My mother was in every respect, whether as regarded her ideas or her associations, one of the old school.  She spoke Breton perfectly, and had at her fingers’ ends all the sailors’ proverbs and a host of things which no one now remembers.  She was a true woman of the people, and her natural wit imparted a wonderful amount of life to the long stories which she told and which few but herself knew.  Her sufferings did not in any way affect her spirits, and she was quite cheerful the afternoon of her death.  Of an evening I used to sit with her for an hour in her room, with no other light—­for she was very fond of this semi-obscurity—­than that of the gas-lamp in the street.  Her lively imagination would then assume free scope, and, as so often happens with old people, the recollections of her early days came back with special force and clearness.  She could remember what Treguier and Lannion were before the Revolution, and she would describe what the different houses were like, and who lived in them.  I encouraged her by questions to wander on, as it amused her and kept her thoughts away from her illness.

Upon one occasion we began to talk of the hospital, and she gave me the complete history of it.  “Many changes,” to use her own words, “have occurred there since I first knew it.  No one need ever feel any shame at having been an inmate of it, for the most highly respected persons have resided there.  During the First Empire, and before the indemnities were paid, it served as an asylum for the poor daughters of the nobles, who might be seen sitting out at the entrance upon cane chairs.  Not a complaint ever escaped their lips, but when they saw the persons who had acquired possession of their family property rolling by in carriages, they would enter the chapel and engage in devotions so as not to meet them.  This was done not so much to avoid regretting the loss of goods, of which they had made a willing sacrifice to God, as from a feeling of delicacy lest their presence might embarrass these parvenus.  A few years later the parts were completely reversed, but the hospital still continued to receive all sorts of wreckage.  It was there that your uncle, Pierre Renan, who led a vagabond life, and passed all his time in taverns reading to the tipplers the books he borrowed from us, died; and old Systeme, whom the priests disliked though he was a very good man; and Gode, the old sorceress, who, the day after you were born, went to tell your fortune in the Lake of the Minihi; and Marguerite Calvez, who perjured herself and was struck down with consumption the very day she heard that St. Yves had been implored to bring about her death within the year."[1]

“And who,” I asked her, “was that mad woman who used to sit under the screen, and of whom Guyomar and myself were so afraid?”

Reflecting a moment to remember whom I meant, she replied, “Why, she was the daughter of the flax-crusher.”

“Who was he?”