The Castle of Plouernel is located not far from Nantes on one side nor from Rennes on the other, and is one of the most magnificent residential palaces of France. It dates back to the Renaissance period, and presents a finished specimen of that style of architecture, the fancy of which is infinite and charming. Here, cupolas, elegant as Oriental minarets, contrast vividly with the pointed angle of high roofs; yonder, wide-arched galleries, resembling aerial bridges thrown over space, join one set of buildings to another; here, balustraded terraces seem embroidered in the living stone. It is a mass of richness and diversity, a dazzling efflorescence of architectural ornamentation from the exterior of the chimneys, each of which is a masterpiece of execution, down to the chimerical gutter-spouts and the stone setting of the doors and windows, sculptured in human figures, flowers, birds and the heads of monstrous animals, real and fabulous. And yet, Oh! prodigy of art, the inexhaustible variety of details, the fantastic irregularity of the different parts of the edifice merge into a whole that is instinct with loftiness and grace. Finally, about half a league away from that dazzling fairy palace--the façade of which runs over with sculptured designs gilded by the slanting rays of the sun, and brilliantly harmonizes with the azure of the sky above and the verdure of the woods round about--the eye catches on the crest of an arid and rocky ridge that rises almost perpendicularly, the ruins of the ancient feudal manor of Plouernel, semi-hidden under a vast wrappage of ivy. The indestructible dungeon only has defied the tooth of time. Its square bulk, blackened by the ages, rises to a height of over a hundred and twenty feet, still crowned by its old crenelated battlements and machicolations, and flanked at either angle with a turret from which the men on watch kept an eye upon the road and the river, the former of which wound its way to the right, the other to the left of the foot of the rock, at the summit of which, perched like a vulture's nest, rose the seigniorial lair. An avenue of centennarian elms, planted in four files, led up to the façade of the Castle of Plouernel, which rose from a wide and semi-circular "court of honor," surrounded by a colonnade surmounted by terraces. The elegant architectural hemicycle masked the stables, the kennels, the falcon cages and other out-buildings of the castle, and was, in turn, surmounted by an impost on which, woven into implements of war and of the chase artistically sculptured, was seen the coat-of-arms of Plouernel--three eagle's talons sable on a field gules--and, rising from among gracefully executed ornamentations, the lettering "Guy de Plouernel," the builder of the palace in the year 1559, according to the lapidary date graven above the armorial bearings.