Chapter 1 - Page 2

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