osit the sacred image, houses followed next, and a little town
gradually formed, which the Comte de Porhoet surrounded with walls, and
Josselin, his son, endowed with his name, 1030. Such was the rise of
Josselin. A celebrated pilgrimage still exists to Josselin on Whit
Tuesday, resorted to by crowds of "aboyeuses" or barkers, people possessed
with this kind of epilepsy, said to be hereditary in several families, and
which is accounted for from the circumstance of a party of washerwomen
having refused a glass of water to the Vierge du Roncier, who went to them
disguised in the garb of a beggar. The merciless creatures set their dogs
upon the pretended mendicant, and thus brought down upon themselves and
their posterity this fearful malediction. The disease is supposed to
return periodically about Whitsuntide, and only to leave the afflicted
when they are carried forcibly to the sanctuary of Notre Dame to press
with their foaming lips the fragments still remaining of the ancient
miraculous statue which was burnt upon the public Place in the time of the
French Revolution.

We left Ploermel at four o'clock in the morning for Montfort-sur-Mer,
passing through Plelan; while the horses baited at a little auberge we got
some hot coffee, and found a good fire in the kitchen. The landlady, shut
in her "lit clos," did not disturb herself, but occasionally put out her
head to give directions for our breakfast. On the left of the road is the
forest of Paimpont, which formerly extended from Montfort to Rostrenan, a
kind of neutral desert land, called Broceliande, and famous, under that
name, in the history of King Arthur. It was the theatre of the fairies'
most wondrous enchantments. Here was the fountain of Youth and also that
of Barenton, where they came every day to draw water in an emerald basin.
Here, too, the enchanted Merlin has lain sleeping for centuries,
enthralled by his pupil the fairy Viviana, who has cast a spell upon her
master she knows not how to break.

Montfort, where we joined the railway, is celebrated for the legend of the
duck and its ducklings, and was the residence of the De Montfort family
until Guy Comte de Laval and Sire de Montfort married Francoise de Dinan,
widow of the unfortunate Gilles de Bretagne, when the Montforts left their
paternal demesne for the chateaux of Laval, Vitre, and Chateaubriant.

The railway took us to Rennes, an uninteresting modern French town, the
old town was burnt down in 172