"It would seem that the fickleness of fashion exercises in constant
local variations that mutability which is utterly denied to it in
Brittany with regard to time. Every district, almost every commune
has its own peculiar 'mode' (for both sexes) which changes not from
generation to generation. As the mothers dress, so do their daughters,
so did their grandmothers, and so will their grand-daughters." [But I
reckoned when writing thus without the railroad and its consequences.]
"If a woman of one parish marries, or takes service, or for any other
cause resides in another, she still retains the mode of her native
village; and thus carries about her a mark, which is to those, among
whom she is a sojourner, a well-recognised indication of the place
whence she comes, and to herself a cherished souvenir of the home
which she never ceases to consider her own country.

"But though the form of the dress is invariable, and every inhabitant
of the commune, from the wealthy farmer's wife to the poorest cottager
who earns her black bread by labour in the fields, would as soon think
of adopting male attire as of innovating on the immemorial _mode du
pays_, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and
female coquetry to show themselves. Thus the invariable _mode de
Broons_, with its trifling difference in form, which in the eye of the
inhabitants made it as different as light from darkness from the _mode
de St. Jouan_,' was equally observable in the coarse linen _coiffe_ of
the maid, and the richly-laced and beautifully 'got up' head-dress of
the daughter of the house.

"A very slight observation of human nature under a few only of its
various phases may suffice to show that the instinct which prompts a
woman to adorn her person to the best possible advantage is not the
hot-house growth of cities, but a genuine wild flower of nature. No