s 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
lan