n 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