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ANATOLE LE BRAZ, Professor of French Literature, University of Rennes, Brittany; author of La Légende de la Mort, Au Pays des Pardons, &c. (Translation -John Bruno Hare) RENNES
November, 1, 1910.

Quite lately, in the course of an autumn pilgrimage to the hallucinatory forest of Paimpont (or Brocéliande), still haunted throughout by the great memories of Celtic legend, I encountered beneath the thick foliage of the Pas-du-Houx, a woman gathering faggots, with whom I did not fail, as you may well imagine, to enter into conversation.--One of the first names I uttered was naturally that of Vivian.

'Vivian!' cried out the poor old woman. 'Ah! a blessing on her, the good Lady! for she is as good as she is beautiful . . . . Without her protection my good man, who works at woodcutting, would have fallen, like a wolf, beneath the keepers' guns. . . .' And she began to narrate to me 'as how' her husband, something of a poacher like all the woodcutters of these districts, had one night gone to watch for a roebuck in the neighbourhood of the Butte-aux-Plaintes, and had been caught red-handed by a party of keepers. He sought to fly: the keepers fired. A bullet hit him in the thigh: he fell, and was making ready to let himself be killed on the spot, rather than surrender, when there suddenly interposed between him and his assailants a kind of very thick mist which covered everything--the ground, the trees, the keepers, and the wounded man himself. And he heard a voice coming out of the mist, a voice gentle like the rustling of leaves, and murmuring in his ear: 'Save thyself, my son: the spirit of Vivian will watch over thee till thou hast crawled out of the forest.'

'Such were the actual words of the fairy,' concluded the faggot-gatherer. And she crossed herself devoutly, for pious Brittany, as you know, reveres fairies as much as saints.