aiting at the steps of the jetty, where the party embarked
without a smile. The marquise was cold and dignified. Camille had
lectured Calyste on his disobedience, explaining to him clearly how
matters stood. Calyste, a prey to black despair, was casting glances at
Beatrix in which anger and love struggled for the mastery. Not a word
was said by any of them during the short passage from the jetty of
Guerande to the extreme end of the port of Croisic, the point where
the boats discharge the salt, which the peasant-women then bear away on
their heads in huge earthen jars after the fashion of caryatides. These
women go barefooted with very short petticoats. Many of them let the
kerchiefs which cover their bosoms fly carelessly open. Some wear only
shifts, and are the more dignified; for the less clothing a woman wears,
the more nobly modest is her bearing.

The little Danish vessel had just finished lading, therefore the landing
of the two handsome ladies excited much curiosity among the female
salt-carriers; and as much to avoid their remarks as to serve Calyste,
Camille sprang forward toward the rocks, leaving him to follow with
Beatrix, while Gasselin put a distance of some two hundred steps between
himself and his master.

The peninsula of Croisic is flanked on the sea side by granite rocks
the shapes of which are so strangely fantastic that they can only be
appreciated by travellers who are in a position to compare them with
other great spectacles of primeval Nature. Perhaps the rocks of Croisic
have the same advantage over sights of that kind as that accorded to the
road to the Grande Chartreuse over all other narrow valleys. Neither
the coasts of Croisic, where the granite bulwark is split into strange
reefs, nor those of Sardinia, where Nature is dedicated to grandiose and
terrible effects, nor even the basaltic rocks of the northern seas can
show a character so unique and so complete. Fancy has here amused itself
by composing interminable arabesques where the most fantastic figures
wind and twine. All forms are here. The imagination is at last fatigued
by this vast gallery of abnormal shapes, where in stormy weather the sea
makes rough assaults which have ended in polishing all ruggedness.

You will find under a naturally vaulted roof, of a boldness imitated
from afar by Brunelleschi (for the greatest efforts of art are always
the timid copying of effects of nature), a rocky hollow polished like a
marble bath-tub