Mont Saint-Michel

“ Without feeling their lights, you can never feel their shadows. These two halls at Mont-Saint-Michel are antechambers to the nave of Chartres; their fenestration, inside and out, controls the whole design. The lighting of the refectory is superb, but one feels its value in art only when it is taken in relation to the lighting of the hall, and both serve as a simple preamble to the romance of the Chartres windows. ”

“ One may choose the narrow street with its moss-grown steps, its curves, and turns; or one may have the broader path along the ramparts, with its glorious outlook over land and sea. Whichever approach one chooses, one passes at last beneath the great doors of the Barbican.
Three times did the vision of St. Michel appear to Saint Aubert, in his dream, commanding the latter to erect a church on the heights of Mont St. Michel to his honor. How many a time must the modern pilgrim traverse the stupendous mass that has grown out of that command before he is quite certain that the splendor of Mont St. ”

“ S. Michael's Mount is a grand upshoot of granite from the sea. As a rock it is far finer than its corelative in Brittany, but the buildings crowning the Cornish mount are vastly inferior to the magnificent pile on Mont Saint Michel. Nevertheless, those that now form the residence of Lord S. Levan are by no means insignificant or unworthy of their position. The masses of granite crag, especially to the west, are singularly bold, and if some of the modern work be poor in design, it might have been much worse. ”

“ But the magnificent opening description of "the fairy castle planted in the sea" [505] excuses, and is thrown up by, the sequel. Mont-Saint-Michel is not like Naples. When you have seen it, it is not your business to die, but to live and remember the sight of it; and, if you are lucky, your remembrance will have anticipated Maupassant's words, and be freshened by them. ”

“ The architect meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he could command, the mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in religion, over the masculine, military energy of the great hall below. The thirteenth century rarely let slip a chance to insist on this moral that love is law. Saint Francis was preaching to the birds in 1215 at Assisi, and the architect built this cloister in 1226 at Mont-Saint-Michel. ”

“ Nothing is sadder than the catastrophe of Gothic art, religion, and hope.
One looks back on it all as a picture; a symbol of unity; an assertion of God and Man in a bolder, stronger, closer union than ever was expressed by other art; and when the idea is absorbed, accepted, and perhaps partially understood, one may move on.
CHAPTER IV NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE From Mont-Saint-Michel, the architectural road leads across Normandy, up the Seine to Paris, and not directly through Chartres, which lies a little to the south. ”

“ Michael; or they may have been derived from a common origin. See Le Grand Dictionaire Historique, par M. Moreri, Paris edition of 1188, with the Supplement of 1735. In the 5th folio volume of the Dictionary, p. 193, and in the 2d. folio volume of the Supplement, p. 261, will be found these passages:
“Saint Michel ou Mont Saint Michel, en Latin Mons Sancti Michaelis in periculo Maris. Bourg de France en Normandie, avec une Abbaie celebre et un chateau. Sa situation est assez particuliere, sur un rocher qui s’etend au milieu d’une grand greve, que la mer couvre de son reflux. ”

“ It is the common habit of hills and mountains, as we all know, to turn disdainful as they grow skyward; they only too eagerly drop, one by one, the things by which man has marked the earth for his own. To stand on a mountain top and to go down to your grave are alike, at least in this—that you have left everything, except yourself, behind you. But it is both the charm and the triumph of Mont St. Michel, that it carries so much of man's handiwork up into the blue fields of air ”

“ Malo, and to the east the Bay of Mont St. Michel.
Michelet wrote of this famous mount off the Breton coast as follows:
“The gigantic rock is an abbey, a cloister, a fortress, and a prison, with exquisite sublimity and true dignity. It rises like a titanic tower, rock upon rock, keep upon keep, and century upon century. Below the monks; higher the iron cage of Louis XI. (who, it seems, left these details rather numerously about his domain) ; higher yet the cell of Louis XIV.; higher yet the prison of to-day. All is in a whirlwind; Mont St. Michel is a very sepulchre of peace.” ”

