‘You remember the little village of Trédarzec, whose steeple we could see from the turret of our house? Less than a quarter of a league from the village, made up at that time almost entirely of the church, the village hall and the parsonage, rose the manor-house of Kermelle. It was a manor-house like so many others, a well-kept farm, old in appearance, surrounded by a long high wall of a beautiful grey colour. The courtyard was approached by a large arched gate surmounted by a tiled roof, at the side of which was a smaller door for everyday use. A dovecot, a turret, two or three well-built windows, almost like church windows, indicated a nobleman’s house, one of those old castles which were inhabited before the revolution by a class of people whose character and habits it is nowadays impossible to imagine.

‘These country nobles were peasants like the others, but chief of the others. In old times there was only one of them in each parish; they were the leaders of the population: no one contested their right, and they were accorded great honour. But already, about the time of the Revolution, they had become scarce. The peasants considered them as the lay chiefs of the parish, as the priest was the ecclesiastical chief. The one who lived at Trédarzec, about whom I am telling you, was a fine old man, tall and vigorous, like a young man, with a frank honest face. He wore his hair long, held up by a comb, and only let it down on Sundays when he was taking communion. I see him still (he used to come to our house at Tréguier), serious, grave, rather sad, for he was the only one of his kind. These petty pedigreed nobility had disappeared for the most part: the rest had long ago gone to live in town. All the countryside adored him. He had a pew set apart for him in church: every Sunday he was seen there, seated in the first row of the faithful, with his old-fashioned attire and his ceremonial gloves, which reached almost to his elbow. At the moment of communion he started at the bottom of the choir, loosened his hair, laid his gloves on a little credence table set ready for him near the screen, and crossed the choir, alone, without abating a jot of his high carriage. Nobody went to the communion table until he was back in his place, and until he had finished pulling on his gauntlets again.

‘He was very poor: but he hid it as a duty to his rank. Those country nobility had formerly certain privileges which helped them to live a little differently from the peasants: all that had gone with the times. Kermelle was in very embarrassed circumstances. His rank as a nobleman forbade him to work in the fields: he shut himself up in his house all day, and busied himself behind closed doors with an occupation which did not require open air. When flax is soaked it has to undergo a sort of decortication which only permits the textile fibre to remain. It was this task in which poor Kermelle considered he could engage without loss of dignity. No one saw him: professional honour was saved; but everybody knew it, and as in those days everybody had a nickname, he was soon known in the countryside under the name of the flax pounder. This nickname, as usually is the case, took the place of his real name, and it was in this fashion that he was universally designated.

‘He was like a living patriarch. You would laugh if I told you what it was with, that the flax pounder supplemented the insufficient remuneration of his poor little trade. People believed that, as chief, he was the depositary of the power of his blood, that he possessed in a high degree the gifts of his race, and that he could, by means of his saliva and the touch of his hands, raise it up when it was weakened. They were persuaded that, to accomplish cures of this kind, an enormous number of quarterings of nobility were needed, and he alone had them. His house was surrounded, on certain days, by people come from twenty leagues round about. When a child was late in walking, with feeble limbs, it was brought to him. He moistened his finger in his saliva, traced this anointing on the child’s loins which were thereby strengthened. What do you expect? People had faith in those days: men were so simple and so good! For nothing in the world would he have expected payment, and since the people who came, were too poor to pay the debt in money, they would offer him as a present a dozen eggs, a bit of fat bacon, a handful of linen, a basketful of potatoes, a pat of butter, some fruit. He accepted. The town nobility jeered at him, but they were very wrong. He knew the countryside: he was the soul and the incarnation of it.

‘At the time of the Revolution, he emigrated to Jersey: one doesn’t quite see why; certainly no one would have done him any harm, but the nobility of Tréguier said to him that the king commanded it, and he went away with the others. He returned early, found his old house, which no one had wanted to occupy, in the state he had left it. At the time of the indemnities people tried to persuade him that he had lost