In and out of Three Normandy Inns

by Anna Bowman Dodd

Other aspects of the hill, on this day of the pilgrimage, made those older dead-and-gone bands of pilgrims astonishingly real. On the tops of bastions, in the clefts of the rocks, beneath the glorious walls of La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected. The crude blues and scarlets of banners were fluttering, like so many pennants, in the light breeze. Beneath the improvised altar-roofs—strips of gay cloth stretched across poles stuck into the ground—were groups not often seen in these less fervent centuries. High up, mounted on the natural pulpit formed of a bit of rock, with the rude altar before him, with its bit of scarlet cloth covered with cheap lace, stood or knelt the priest. Against the wide blue of the open heaven his figure took on an imposing splendor of mien and an unmodern impressiveness of action. Beneath him knelt, with bowed heads, the groups of the peasant-pilgrims; the women, with murmuring lips and clasped hands, their strong, deeply-seamed faces outlined, with the precision of a Francesco painting, against the gray background of a giant mass of wall, or the amazing breadth of a vast sea-view; children, squat and chubby, with bulging cheeks starting from the close-fitting French bonnet; and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the older varieties, whose stiffened or rheumatic knees and knotty hands made their kneeling real acts of devotional zeal. There were a dozen such altars and groups scattered over the perpendicular slant of the hill. The singing of the choir-boys, rising like skylark notes into the clear space of heaven, would be floating from one rocky-nested chapel, while below, in the one beneath which we, for a moment, were resting, there would be the groaning murmur of the peasant groups in prayer.

All day little processions were going up and down the steep stone steps that lead from fortified rock to parish church, and from the town to the abbatial gateway. The banners and the choir-boys, the priests in their embroideries and lace, the peasants in cap and blouse, were incessantly mounting and descending, standing on rock edges, caught for an instant between a medley of perpendicular roofs, of giant gateways, and a long perspective of fortified walls, only to be lost in the curve of a bastion, or a flying buttress, that, in their turn, would be found melting into a distant sea-view.

All the hours of a pilgrimage, we discovered, were not given to prayer; nor yet is an incessant bowing at the shrine of St. Michel the sole other diversion in a true pilgrim's round of pious devotions. Later on in this eventful day, we stumbled on a somewhat startling variation to the penitential order of the performances. In a side alley, beneath a friendly overhanging rock and two protecting roof-eaves, an acrobat was making her professional toilet. When she emerged to lay a worn strip of carpet on the rough cobbles of the street, she presented a pathetic figure in the gold of the afternoon sun. She was old and wrinkled; the rouge would no longer stick to the sunken cheeks; the wrinkles were become clefts; the shrunken but still muscular legs were clad in a pair of tights, a very caricature of the silken webs that must once have encased the poor old creature's limbs, for these were knitted of the coarse thread the commonest peasant uses for the rough field stocking. Over these obviously home-made coverings was a single skirt of azure tarlatan, plentifully besprinkled with golden stars. The gossamer skirt and its spangles turned, for their début, a somersault in the air, and the knitted tights took strange leaps from the bars of a rude trapeze. The groups of peasants were soon thicker about this spectacle than they had gathered about the improvised altars. All the men who had passed the day in the taverns came out at the sound of the hoarse cracked voice of the aged acrobat. As she hurled her poor old twisted shape from swinging bar to pole, she cried aloud, "Ah, messieurs, essayez ça seulement!" The men's hands, when she had landed on her feet after an uncommonly venturous whirl of the blue skirts in mid-air, came out of their deep pockets; but they seasoned their applause with coarse jokes which they flung, with a cruel relish, into the pitifully-aged face. A cracked accordion and a jingling tambourine were played by two hardened-looking ruffians, seated on their heels beneath a window—a discordant music that could not drown the noise of the peasants' derisive laughter. But the latter's pennies rattled a louder jingle into the ancient acrobat's tin cup than it had into the priest's green netted contribution box.

