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 landscape is seen in its rich magnificence through the
loop-holes of the casemates once occupied by halberdiers and archers,
which are not unlike the sashes of some belvedere arranged for a point
of view.
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