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The faces of many of the passengers, on this grew pale, yet they stood firmly at their quarters. And now, once more, the pirate kept on her coarse. Still Captain Dinan would not fire. "Christison," said the captain, "we have someone who knows better how to fight for us than we do ourselves. See! if the pirate attempts that manoeuvre again, he will pay dearly for it."
But I now abandon that idea for several reasons; among others, because I succeeded in 1841 in tracing the Crag fauna southward in Normandy to within seventy miles of the Falunian type, near Dinan, yet found that both assemblages of fossils retained their distinctive characters, showing no signs of any blending of species or transition of climate.
Commerce was dead. From Rennes in the east to Hennebon in the west, and from Dinan in the north to Nantes in the south, there was no spot where a man's life or a woman's honor was safe. Such was the land, full of darkness and blood, the saddest, blackest spot in Christendom, into which Knolles and his men were now advancing.
All he could do was to send William the Marshal with a small force into Anjou, while he himself spread out westward to give Hugh of Dinan battle and save Avranches, if that might be. So it was that King Philip slipped in between him and Le Mans. By this time Richard was master of Tours, and himself on the way to Le Mans, nosing the air for William the Marshal. This was in the beginning of April.
About 1314, fifty years before Charles's accession, there was born at the castle of Motte-Broon, near Rennes, in a family which could reckon two ancestors amongst Godfrey de Bouillon's comrades in the first crusade, Bertrand du Guesclin, "the ugliest child from Rennes to Dinan," says a contemporary chronicle, flat-nosed and swarthy, thick-set, broad-shouldered, big-headed, a bad fellow, a regular wretch, according to his own mother's words, given to violence, always striking or being struck, whom his tutor abandoned without having been able to teach him to read.
An air of slow respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa at £150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or Biarritz.
My tongue is a blunt one, and fitter to shout word of command than to clear up such a matter as this, of which I can myself understand little. This, however, I know, that my wife is come of a very sainted race, whom God hath in His wisdom endowed with wondrous powers, so that Tiphaine Raquenel was known throughout Brittany ere ever I first saw her at Dinan.
Sir Walter Manny, in spite of the inferiority of his force, sallied out to relieve it, but it was taken before his arrival, and Don Louis had marched away to Dinan, leaving a small garrison in Conquet. It was again captured by Sir Walter, but finding it indefensible he returned with the whole of his force to Hennebon. Don Louis captured Dinan and then besieged Guerande.
The influence of the past is even more apparent in Brittany; and New York became something hardly credible when I found myself in a little hotel at which I had engaged rooms an hotel girdled by the ramparts and medieval towers of Dinan. I remained there for six weeks, during which time my book, to which I gave the name A Critical Examination of Socialism, was very nearly completed.
He had never asked to be born: he had no wish to live at all, if living involved all this misery. It had been bad enough in Dinan before his escape; but to tread back that weary road in proclaimed dishonour, exposed to contemptuous eyes at every halting-place, and to take up the burden again plus the shame it was unthinkable, and he came near to a hysterical laugh at the command.
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