“ Michael's Mount in Cornwall. In physical structure there is a curious resemblance between the two mounts. Both are granite islands, and both so near the coast that at low water a dry passage is open to them from the mainland. The Mount on the Norman coast is larger and more distant from the coast than St. Michael's Mount, yet for all that their general likeness is very striking. Now Mont St. Michel was called Tumba at least as far back as the tenth century. Mabillon, in his “Annales Benedictini” (vol. ii. p. 18) , quotes from an ancient author the following explanation [pg 327] of the name. ”

“ The whole Mount still kept the grand style; it expressed the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe. ”

“ In the southwest point of Normandy, separated from Brittany only by a narrow and straight river, like the formal canals of Holland, stands the curious granite rock which is called Mont St. Michel. It is an isolated peak, rising abruptly out of a vast plain of sand to the height of nearly four hundred feet, and so precipitous toward the west that scarcely a root of grass finds soil enough in its weather-beaten clefts. At the very summit is built that wonderful church, the rich architecture and flying buttresses of which strike the eye leagues and leagues away, either on the sea or the mainland. ”

“ If the rock had only one-half of its historic and fantastically arranged buildings, it would still deserve considerably more than this fleeting attention paid to it by such a large proportion of the tourists. So many of these poor folk come to Mont St Michel quite willing to learn the reasons for its past greatness, but they do not bring with them the smallest grains of knowledge. ”

“ Sometimes some poor soul is engulfed, but it is a first-class scare in most instances. Michelet says of these quicksands (“cendre blanche”) , “It is not land; it is not sea; I myself only just escaped being engulfed.”
As a sort of side-show to the wonderful Abbey of Mont St. Michel is the stern and barren Isle of Tombelaine.
It lies, also amid its own desert of sand or water, according to the state of the tide, about a mile, or perhaps a little more, to the north-east of the mount.
It is a simple islet of granite, uncultivated, and as wild as it always has been. ”

“ One always goes upwards in Mont St. Michel, seeing the dark purplish-pink mass of the grand old church above you, with its many spires of sculptured stone. Stone steps lead to the ramparts. Here you can lean over the balustrade and look down upon the waste of sand surrounding Mont St. Michel. All is absolutely calm and noiseless. Immediately below is the town, its clusters of new gray-slate roofs mingling with those covered in yellow lichen and green moss; also the church of the village, looking like a child's plaything perched on the mountain-side. ”

“ Trevennack’s eye was fixed on him now more carefully and more earnestly, Tyrrel observed, than ever.
“I wonder why it is,” Eustace Le Neve interposed, to spare Cleer’s feelings, “that so many high places, tops of mountains and so forth, seem always to be dedicated to St. Michael in particular? He seems to love such airy sites. There’s St. Michael’s Mount here, you know, and Mont St. Michel in Normandy; and at Le Puy, in Auvergne, there’s a St. Michael’s Rock, and at ever so many other places I can’t remember this minute.” ”

“ As she rose from her knees she heard the evening gun from the Castle of Mont Orgueil, whither Michel was being borne by the Queen’s men. The vesper-bell had stopped. Through the wood came the salt savor of the sea on the cool sunset air. She threw back her head and walked swiftly towards it, her heart beating hard, her eyes shining with the light of purpose, her step elastic with the vigor of youth and health. A quarter-hour’s walking brought her to the cliff of the Couperon. ”

“ I am safe now, quite safe. Did the archangel St. Michel send thee?”
There was not a moment to be lost; Michel knew that full well. The moan of the sea was growing louder every minute, though he could not see its advancing line. There was no spot upon the sand that would not be covered before another hour was gone, and there was barely time, if enough, to get back to the Mont. He could not waste time or breath in talking to the child he held fast in his arms. A pale gleam of moonlight shone through the vapour, but of little use to him save to throw a ghostly glimmer across the sands. ”

