To return to Clisson, which I was in so great a hurry to see that I left my excellent hosts to visit it the day after my arrival. Well, Clisson, which people had praised so highly to me, would have been an extremely pretty town in Greece or Italy, but in France and in la Vendée it was not: there is something incompatible between the misty skies of the west and the flat roofs of the east, between the pretty Italian factories and our dirty French countrysides. The château de Clisson itself, thanks to the care of M. Lemot, the celebrated sculptor, is so well preserved that one is tempted to be angry with its owner for not having allowed a single spider's web to crawl over its walls. It reminded one of an old man made up on shaving days, with false teeth and false hair and rouged. M. Lemot spent enormous sums to produce a picturesque effect, and only made an anomaly; and this anomaly was illustrated all the more forcibly by the presence of the tricolour flag floating over the eleventh-century ruin: the mayor would not allow it to be placed on the clock tower. The park is like every other park in existence--like Ermenonville or Mortefontaine: a river, rocks, grottoes, statues and temples to the Muses, to Apollo and to Diana. Instead of all these, imagine on both sides of the valley cottages grouped where the temples stand, some seeming to be climbing up the hillside and others descending it, dotted here and there according to the fancy or convenience of their owners; the river flowing at the bottom of the ravine, and, on the top of the hill, the castle: an old ruin rent by cracks, surrounded by stones which time has caused to roll down like dead leaves round the trunk of an oak tree. Add to this its old memories of Olivier de Clisson and its modern memories of the Chouans and the Blues; the vault which was used as a dungeon by the Barons, and the well that forms a tomb for four hundred Vendeans--and, if you possess a romantic turn of mind, you will have food for centuries of contemplation.