million their farmers

have advanced to them? Before 1789 the tenure of the fiefs subject to

the castle of Guaisnic was still worth fifty thousand francs a year;

but a vote of the National Assembly suppressed the seigneurs' dues

levied on inheritance.

In such a situation this familyof absolutely no account in France,

and which would be a subject of laughter in Paris, were it known there

is to Guerande the whole of Brittany. In Guerande the Baron du

Guaisnic is one of the great barons of France, a man above whom there

is but one man,the King of France, once elected ruler. To-day the

name of du Guaisnic, full of Breton significances (the roots of which

will be found explained in "The Chouans") has been subjected to the

same alteration which disfigures that of du Guaisqlain. The tax-

gatherer now writes the name, as do the rest of the world, du Guenic.

At the end of a silent, damp, and gloomy lane may be seen the arch of

a door, or rather gate, high enough and wide enough to admit a man on

horseback,a circumstance which proves of itself that when this

building was erected carriages did not exist. The arch, supported by

two jambs, is of granite. The gate, of oak, rugged as the bark of the

tree itself, is studded with enormous nails placed in geometric

figures. The arch is semicircular. On it are carved the arms of the

Guaisnics as clean-cut and clear as though the sculptor had just laid

down his chisel. This escutcheon would delight a lover of the heraldic

art by a simplicity which proves the pride and the antiquity of the

family. It is as it was in the days when the crusaders of the

Christian world invented these symbols by which to recognize each

other; the Guaisnics have never had it quartered; it is always itself,

like that of the house of France, which connoisseurs find

inescutcheoned in the shields of many of the old families. Here it is,

such as you may see it still at Guerande: Gules, a hand proper

gonfaloned ermine, with a sword argent in pale, and the terrible

motto, FAC. Is not that a grand and noble thing? The circlet of a

baronial coronet surmounts this simple escutcheon, the vertical lines

of which, used in carving to represent gules, are clear as ever. The

artist has given I know not what proud, chivalrous turn to the hand.

With what vigor it holds the sword which served but recently the

present family!

If you go to Guerande after reading this history you cannot fail to

quiver when you see that blazon. Yes, the most confirmed republican

would be moved by the fidelity, the nobleness, the grandeur hidden in

the depths of that dark lane. The du Guaisnics did well yesterday, and

they are ready to do well to-morrow. To DO is the motto of chivalry.

"You did well in the battle" was the praise of the Connetable /par

excellence/, the great du Guesclin who drove the English for a time

from France. The depth of this carving, which has been protected from

the weather by the projecting edges of the arch, is in keeping with

the moral depth of the motto in the soul of this family. To those who

know the Guaisnics this fact is touching.

The gate when open gives a vista into a somewhat vast court-yard, on

the right of which are the stables, on the left the kitchen and

offices. The house is build of freestone from cellar to garret. The

facade on the court-yard has a portico with a double range of steps,

the wall of which is covered with vestiges of carvings now effaced by

time, but in which the eye of an antiquary can still make out in the

centre of the principal mass the Hand bearing the sword. The granite

steps are now disjointed, grasses have forced their way with little

flowers and mosses through the fissures between the stones which

centuries have displaced without however lessening their solidity. The

door of the house must have had a charming character. As far as the

relics of the old designs allow us to judge, it was done by an artist

of the great Venetian school of the thirteenth century. Here is a

mixture, still visible, of the Byzantine and the Saracenic. It is

crowned with a circular pediment, now wreathed with vegetation,a

bouquet, rose, brown, yellow, or blue, according to the season. The

door, of oak, nail-studded, gives entrance to a noble hall, at the end

of which is another door, opening upon another portico which leads to

the garden.

This hall is marvellously well preserved. The panelled wainscot, about

three feet high, is of chestnut. A magnificent Spanish leather with

figures in relief, the gilding now peeled off or reddened, covers the

walls. The ceiling is of wooden boards artistically joined and painted

and gilded. The gold is scarcely noticeable; it is in the same

condition as that of the Cordova leather, but a few red flowers and

the green foliage can be distinguished. Perhaps a thorough cleaning

might bring out paintings like those discovered on the plank ceilings

of Tristan's house at Tours. If so, it would prove that those planks

were placed or restored in the reign of Louis XI. The chimney-piece is

enormous, of carved stone, and within it are gigantic andirons in

wrought-iron of precious workmanship. It could hold a cart-load of

wood. The furniture of this hall is wholly of oak, each article

bearing upon it the arms of the family. Three English guns equally

suitable for chase or war, three sabres, two game-bags, the utensils

of a huntsman and a fisherman hang from nails upon the wall.

On one side is a dining-room, which connects with the kitchen by a

door cut through a corner tower. This tower corresponds in the design

of the facade toward the court-yard with another tower at the opposite

corner, in which is a spiral staircase leading to the two upper

stories.

The dining-room is hung with tapestries of the fourteenth century; the

style and the orthography of the inscription on the banderols beneath

each figure prove their age, but being, as they are, in the naive

language of the /fabliaux/, it is impossible to transcribe them here.

These tapestries, well preserved in those parts where light has

scarcely penetrated, are framed in bands of oak now black as ebony.

