In and out of Three Normandy Inns

by Anna Bowman Dodd

To awake on a hill-top at sea. This was what morning brought.

Crowd this hill with houses plastered to the sides of rocks, with great walls girdling it, with tiny gardens lodged in crevices, and with a forest tumbling seaward. Let this hill yield you a town in which to walk, with a street of many-storied houses; with other promenades along ramparts as broad as church aisles; with dungeons, cloisters, halls, guard-rooms, abbatial gateways, and a cathedral whose flying buttresses seemed to spring from mid-air and to end in a cloud—such was the world into which we awoke on the heights of Mont St. Michel.

The verdict of the shore on the hill had been a just one; this world on a rock was a world apart. This hill in the sea had a detached air—as if, though French, at heart a true Gaul, it had had from the beginning of things a life of adventure peculiar to itself. The shore, at best, had been only a foster-mother; the hill was the true child of the sea. Since its birth it has had a more or less enforced separateness, in experience, from the country to which it belonged. Whether temple or fortress, whether forest-clad in virginal fierceness of aspect, or subdued into beauty by the touch of man's chisel, its destiny has ever been the same—to suffice unto itself—to be, in a word, a world in miniature.

The Mont proved by its appearance its history in adventure; it had the grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features, whether of rock or of more plastic human mould—that have been carved by the rough handling of experience.

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; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills. It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud, "See what we can do, against your tempests and your futile tides—when we try."

On that particular morning, the taunt seemed more like an epithalamium—such marriage-lines did sea and sky appear to be reading over the glistening face of the rock. June had pitched its tent of blue across the seas; all the world was blue, except where the sun smote it into gold. To eyes in love with beauty, what a world at one's feet! Beneath that azure roof, toward the west, was the world of water, curling, dimpling, like some human thing charged with the conscious joy of dancing in the sun. Shoreward, the more stable earth was in the Moslem's ideal posture—that of perpetual prostration. The Brittany coast was a long, flat, green band; the rocks of Cancale were brown, but scarcely higher in point of elevation than the sand-hills; the Normandy forests and orchards were rippling lines that focussed into the spiral of the Avranches cathedral spires: floating between the two blues, hung the aerial shapes of the Chaunsey and the Channel Islands; and nearer, along the coast-line, were the fringing edges of the shore, broken with shoals and shallows—earth's fingers, as it were, touching the sea—playing, as Coleridge's Abyssinian maid fingered the dulcimer, that music that haunts the poet's ear.

We were seated at the little iron tables, on the terrace. We were sipping our morning coffee, beneath the plane-trees. The terrace, a foot beyond our coffee-cups, instantly began its true career as a precipice. We, ourselves, seemed to have begun as suddenly our own flight heavenward—on such astonishing terms of intimacy were we with the sky. The clapping close to our ears of large-winged birds; the swirling of the circling sea-gulls; the amazing nearness of the cloud drapery—all this gave us the sense of being in a new world, and of its being a strangely pleasant one.

Suddenly a cock's crow, shrill and clear, made us start from the luxurious languor of our contentment; for we had scarcely looked to find poultry on this Hill of Surprises. Turning in the direction of the homely, familiar note, we beheld a garden. In this garden walked the cock—a two-legged gentleman of gorgeous plumage. If abroad for purely constitutional purposes, the crowing chanticleer must be forced to pass the same objects many times in review. Of all infinitesimal, microscopic gardens, this one, surely, was a model in minuteness. Yet it was an entirely self-respecting little garden. It was not much larger than a generous-sized pocket handkerchief; yet how much talent—for growing—may be hidden in a yard of soil—if the soil have the right virtue in it. Here were two rocks forming, with a fringe of cliff, a triangle; in that tri-cornered bit of earth a lively crop of growing vegetables was offering flattering signs of promise to the owner's eye. Where all land runs aslant, as all land does on this Mont, not an inch was to be wasted; up the rocks peach and pear-split trees were made to climb—and why should they not, since everything else—since man himself must climb from the moment he touches the base of the hill?

Following the cock's call, came the droning sweetness of bees; the rose and the honeysuckle vines were loading the morning air with the perfume of their invitations. Then a human voice drowned the bees' whirring, and a face as fresh and as smiling as the day stood beside us. It was the voice and the face of Madame Poulard, on the round of her morning inspections. Our table and the radiant world at her feet were included in this, her line of observations.

"Ah, mesdames, comme vous savez bien vous placer!—how admirably you understand how to place yourselves! Under such a sky as this—before such a spectacle—one should be in the front row, as at a theatre!"