“We had observed that at Broons a style of coiffure which was new to us prevailed; and my companion wished to add a sketch of it to his fast-increasing collection of Breton costumes.  With this view, he had begun making love to the maid a little, to induce her to do so much violence to her maiden modesty, as to sit to him for a few minutes, when a far better opportunity of achieving his object presented itself.

“The landlady’s daughter, a very pretty little girl about fourteen years old, was going to be confirmed, and had just come down stairs to her mother, who was sitting knitting in the salle a manger, for inspection and approval before she started.  Of course, upon such an occasion, the art of the blanchisseuse was taxed to the utmost.  Lace was not spared; and the most recherche coiffure was adopted, that the rigorous immutability of village modes would permit.

“It would seem that the fickleness of fashion exercises in constant local variations that mutability which is utterly denied to it in Brittany with regard to time.  Every district, almost every commune has its own peculiar ‘mode’ (for both sexes) which changes not from generation to generation.  As the mothers dress, so do their daughters, so did their grandmothers, and so will their grand-daughters.” [But I reckoned when writing thus without the railroad and its consequences.] “If a woman of one parish marries, or takes service, or for any other cause resides in another, she still retains the mode of her native village; and thus carries about her a mark, which is to those, among whom she is a sojourner, a well-recognised indication of the place whence she comes, and to herself a cherished souvenir of the home which she never ceases to consider her own country.

“But though the form of the dress is invariable, and every inhabitant of the commune, from the wealthy farmer’s wife to the poorest cottager who earns her black bread by labour in the fields, would as soon think of adopting male attire as of innovating on the immemorial mode du pays, yet the quality of the materials allows scope for wealth and female coquetry to show themselves.  Thus the invariable mode de Broons, with its trifling difference in form, which in the eye of the inhabitants made it as different as light from darkness from the mode de St. Jouan,’ was equally observable in the coarse linen coiffe of the maid, and the richly-laced and beautifully ‘got up’ head-dress of the daughter of the house.

“A very slight observation of human nature under a few only of its various phases may suffice to show that the instinct which prompts a woman to adorn her person to the best possible advantage is not the hot-house growth of cities, but a genuine wild flower of nature.  No high-born beauty ever more repeatedly or anxiously consulted her wax-lit psyche on every faultless point of hair, face, neck, feet, and figure, before descending to the carriage for her first ball, than did our young Bretonne again and again recur to the mirror, which occupied the pier between the two windows of the salle a manger, before sallying forth on the great occasion of her confirmation.