“ Michel, a haunted ruin, built on the edge of a precipice, and shadowed over by the eternal forest. We repassed the vale of Servoz, a vale more beautiful, because more luxuriant, than that of Chamouni. Mont Blanc forms one of the sides of this vale also, and the other is inclosed by an irregular amphitheatre of enormous mountains, one of which is in ruins, and fell fifty years ago into the higher part of the valley; the smoke of its fall was seen in Piedmont, and people went from Turin to investigate whether a volcano had not burst forth among the Alps. ”

“ The attaches of the rival hotels are already awaiting the arrival of the early batch of sight-seers. All over the delicately tinted sands there are constantly moving shadows from the light clouds forming over the sea, and blowing freshly from the west there comes an invigorating breeze.
Before even the museum can have a real interest for us, we must go back to the early times when Mont St Michel was a bare rock; when it was not even an island, and when the bay of Mont St Michel was covered by the forest of Scissey. ”

“ It is not for the inspection of these ruins that we direct the stranger to ascend the hill, for they are too insignificant to merit attention, but it is for the purpose of his viewing the extensive prospect which its summit commands,—a wild expanse of waters occupying twenty-nine points of the compass!—From this spot also Saint Michael's Mount has a singularly fine effect, appearing as if placed in the centre of a lake at a distance from the ocean. ”

“ They are missed by all those who, instead of going by the picturesque and winding coast-road from Pontaubault, take the straight and dusty route nationale to Pontorson, and then turn to follow the tramway that has in recent years been extended along the causeway to the mount itself. If one can manage to make it a rather late ride along the coast-road just mentioned, many beautiful distant views of Mont St Michel, backed by sunset lights, will be an ample reward. ”

“ Religion, history, poetry, and painting, have all united in giving celebrity to St. Michael's Mount. The extraordinary sanctity of its monastery, the striking peculiarities of its form and situation, and the importance acquired by the many sieges it supported, or the almost endless pilgrimages it received, have so endeared it to the man of taste and the philosopher, that scarcely a spot is to be found in Europe, more generally known, or more universally interesting. ”

“ St. Michel, Mont, a remarkable islet in St. Michel Bay, SW. corner of Normandy, 18 m. W. of Avranches; is formed of a single cone of granite, 242 ft. high, crowned by a historic Benedictine monastery; on the lower slopes is built a little fortified town; a causeway 1 m. long joins it to the mainland.
St. Nazaire (26) , a flourishing seaport of France, on the Loire, 40 m. W. of Nantes, where large sums have been expended in improving its spacious docks to accommodate an increasing shipping-trade; its exports, brandy, coal, wheat, &c., are mainly from Nantes and the interior. ”

“ Then the entire population of these mountains flocks hither from the most distant heights and the most secluded valleys, so that church and village can scarcely contain the crowds. The legend is that on that day Saint Michael, although invisible, descends from the Eagle ridge and ploughs the earth with his flaming sword as he did visibly centuries ago, when his shrine was founded here. ”

“ The spire is modern, but gives a suggestion, at least, in viewing the city from a distance, of something of what a mediæval walled seaport, with its population huddled close beneath the shadow of the church, and within the city walls, must have been like. The best example of this which ever existed in mediæval France, and which exists to-day in a more than ordinary remarkable state of preservation, is the famous Mount St. Michel, a few miles only to the eastward, and famed of all, historian, ecclesiast, artist, and mere pleasure-seeker, alike. ”

“ It is a mass of granite rising from the sands, covering about twenty-five acres, and the top of the church which crowns it is elevated two hundred and thirty-eight feet. It is impossible by either pen or pencil to give an adequate idea of St. Michael's Mount—of the shattered masses of the rock itself, its watch-turrets and batteries, the turf and sea-plants niched in its recesses, and the gray, lichen-covered towers that rise from the summit. Cornish tradition says that the giant Cormoran built the first fortress here ”

“ The western shores are sprinkled with picturesque villages, churches, cottages, and villas; and near the eastern margin of the bay, a pile of rocks, supporting a venerable chapel on its summit, starts abruptly from the waves, and presents an appearance of a most singular and beautiful description—this is Saint Michael's Mount, an eminence equally celebrated in the works of the poet, the naturalist, the antiquary, and the historian. ”