Having now played the role of a chatelaine, adored by her vassals as if the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had lowered no banners; and after rides through forests, and halts at farmhouses, dinners on oaken tables, covered with centenary linen, bending under Homeric viands served on antediluvian dishes; after drinking the choicest wines in goblets to volleys of musketry, accompanied by cries of “Long live the Guenics!” till I was deafened; after balls, where the only orchestra was a bagpipe, blown by a man for ten hours; and after bouquets, and young brides who wanted us to bless them, and downright weariness, which made me find in my bed a sleep I never knew before, with delightful awakenings when love shone radiant as the sun pouring in upon me, and scintillating with a million of flies, all buzzing in the Breton dialect!—­in short, after a most grotesque residence in the Chateau du Guenic, where the windows are gates and the cows grace peacefully on the grass in the halls (which castle we have sworn to repair and to inhabit for a while very year to the wild acclamations of the clan du Guenic, a gars of which bore high our banner)—­ouf!  I am at Nantes.

But oh! what a day was that when we arrived at the old castle!  The rector came out, mother, with all his clergy, crowned with flowers, to receive us and bless us, expressing such joy,—­the tears are in my eyes as I think of it.  And my noble Calyste! who played his part of seigneur like a personage in Walter Scott!  My lord received his tenants’ homage as if he were back in the thirteenth century.  I heard the girls and the women saying to each other, “Oh, what a beautiful seigneur we have!” for all the world like an opera chorus.  The old men talked of Calyste’s resemblance to the former Guenics whom they had known in their youth.  Ah! noble, sublime Brittany! land of belief and faith!  But progress has got its eye upon it; bridges are being built, roads made, ideas are coming, and then farewell to the sublime!  The peasants will certainly not be as free and proud as I have now seen them, when progress has proved to them that they are Calyste’s equals —­if, indeed, they could ever be got to believe it.

After this poem of our pacific Restoration had been sung, and the contracts and leases signed, we left that ravishing land, all flowery, gay, solemn, lonely by turns, and came here to kneel with our happiness at the feet of her who gave it to us.

Calyste and I both felt the need of thanking the sister of the Visitation.  In memory of her he has quartered his own arms with those of Des Touches, which are:  party couped, tranche and taille or and sinople, on the latter two eagles argent.  He means to take one of the eagles argent for his own supporter and put this motto in its beak:  Souviegne-vous.

Yesterday we went to the convent of the ladies of the Visitation, to which we were taken