Book account

If you reach Guerande from Croisic, after crossing a
dreary landscape of salt-marshes, you will experience a strong
sensation at sight of that vast fortification, which is still as good
as ever. If you come to it by Saint-Nazaire, the picturesqueness of
its position and the naive grace of its environs will please you no
less. The country immediately surrounding it is ravishing; the hedges
are full of flowers, honeysuckles, roses, box, and many enchanting
plants. It is like an English garden, designed by some great
architect. This rich, coy nature, so untrodden, with all the grace of
a bunch of violets or a lily of the valley in the glade of a forest,
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.


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