The town of Mayenne is ancient and irregularly built, the river Mayenne running through it. The ruins of an old wall and some decayed towers remain of the fortifications which were taken by assault, after several bloody attempts, during the siege by the English, in 1424. At Laval, where I stopped, after again crossing the Mayenne, I entered the province of Bretagne: it is an old dirty town, completely intersected by the river, and has a manufactory for coarse cloths and cottons. The _Tête Noire_ is one of the worst inns I have met with in the country. The department of the Isle-et-Vilaine commences here. This place is celebrated in the history of the Vendean war by the refuge Madame de Laroche-Jaquelin sought there, after the deplorable defeat of the royalist army at the battle of Mans, where it received its death-blow. The wreck of that army, under M. de Laroche-Jaquelin, were driven from it again on the following day, and from that hour never rallied so as to make any stand against the victorious republicans. Quitting Laval the day after my arrival, I ascended a long and steep hill, travelled by the side of the forest of Petre, and came to Vitré, where I remained all night for the purpose of visiting the château of the celebrated Madame de Sévigné,[4] whose estate has descended to a distant branch of her family, who had the good fortune to save it from destruction during the revolution. The grounds are kept in excellent order. Her picture hangs in the apartment in which she composed her interesting and elegant letters, and every article of furniture carefully preserved is shown to strangers. The distance from Vitré to Rennes is seven leagues, over a road which becomes gradually less and less Interesting. [Footnote 4: Marie de Rabutin, Marchioness de Sevigné, was the daughter of the Baron de Chantal, and born in 1626: she espoused at the age of eighteen the Marquis de Sévigné, who fell in a duel in 1651, leaving her with one son and a daughter, to whose education she paid strict attention: the daughter married in 1669 the Count de Grignan, Commandant in Provence, and it was on a visit to her that the Marchioness caught a fever and died in 1696. Her son Charles, Marquis de Sevigné, was one of the admirers of Ninon de L'Enclos, and had a dispute with Madame Dacier respecting the sense of a passage in Horace. He died in 1713. (Moreri.)] Rennes is the chief city of the Isle-et-Vilaine, and in former times was the capital of Bretagne. It is a large ancient built town, standing on a vast plain, between the rivers Isle and Vilaine. It has a hall of justice, (Cour Royale,) an episcopal palace, and a foundry for cannon. A more dismal dirty looking city, or a more uninteresting one to a stranger, is seldom to be seen. Few traces remain of its ancient splendor; the old rampart, which once encompassed it, now forms a promenade.