In form the château is an irregular pentagon, perhaps modified from its original plan in 1420. Its orchid machicolations are remarkable both for their beauty and their utility. Seven towers, of which six remain, originally flanked its gates and walls. The new tower is a fine cylindrical keep of the fifteenth century. Over the entrance one still reads a tablet inscription as follows:
Ici est né
Le duc Arthur III.
le 24 Août, 1393
North of Vannes are Ploërmel and Josselin, two places which no one should leave out of the itinerary of Brittany. Neither is easily accessible by rail, but both are conveniently reached by road.
Ploërmel has a railway connection with the line to Brest by way of Rennes, and another with the line to Brest by way of Vannes, but Josselin is off the beaten track, and one makes his way from Ploërmel by omnibus or in a carriage.
Ploërmel and its “pardon” have inspired an opera, one of Meyerbeer’s most celebrated scores, known to English music lovers as “Dinorah,” but in French called “The Pardon of Ploërmel.” The town owes its name to an anchorite who, in the sixth century, retired here to a hermitage.
The history of Ploërmel during the middle ages was stormy. It was here that the edict expelling the Jews from Brittany was issued in 1240. In 1273 the Comte de Richemont—upon his return from the Crusades—founded at Ploërmel the first Carmelite convent known to France. This ancient convent, situated without the walls, escaped from the disasters which caused the city to be burned in 1347. The Calvinists came in time to have a temple here, in which they held two synods of their church.
To-day Ploërmel is a sleepy, old-world town, with two good inns, and not much except the fragmentary reminders of old walls and buildings to remind one of the parts played in other days.