The ceiling has projecting rafters enriched with foliage which is

varied for each rafter; the space between them is filled with planks

painted blue, on which twine garlands of golden flowers. Two old

buffers face each other; on their shelves, rubbed with Breton

persistency by Mariotte the cook, can be seen, as in the days when

kings were as poor in 1200 as the du Guaisnics are in 1830, four old

goblets, an ancient embossed soup-tureen, and two salt-cellars, all of

silver; also many pewter plates and many pitchers of gray and blue

pottery, bearing arabesque designs and the arms of the du Guaisnics,

covered by hinged pewter lids. The chimney-piece is modernized. Its

condition proves that the family has lived in this room for the last

century. It is of carved stone in the style of the Louis XV. period,

and is ornamented with a mirror, let in to the back with gilt beaded

moulding. This anachronism, to which the family is indifferent, would

grieve a poet. On the mantel-shelf, covered with red velvet, is a tall

clock of tortoise-shell inlaid with brass, flanked on each side with a

silver candelabrum of singular design. A large square table, with

solid legs, fills the centre of this room; the chairs are of turned

wood covered with tapestry. On a round table supported by a single leg

made in the shape of a vine-shoot, which stands before a window

looking into the garden, is a lamp of an odd kind. This lamp has a

common glass globe, about the size of an ostrich egg, which is

fastened into a candle-stick by a glass tube. Through a hole at the

top of the globe issues a wick which passes through a sort of reed of

brass, drawing the nut-oil held in the globe through its own length

coiled like a tape-worm in a surgeon's phial. The windows which look

into the garden, like those that look upon the court-yard, are

mullioned in stone with hexagonal leaded panes, and are draped by

curtains, with heavy valances and stout cords, of an ancient stuff of

crimson silk with gold reflections, called in former days either

brocatelle or small brocade.

On each of the two upper stories of the house there are but two rooms.

The first is the bedroom of the head of the family, the second is that

of the children. Guests were lodged in chambers beneath the roof. The

servants slept above the kitchens and stables. The pointed roof,

protected with lead at its angles and edges, has a noble pointed

window on each side, one looking down upon the court-yard, the other

on the garden. These windows, rising almost to the level of the roof,

have slender, delicate casings, the carvings of which have crumbled

under the salty vapors of the atmosphere. Above the arch of each

window with its crossbars of stone, still grinds, as it turns, the

vane of a noble.

Let us not forget a precious detail, full of naivete, which will be of

value in the eyes of an archaeologist. The tower in which the spiral

staircase goes up is placed at the corner of a great gable wall in

which there is no window. The staircase comes down to a little arched

door, opening upon a gravelled yard which separates the house from the

stables. This tower is repeated on the garden side by another of five

sides, ending in a cupola in which is a bell-turret, instead of being

roofed, like the sister-tower, with a pepper-pot. This is how those

charming architects varied the symmetry of their sky-lines. These

towers are connected on the level of the first floor by a stone

gallery, supported by what we must call brackets, each ending in a

grotesque human head. This gallery has a balustrade of exquisite

workmanship. From the gable above depends a stone dais like those that

crown the statues of saints at the portal of churches. Can you not see

a woman walking in the morning along this balcony and gazing over

Guerande at the sunshine, where it gilds the sands and shimmers on the

breast of Ocean? Do you not admire that gable wall flanked at its

angles with those varied towers? The opposite gable of the Guaisnic

mansion adjoins the next house. The harmony so carefully sought by the

architects of those days is maintained in the facade looking on the

court-yard by the tower which communicates between the dining-room and

the kitchen, and is the same as the staircase tower, except that it

stops at the first upper story and its summit is a small open dome,

beneath which stands a now blackened statue of Saint Calyste.

The garden is magnificent for so old a place. It covers half an acre

of ground, its walls are all espaliered, and the space within is

divided into squares for vegetables, bordered with cordons of fruit-

trees, which the man-of-all-work, named Gasselin, takes care of in the

intervals of grooming the horses. At the farther end of the garden is

a grotto with a seat in it; in the middle, a sun-dial; the paths are

gravelled. The facade on the garden side has no towers corresponding

to those on the court-yard; but a slender spiral column rises from the

ground to the roof, which must in former days have borne the banner of

the family, for at its summit may still be seen an iron socket, from

which a few weak plants are straggling. This detail, in harmony with

the vestiges of sculpture, proves to a practised eye that the mansion

was built by a Venetian architect. The graceful staff is like a

signature revealing Venice, chivalry, and the exquisite delicacy of

the thirteenth century. If any doubts remained on this point, a

feature of the ornamentation would dissipate them. The trefoils of the

hotel du Guaisnic have four leaves instead of three. This difference

plainly indicates the Venetian school depraved by its commerce with

the East, where the semi-Saracenic architects, careless of the great

Catholic thought, give four leaves to clover, while Christian art is

faithful to the Trinity. In this respect Venetian art becomes

heretical.

If this ancient dwelling attracts your imagination, you may perhaps

ask yourself why such miracles of art are not renewed in the present

day. Because to-day mansions are sold, pulled down, and the ground

they stood on turned into streets. No one can be sure that the next

generation will possess the paternal dwelling; homes are no more than

inns; whereas in former times when a dwelling was built men worked, or

thought they worked, for a family in perpetuity. Hence the grandeur of

these houses. Faith in self, as well as faith in God, did prodigies.

As for the arrangement of the upper rooms they may be imagined after

this description of the ground-floor, and after reading an account of

the manners, customs, and physiognomy of the family. For the last

fifty years the du Guaisnics have received their friends in the two

rooms just described, in which, as in the court-yard and the external

accessories of the building, the spirit, grace, and candor of the old

and noble Brittany still survives. Without the topography and

description of the town, and without this minute depicting of the

house, the surprising figures of the family might be less understood.

Therefore the frames have preceded the portraits. Every one is aware

that things influence beings. There are public buildings whose effect

is visible upon the persons living in their neighborhood. It would be

difficult indeed to be irreligious in the shadow of a cathedral like

that of Bourges. When the soul is everywhere reminded of its destiny

by surrounding images, it is less easy to fail of it. Such was the

thought of our immediate grandfathers, abandoned by a generation which

was soon to have no signs and no distinctions, and whose manners and

morals were to change every decade. If you do not now expect to find

the Baron du Guaisnic sword in hand, all here written would be

falsehood.