II.
To begin with, I take it for granted that the reader, if he or she has not already visited Mont St. Michel, is at least aware that it is situated in the bay of the same name, near the point where the coasts of Normandy and Brittany merge, and thus some forty-three miles south-east of Jersey. The story of Mont St. Michel, even had the hand of man never reared upon the rock one of the most remarkable structures the human mind has conceived, could scarcely have failed to be interesting. During the Roman occupation of France, or Gaul as it was then called, the great stretch of sea that lies to-day between the Mount and Jersey was then a vast forest, through which some fourteen miles of Roman military road were constructed. But in the third century the invasion of the sea compelled the Romans to alter the course of their road, and in the next century both the Mount and the small island of Tombelaine, which lies scarcely two miles away, were isolated at high tide. So on from century to century the sea has gradually eaten away this part of Normandy, until now some hundred and ninety square miles of land are entirely submerged at high tide. This alone is sufficient to invest the Mount with a peculiar interest, for one can stand upon it to-day and, gazing far away to sea, contemplate the absolute mastery of Neptune, whose ravages have left of all the great forest of Scissy nothing more than a handful of trees growing sturdily among the rocks on the north side of the Mount.
But it is the human interest attaching to Mont St. Michel that outweighs everything else. The rock is steeped in religious lore, and in the annals of war there is no place in France more historic. Originally a monastery, it became in time an impregnable fortress as well; the rough warrior lived side by side upon it with the studious monk, and there the clash of battle was as regular an occurrence for years on end as the mass and vespers. In its old age it became a prison, one of the most dreaded in a land of terrible prisons, and just as it had been absolutely impregnable to attack (the English without success besieging it for eleven years in the fifteenth century), so was it an inviolable prison, only one man ever having been able to effect his escape, and even in his case escape would have been impossible but for the facilities unconsciously placed in his hands by his gaolers.