IV.
The whole scheme of the wonderful memorial that fascinates the eye of the latter-day tourist owed its conception to this eleventh-century abbot, and surely no heaven-born architect ever conceived a more audacious plan. His project was not merely to occupy the limited space on the summit of the Mount with his religious buildings, but to start far down the sides of the rock, and, by utilising the Mount just as the sculptor makes use of a skeleton frame whereon to plaster the clay in which he models his statue, so to rear upward gigantic walls and buttresses which at the top would carry a huge platform to hold the superstructures, creating thus a collection of vast buildings with the live rock thrust up in the centre for foundation. It is to the glory of Saint Michael that for no less than five centuries this colossal scheme of Hildebert's was carried out with absolute unity of purpose by his successors, an achievement only possible among religious workers. The result was that this lonely Mount gradually became clothed with a series of most beautiful buildings, which to the eye of the beholder seem to have grown by some natural process out of the rock itself.
GENERAL VIEW OF MONT ST. MICHEL
To the student of architecture it would be impossible to mention any monument more worthy of study than this. Not only do we find within its innumerable cloisters, crypts, and halls, specimens of the purest Gothic that exists, but at every turn we are presented with structures that conform to the very highest ideals of art, in being at once useful and beautiful. There is not a single buttress, not a window, not an arch, not a pillar, that does not discharge some duty, and the removal of which would not weaken in some degree a part of the scheme.