is framed by an African desert banked by the ocean,--a desert without
a tree, an herb, a bird; where, on sunny days, the laboring
/paludiers/, clothed in white and scattered among those melancholy
swamps where the salt is made, remind us of Arabs in their burrows.

Thus Guerande bears no resemblance to any other place in France.
The town produces somewhat the same effect upon the mind as a
sleeping-draught upon the body. It is silent as Venice. There is no
other public conveyance than the springless wagon of a carrier who
carries travellers, merchandise, and occasionally letters from
Saint-Nazaire to Guerande and /vice versa/. Bernus, the carrier, was,
in 1829, the factotum of this large community. He went and came when
he pleased; all the country knew him; and he did the errands of all.
The arrival of a carriage in Guerande, that of a lady or some invalid
going to Croisic for sea-bathing (thought to have greater virtue among
those rocks than at Boulogne or Dieppe) is still an immense event.
The peasants come in on horseback, most of them with commodities
for barter in sacks. They are induced to do so (and so are the
/paludiers/) by the necessity of purchasing the jewels distinctive of
their caste which are given to all Breton brides, and the white linen,
or cloth for their clothing.

For a circuit ten miles round, Guerande is always GUERANDE,--the
illustrious town where the famous treaty was signed in 1365, the key
of the coast, which may boast, not less than the village of Batz, of a
splendor now lost in the night of time. The jewels, linen, cloth,
ribbon, and hats are made elsewhere, but to those who buy them they
are from Guerande and nowhere else. All artists, and even certain
bourgeois, who come to Guerande feel, as they do at Venice, a desire
(soon forgotten) to end their days amid its peace and silence, walking