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 i