The house is amongst the most curious and interesting and ancient in Morlaix, but it is doomed.  The whole interior is going to rack and ruin, and it was at the peril of our lives that we scrambled up the staircase and over the broken floors, where a false step might have brought us much too rapidly back to terra firma.  Morlaix is not enterprising enough to restore and save this relic of antiquity.

The staircase, built on the same lines as the wonderful staircase in the Grand’ Rue, is, if possible, more refined and beautiful; but it has been allowed to fall into decay, and much of it is in a hopelessly worm-eaten condition.  H.C. was in ecstasies, and almost went down on his knees before the image of an angel that had lost a leg and an arm, part of a wing, and the whole of its nose; but very lovely were the outlines that remained.

“Like the Venus of Milo in the Louvre,” said H.C., “what remains of it is all the more precious for what is not.”

It was not so very long since we had visited the Louvre together, and he had remained rapt before the famous Venus for a whole hour, contemplating her from every point of view, and declaring that now he should never marry:  he had seen perfection once, and should never see it again.  This I knew to be nothing but the enthusiasm of the moment.  The very next pretty face and form he encountered, animated with the breath of life, would banish from his mind all allegiance to the cold though faultless marble image.

The exterior of the house of the Duchesse Anne was as remarkable as the interior for its wonderful antiquity, its carvings, its statues and grotesques, its carved pilasters between the windows, each of different design and all beautiful, its gabled roofs and its latticed panes that had long fallen out of the perpendicular.  Both this and the next house were closed; and it was heartbreaking to think that perhaps on our next visit to Morlaix empty space would here meet our gaze, or, still worse, a barbarous modern aggression.

Few towns now, comparatively speaking, possess fifteenth century remains, and those few towns should preserve them as amongst their most cherished treasures.

Morlaix is still amongst the most favoured towns in this respect.  Go which way you will, and amongst much that is modern, you will see ancient houses and nooks and corners that delight you and take you back to the Middle Ages.  Now it will be an old house in the market-place that has escaped destruction; now a whole court up some narrow turning, too out-of-the-way to have been worthy of demolition; and now it will be a whole street, like the Grand’ Rue, which has been preserved, no doubt of deliberate intent, as being one of the most typical fifteenth century streets in the whole of France, an ornament and an attraction to the town, raising Morlaix out of the commonplace, and causing antiquarians and many others to visit it.