"No, madame, as for us, we do not care for pilgrimages," was Madame Poulard's verdict on such survivals of past religious enthusiasms. And she seasoned her comments with an enlightening shrug. "We see too well how they end. The men go home dead drunk, the women are dropping with fatigue, et les enfants même se grisent de cidre! No; pilgrimages are bad for everyone. The priests should not allow them."

This was at the end of the day, after the black and blue swarm had passed, a weary, uncertain-footed throng, down the long street, to take its departure along the dike. At the very end of the straggling procession came the three acrobats; they had begged, or bought, a drive across the dike from some of the pilgrims. The lady of the knitted tights, in her conventional skirts and womanly fichu, was scarcely distinguishable from the peasant women who eyed her askance; though decently garbed now, they looked at her as if she were some plague or vice walking in their midst.

The verdict of Madame Poulard seemed to be the verdict of all Mont St. Michel. The whole town was abroad that evening, on its doorsteps and in its garden beds, repairing the ravages committed by the band of the pilgrims. Never had the town, as a town, been so dirty; never had the street presented so shocking a collection of abominations; never had flowers and shrubs been so mercilessly robbed and plundered—these were the comments that flowed as freely as the water that was rained over the dusty cobbles, thick with refuse of luncheon and the shreds of torn skirts and of children's socks.

At any hour of the day, of even an ordinary, uneventful day, to take a walk in the town is to encounter a surprise at every turning. Would you call it a town—this one straggling street that begins in a King's gateway and ends—ah, that is the point, just where does it end? I, for one, was never once quite certain at just what precise point this one single Mont St. Michel street stopped—lost itself, in a word, and became something else. That was also true of so many other things on the hill; all objects had such an astonishing way of suddenly becoming something else. A house, for example, that you had passed on your upward walk, had a beguiling air of sincerity. It had its cellar beneath the street front like any other properly built house; it continued its growth upward, showing the commonplace features of a door, of so many windows—queerly spaced, and of an amazing variety of shapes, but still unmistakably windows. Then, assured of so much integrity of character, you looked to see the roof covering the house, and instead-like the eggs in a Chinese juggler's fingers, that are turned in a jiffy into a growing plant—behold the roof miraculously transformed into a garden, or lost in a rampart, or, with quite shameless effrontery, playing deserter, and serving as the basement of another and still fairer dwelling. That was a sample of the way all things played you the trick of surprise on this hill. Stairways began on the cobbles of the streets, only to lose themselves in a side wall; a turn on the ramparts would land you straight into the privacy of a St. Michelese interior, with an entire household, perchance, at the mercy of your eye, taken at the mean disadvantage of morning dishabille. As for doors that flew open where you looked to find a bastion; or a school—house that flung all the Michelese voyous over the tops of the ramparts at play-time; or of fishwives that sprung, as full-armed in their kit as Minerva from her sire's brows, from the very forehead of fortified places; or of beds and settees and wardrobes (surely no Michelese has ever been able, successfully, to maintain in secret the ghost of a family skeleton!) into which you were innocently precipitated on your way to discover the minutest of all cemeteries—these were all commonplace occurrences once your foot was set on this Hill of Surprises.

