Nowadays we have /products/, we no longer have /works/. Public
buildings, monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of
retrospection; but the monuments of modern industry are freestone
quarries, saltpetre mines, cotton factories. A few more years and even
these old cities will be transformed and seen no more except in the
pages of this iconography.
One of the towns in which may be found the most correct likeness of
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.
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