The garden front has no second turret to correspond with that at the corner of the gable; to make up for this there is a column with a spiral twist from bottom to top, which of old must have borne the standard of the family, for it ends in a large rusty iron socket in which lank weeds are growing. This ornament, harmonizing with the remains of stonework, shows that the building was designed by a Venetian architect; this elegant standard is like a sign manual left by Venice, and revealing the chivalry and refinement of the thirteenth century. If there could still be any doubt, the character of the details would remove them. The trefoils of the Guaisnic house have four leaves. This variant betrays the Venetian school debased by its trade with the East, since the semi-Mauresque architects, indifferent to Catholic symbolism, gave the trefoil a fourth leaf, while Christian architects remained faithful to the emblem of the Trinity. From this point of view Venetian inventiveness was heretical.
If this house moves you to admiration, you will wonder, perhaps, why the present age never repeats these miracles of art. In our day such fine houses are sold and pulled down, and make way for streets. Nobody knows whether the next generation will keep up the ancestral home, where each one abides as in an inn; whereas formerly men labored, or at least believed that they labored, for an eternal posterity. Hence the beauty of their houses. Faith in themselves worked wonders, as much as faith in God.
With regard to the arrangement and furniture of the upper stories, they can only be imagined from this description of the ground floor, and from the appearance and habits of the family. For the last fifty years the du Guaisnics have never admitted a visitor into any room but these two, which, like the courtyard and the external features of the house, are redolent of the grace, the spirit, and the originality of the noble province of old Brittany.
Without this topography and description of the town, without this detailed picture of their home, the singular figures of the family dwelling there might have been less well understood. The frame was necessarily placed before the portraits. Everyone must feel that mere things have an effect on people. There are buildings whose influence is visible on the persons who live near them. It is difficult to be irreligious under the shadow of a cathedral like that of Bourges. The soul that is constantly reminded of its destiny by imagery finds it less easy to fall short of it. So thought our ancestors, but the opinion is no longer held by a generation which has neither symbols nor distinctions, while its manners change every ten years. Do you not expect to find the Baron du Guaisnic, sword in hand—or all this picture will be false?
In 1836, when this drama opens, in the early days of August, the family consisted still of Monsieur and Madame du Guénic, of Mademoiselle du Guénic, the Baron’s elder sister, and of a son aged one-and-twenty, named Gaudebert-Calyste-Louis, in obedience to an old custom in the family. His father’s name was Gaudebert-Calyste-Charles. Only the last name was ever changed; Saint-Gaudebert and Saint-Calixtus were always the patrons of the Guénics.
The Baron du Guénic had gone forth from Guérande as soon as la Vendée and Brittany had taken up arms, and he had fought with Charette, with Catelineau, La Rochejaquelein, d’Elbée, Bonchamps, and the Prince de Loudon. Before going, he had sold all his possessions to his elder sister, Mademoiselle Zéphirine du Guénic, a stroke of prudence unique in Revolutionary annals. After the death of all the heroes of the West, the Baron, preserved by some miracle from ending as they did, would not yield to Napoleon. He fought on till 1802, when, having narrowly escaped capture, he came back to Guérande, and from Guérande went to le Croisic, whence he sailed to Ireland—faithful to the traditional hatred of the Bretons for England.
The good people of Guérande pretended not to know that the Baron was alive; during twenty years not a word betrayed him. Mademoiselle du Guénic collected the rents, and sent the money to her brother through the hands of fishermen.
In 1813, Monsieur du Guénic came back to Guérande with as little fuss as if he had been spending the summer at Nantes. During his sojourn in Dublin, in spite of his fifty years, the Breton noble had fallen in love with a charming Irish girl, the daughter of one of the oldest and poorest houses of that unhappy country. Miss Fanny O’Brien was at that time one-and-twenty. The Baron du Guénic came to fetch the papers needed for his marriage, went back to be married, and returned ten months later, at the beginning of 1814, with his wife, who gave birth to a son on the very day when Louis XVIII landed at Calais—which accounts for the name of Louis.
The loyal old man was now seventy-three years old, but the guerilla warfare against the Republic, his sufferings during five sea voyages in open boats, and his life at Dublin, had all told on him; he looked more than a hundred. Hence, never had there been a Guénic whose appearance was in more perfect harmony with the antiquity of the house built at a time when a Court was held at Guérande.
Monsieur du Guénic was a tall old man, upright, shriveled, strongly knit, and lean. His oval face was puckered by a thousand wrinkles, forming arched fringes above the cheekbones and eyebrows, giving his face some resemblance to those of the old men painted with such a loving brush by Van Ostade, Rembrandt, Mieris, and Gerard Dow—heads that need
