It was only just before the Revolution that a petty nobility, recruited for the most part from the country around, sprang up under the shadow of the bishop’s palace.  Brittany contained two distinct orders of nobility.  The first derived its titles from the King of France and displayed in a very marked degree the defects and the qualities which characterised the French nobility.  The other was of Celtic origin and thoroughly Breton.  This latter nobility comprised, from the period of the invasion, the chief men of the parish, the leaders of the people, of the same race as them, possessing by inheritance the right of marching at their head and representing them.  No one was more deserving of respect than this country nobleman when he remained a peasant, innocent of all intrigues or of any effort to grow rich:  but when he came to reside in town he lost nearly all his good qualities and contributed but little to the moral and intellectual progress of the country.

The Revolution seemed for this agglomeration of priests and monks neither more nor less than a death warrant.  The last of the bishops of Treguier left one evening by a back door leading into the wood behind his palace and fled to England.  The concordat abolished the bishopric, and the unfortunate town was not even given a sub-prefect, Lannion and Guingamp, which are larger and busier, being selected in preference.  But large buildings, fitted up so as to fulfil only one object, nearly always lead to the reconstitution of the object to which they were destined.  We may say morally what is not true physically:  when the hollows of a shell are very deep, these hollows have the power of re-forming the animal moulded in them.  The vast monastic edifices of Treguier were once more peopled, and the former seminary served for the establishment of an ecclesiastical college, very highly esteemed throughout the province.  Treguier again became in a few years’ time what St. Tudwal had made it thirteen centuries before, a town of priests, cut off from all trade and industry, a vast monastery within whose walls no sounds from the outer world ever penetrated, where ordinary human pursuits were looked upon as vanity and vexation of spirit, while those things which laymen treated as chimerical were regarded as the only realities.

It was amid associations like these that I passed my childhood, and it gave a bent to my character which has never been removed.  The cathedral, a masterpiece of airy lightness, a hopeless effort to realise in granite an impossible ideal, first of all warped my judgment.  The long hours which I spent there are responsible for my utter lack of practical knowledge.  That architectural paradox made me a man of chimeras, a disciple of St. Tudwal, St. Iltud, and St. Cadoc, in an age when their teaching is no longer of any practical use.  When I went to the more secular town of Guingamp, where I had some relatives of the middle class, I felt very ill at ease, and the only pleasant