But to return to the _pardon_. I remember that on this occasion an old cook in the family had permission to start two or three days before the _pardon_, so that she might go all the way on her knees, and during those days one met many such devout pilgrims making their way on their knees along the dusty roads. Some of them came from far distances. We children were called before dawn on the August morning, and it was a sleepy, half-bewildered dressing by candle-light. As a closed carriage made me sick, I was put into the coupé with papa and _maman_. Eliane, Ernest, their nurses, and all the other servants, followed in a sort of omnibus, and behind them came all the horses, trotting gaily along the road to share in the blessings of this great day of the Assumption of the Virgin. The horses of Brittany, it will be conceded, are a specially favored race. Although I was in the coupé and had all the freshness of the early air to invigorate me, I remember of the journey from Loch-ar-Brugg to Folgoat only that I was deplorably sick, and the greatest inconvenience to my parents. Fortunately, I was restored the moment I set my feet upon the ground. [Illustration: "Je me sauve," he would exclaim] We were to be entertained for the day at Folgoat by the curé, and to lunch with him and with the bishops at the presbytery; but we were already ravenously hungry, so, although papa and _maman_ must continue to fast until after taking communion at the early service, we children had a splendid picnic breakfast in the presbytery garden, and a jellied breast of lamb is my first recollection of the day at Folgoat! Then we went out to see the great festival. Seventy-five years or more have passed since that day, and it still lives in my mind with a beauty more than splendid, a divine beauty. In the vast plain, under the vast, blue sky, six bishops, glittering with gold and precious stones, celebrated mass simultaneously at six great altars among thousands of worshipers. It was a sea of color under the August sun, and the white _coiffes_ of the women were like flocks of snowy doves. There was an early mass, and the high mass at eleven. When this was over, we assembled at the presbytery to lunch with the bishops. The table was laid in Anne de Bretagne's council-chamber, its stone walls covered with archaic figures, and it must have been a picturesque sight to see the bishops sitting in all their splendor against that ancient background; but what I most remember are the stories they told of Louis XI and his misdeeds, which seemed to me more interesting and more cruel than the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba and his forty thieves. In the church itself was shown a superbly carved bench where, it was said, while praying, he ordered with a nod the death of a Breton noble who had refused to do him homage. When we went into the church after lunch to see this bench, I sat down on it, and my long golden curls were caught in the claws of the interlaced monsters on the back, and I