Everything, therefore, predisposed me towards romanticism, not in form, for I was not long in understanding that this is a mistake, that though there may be two modes of feeling and thinking there can be but one form of expressing these feelings and thoughts—­but towards romanticism of the mind and imagination, towards the pure ideal.  I was an offshoot from the old idealist race of the most genuine growth.  There is in the district of Goelo or of Avangour, on the Trieux, a place called the Ledano, because it is there that the Trieux opens out and forms a lagoon before running into the sea.  Upon the shore of the Ledano there is a large farm called Keranbelec or Meskanbelec.  This was the head quarters of the Renans, who came there from Cardigan about the year 480, under the leadership of Fragan.  They led there for thirteen hundred years an obscure existence, storing up sensations and thoughts the capital of which has devolved upon me I can feel that I think for them and that they live again in me.  Not one of them attempted to hoard, and the consequence was that they all remained poor.  My absolute inability to be resentful or to appear so is inherited from them.  The only two kinds of occupation which they knew anything of were to till the land or to steer a boat on the estuaries and archipelagos of rocks which the Trieux forms at its mouth.  A short time previous to the Revolution, three of them rigged out a bark, and settled at Lezardrieux.  They lived together on the bark, which was for the best part of her time laid up in a creek of the Ledano, and they sailed her when the fit took them.  They could not be classed as bourgeois, for they were not jealous of the nobles:  they were well-to-do sailors, independent of every one.  My grandfather, one of the three, took another step towards town life; he came to live at Treguier.  When the Revolution broke out, he showed himself to be a sincere but honourable patriot.  He had some little money, but, unlike all others in the same position as himself, he would not buy any of the national property, holding that this property had been ill-gotten.  He did not think it honourable to make large profits without labour.  The events of 1814-15 drove him half mad.

Hegel had not as yet discovered that might implies right, and in any event he would have found it difficult to believe that France had been victorious at Waterloo.  The privilege of these charming theories, of which by the way I have had rather too much, were reserved for me.  On the evening of March 19th, 1815, he came to see my mother and told her to get up early the next morning and look at the tower.  And surely enough he and several other patriots had during the night, upon the refusal of the clerk to give them the keys, clambered up the outside of the steeple at the risk of breaking their necks a dozen times over and hoisted the national flag.  A few months later, when the opposite cause was triumphant, he literally lost his senses.  He would go about in the street