There are two roads that lead one to the noble mass of buildings crowning the hill. 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. Michel is real, and not a part of a dream! Whether one enters through the dark magnificence of the great portals of the Châtelet; whether one mounts the fortified stairway, passing into the Salle des Gardes, passing onward from dungeon to fortified bridge, to gain the abbatial residence; whether one leaves the vaulted splendor of oratories for aerial passage-ways, only to emerge beneath the majestic roof of the Cathedral—that marvel of the early Norman, ending in the Gothic choir of the fifteenth century; or, as one penetrates into the gloom of the mighty dungeons where heroes and the brothers of kings, and saints and scientists have died their long death—as one gropes through the black night of the Crypt, where a faint, mysterious glint of light falls aslant the mystical face of the Black Virgin; as one climbs to the light beneath the ogive arches of the Aumônerie, through the wide-lit aisles of the Salle des Chevaliers, past the slender Gothic columns of the Refectory, up at last to the crowning glory of all the glories of La Merveille, to the exquisitely beautiful colonnades of the open Cloister the impressions and emotions excited by these ecclesiastical and military masterpieces are ever the same, however many times one may pass them in review. A charm, indefinable, but replete with subtle attractions, lurks in every one of these dungeons. The great halls have a power to make one retraverse their space, I have yet to find under other vaulted chambers. The grass that is set, like a green jewel, in the arabesques of the Cloister, is a bit of greensward the feet press with a different tread to that which skips lightly over other strips of turf. And the world, that one looks out upon through prison bars, that is so gloriously arched in the arm of a flying buttress, or that lies prone at your feet from the dizzy heights of the rock clefts, is not the world in which you, daily, do your petty stretch of toil, in which you laugh and ache, sorrow, sigh, and go down to your grave in. The secret of this deep attraction may lie in the fact of one's being in a world that is built on a height. Much, doubtless, of the charm lies, also, in the reminders of all the human life that, since the early dawn of history, has peopled this hill. One has the sense of living at tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions, emotions, sensations crowding upon the mind; of one's whole meagre outfit of memory, of poetic equipment, and of imaginative furnishing, being unequal to the demand made by even the most hurried tour of the great buildings, or the most flitting review of the noble massing of the clouds and the hilly seas.

The very emptiness and desolation of all the buildings on the hill help to accentuate their splendor. The stage is magnificently set; the curtain, even, is lifted. One waits for the coming on of kingly shapes, for the pomp of trumpets, for the pattering of a mighty host. But, behold, all is still. And one sits and sees only a shadowy company pass and repass across that glorious mise-en-scène. For, in a certain sense, I know no other mediaeval mass of buildings as peopled as are these. The dead shapes seem to fill the vast halls. The Salle des Chevaliers is crowded, daily, with a brilliant gathering of knights, who sweep the trains of their white damask mantles, edged with ermine, over the dulled marble of the floor; two by two they enter the hall; the golden shells on their mantles make the eyes blink, as the groups gather about the great chimneys, or wander through the column-broken space. Behind this dazzling cortège, up the steep steps of the narrow street, swarm other groups—the mediaeval pilgrim host that rushes into the cathedral aisles, and that climbs the ramparts to watch the stately procession as it makes its way toward the church portals. There are still other figures that fill every empty niche and deserted watch-tower. Through the lancet windows of the abbatial gateways the yeomanry of the vassal villages are peering; it is the weary time of the Hundred Years' War, and all France is watching, through sentry windows, for the approach of her dread enemy. On the shifting sands below, as on brass, how indelibly fixed are the names of the hundred and twenty-nine knights whose courage drove, step by step, over that treacherous surface, the English invaders back to their island strongholds. Will you have a less stormy and belligerent company to people the hill? In the quieter days of the fourteenth century, on any bright afternoon, you could have sat beside some friendly artist-monk, and watched him color and embellish those wondrous missals that made the manuscripts of the Brothers famous throughout France. Earlier yet, in those naive centuries, Robert de Torigny, that "bouche des Papes," would doubtless have discoursed to you on any subject dear to this "counsellor of kings"—on books, or architecture, or the science of fortifications, or on the theology of Lanfranc; from the helmeted locks of Rollon to the veiled tresses of the lovely Tiphaine Raguenel, Duguesclin's wife; from the ghastly rat-eaten body of the Dutch journalist, who offended that tyrant King, Louis XIV., to the Revolutionary heroes, as pitilessly doomed to an odious death under the gentle Louis Philippe—there is no shape or figure in French history which cannot be summoned at will to refill either a dungeon or a palace chamber at Mont St. Michel.