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 is 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