Fanny O'Brien was then twenty-one years old. The Baron du
Guenic came over to France to obtain the documents necessary for his
marriage, returned to Ireland, and, after about ten months (at the
beginning of 1814), brought his wife to Guerande, where she gave him
Calyste on the very day that Louis XVIII. landed at Calais,--a
circumstance which explains the young man's final name of Louis.
The old and loyal Breton was now a man of seventy-three; but his
long-continued guerilla warfare with the Republic, his exile, the perils
of his five crossings through a turbulent sea in open boats, had weighed
upon his head, and he looked a hundred; therefore, at no period had
the chief of the house of Guenic been more in keeping with the
worn-out grandeur of their dwelling, built in the days when a court
reigned at Guerande.
Monsieur du Guenic was a tall, straight, wiry, lean old man. His oval
face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, which formed a net-work over
his cheek-bones and above his eyebrows, giving to his face a
resemblance to those choice old men whom Van Ostade, Rembrandt,
Mieris, and Gerard Dow so loved to paint, in pictures which need a
microscope to be fully appreciated.
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