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 wago