Its geographical position explains this phenomenon.  The pretty town overlooks a salt-marsh, the product of which is called throughout Brittany the Guerande salt, to which many Bretons attribute the excellence of their butter and their sardines.  It is connected with the rest of France by two roads only:  that coming from Savenay, the arrondissement to which it belongs, which stops at Saint-Nazaire; and a second road, leading from Vannes, which connects it with the Morbihan.  The arrondissement road establishes communication by land, and from Saint-Nazaire by water, with Nantes.  The land road is used only by government; the more rapid and more frequented way being by water from Saint-Nazaire.  Now, between this village and Guerande is a distance of eighteen miles, which the mail-coach does not serve, and for good reason; not three coach passengers a year would pass over it.

These, and other obstacles, little fitted to encourage travellers, still exist.  In the first place, government is slow in its proceedings; and next, the inhabitants of the region put up readily enough with difficulties which separate them from the rest of France.  Guerande, therefore, being at the extreme end of the continent, leads nowhere, and no one comes there.  Glad to be ignored, she thinks and cares about herself only.  The immense product of her salt-marshes, which pays a tax of not less than a million to the Treasury, is chiefly managed at Croisic, a peninsular village which communicates with Guerande over quicksands, which efface during the night the tracks made by day, and also by boats which cross the arm of the sea that makes the port of Croisic.

This fascinating little town is therefore the Herculaneum of feudality, less its winding sheet of lava.  It is afoot, but not living; it has no other ground of existence except that it has not been demolished.  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.