e, and in the eyes of people
of vivid imagination they may well seem to be actually alive. I
remember in particular one good man, who was not more daft than the
rest, who always made off to the churches in the evening when he got
the chance. The next morning, he was invariably found in the building,
half dead with fatigue. He had spent the whole night in detaching the
figures of Christ from the crosses and drawing the arrows out of the
bodies of St. Sebastian.

My mother, who was a Gascon on one side (her father was a native of
Bordeaux), told these anecdotes with much wit and tact, passing
deftly between what was real and what was fanciful, so as to leave
the impression that these things were only true from an ideal point
of view. She clung to these fables as a Breton; as a Gascon she
was inclined to laugh at them, and this was the secret of the
sprightliness and gaiety of her life. This state of things has been
the means of giving me what little talent I may have for historical
studies. I have derived from it a kind of habit of looking below the
surface and hearing sounds which other ears do not catch. The essence
of criticism is to be able to realise conditions different from those
under which we are now living. I have been in actual contact with
the primitive ages. The most remote past was still in existence
in Brittany up to 1830. The world of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries passed daily before the eyes of those who lived in the
towns. The epoch of the Welsh emigration (the fifth and the sixth
centuries) was plainly visible in the country to the practised eye.
Paganism was still to be detected beneath a layer, often so thin as
to be transparent, of Christianity, and with the former were mixed
up traces of a still more ancient world which I afterwards came
upon again among the Laplanders. When visiting in 1870, with Prince
Napoleon, the huts of a Laplander encampment near Tromsoe, I felt some
of my earliest recollections live again in the features of several
women and children and in certain customs and traits of character. It
occurred to me that in ancient times there might have been admixtures
between the lost branches of the Celtic race and races like the
Laplanders which covered the soil upon their arrival. My ethnical
position would in this case be: "A Celt crossed with Gascon with a
slight infusion of Laplander blood." Such a condition of things
ought, if I am not mistaken, according to the theories of