Once inside the gateway there is a narrow street with the entrance of the Poulard Hotel on one side, and small recesses with seats and tables for refreshments on the other; while the street itself is spanned a little higher up by a massive gateway called La Porte du Roi. In the season the hotel is generally crammed, and largely by the English. It is frequently necessary to get put up in one of the dépendances, and for sheer wonder it is hard to beat that which stands some fifty feet higher up the cliff. Entering the main hotel to go to this, one traverses many flights of stairs, and finally, coming out by a wholly unexpected door in the wall, finds oneself on the rugged face of the cliff, with rough-hewn stone steps stretching higher still to the number of fifty or sixty. These lead to a terrace whereon is a large white and red house; and from the terrace what a view! Sea and sky, and the great green scimitar of the French coast, low-lying in the distance, are the principal components. The dépendance is built absolutely plumb with the rock, so by leaning out of one of the long French windows in the front, one might fling a pebble into the murmuring lapping water below; and at night when above gleams “the intense clear star-sown vault of heaven,” and below the tide steals up, and there arises the gentle sucking of the tethered boats, one might well imagine oneself in Mohammed’s coffin, swung between heaven and earth.
LA PORTE DU ROI
Such are a few of the glories of the Mount when first approached; but the reverse side of the medal quickly shows itself. It is impossible to be there for a couple of hours without feeling oneself in a cage. To begin with, the mountain, like the moon, shows only one face, and try as one will, it is but unsatisfactory glimpses one can get of the other. Full of the ardour of discovery the visitor starts out. The little, crooked, narrow main street, if street it can be called, is full of picturesque bits, of visions of blue sky of an intense and dazzling brightness, framed in towering irregular walls. But no time is allowed for enjoyment of these peeps, for in the tiny shops full of penknives, trinkets, paperweights, and every atrocity that has ever been perpetrated under the name of souvenir, the women are waiting to pounce like spiders on any visitor, and pester him to buy their wares. There is no escape. One may pass on quickly, only within a very short time to be brought up by a high blank wall, baffled and annoyed, as visions of sitting on a rocky promontory, and enjoying the quiet evening light grow more remote. The result of a fresh start is to find oneself back on a higher level on the terrace of the dépendance, stopped by the hotel wall, and the entrance to a Musée, where two officials are no less persistent than the women in pressing visitors to come in. One may repeat the experiment, only to realise that, like Sterne’s starling, one “can’t get out.” In despair, one goes on to the walls, broad and flat, and free from shops, with bastion towers at intervals. For a moment irritation is quieted by the repetition of the view, for in front lies the sea, behind, towering into the air, that marvellous fortress of masonry. At the very end of the promenade there is a glimpse, over the high boundary wall, which hems one in so exasperatingly on the east, of growing trees and cool greenness, but admittance to this paradise is apparently unattainable.
In the middle of the day the odours rising from the insanitary pavements is intolerable; oh for a torrent of rain! It is marvellous the inhabitants do not suffer from typhoid fever, but they, like the rest of their countrymen, seem absolutely impervious to any ill-effects arising from lack of sanitation.
By this time one has realised that only a strip of the island, the front facing shorewards, is available; that the whole of the other side is cut off, and can only be seen by descending through the main entrance, and making one’s way at low tide across the wet sands, and fording numerous tidal rivers en route. It is difficult to see why doors should not be pierced in that horrible encircling barrier; a small charge might even be made, and visitors allowed access to the slopes beyond; steep they may be, but it is not beyond human power to cut a few terrace paths for walking.
THE STREET, MONT ST MICHEL
Yet there is still the abbey to be explored, with its endless ramifications. The wonder grows as it is examined, how could monks of the thirteenth century, with no mechanical contrivances, bring the ponderous blocks of stone across the sands, so treacherous and often impassable, raise them up five hundred feet, and plant them so that they stand with an air of finality, impregnable, unshakable? So steep, so massive are those walls, that to look up at them produces almost the same sensation as looking down over a great height: it makes one giddy. Over one corner there peeps a bit of lace work in stone, flying buttresses and decorated pinnacles; old also, older than the marvellous abbey itself. Below this are two rounded towers that guard the entrance to the chatelet. Abbey, fortress, church, and castle, St Michel comprises them all, and the masonry of the various buildings is so interwoven, so intricate, that it is impossible to separate one from the other by mere external looking. The island is small, but its abbey is vast, and much as has been said about it, familiar as are the representations of the Mount, very little has been written about its internal beauties; consequently most people go there expecting to find a ruin, but here is an almost perfect bit of masonry, perfect in construction and in repair.
The oldest part is the church, which is the pinnacle or crown of the island, standing at its highest point, more than four hundred feet above the sea-level. The first church on this lonely and windswept spot was built in the eighth century by the Bishop of Avranches, named Aubert, who declared that St Michael had appeared to him in a dream, and commanded him to undertake this task: before that time the islet had been called Mont de la Tombe, a name recalled in the isle of Tombelaine near. The place is called in old charters “St Michel au péril de la Mer,” and the name must have seemed more fitting then in its loneliness than now, when connected by the solid causeway to the mainland. The bishop’s church was a mere grotto, and of it nothing remains, though the good man’s own name is preserved in a little chapel of St Aubert on the inaccessible southern face of the rock. The incredible difficulty of the task was quite sufficient to ensure its repetition, for what man has done man will do. But the succeeding church, built in the reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, was swept away by fire, and the present one is the third on the same site, built in the course of the eleventh century. The surprising difficulty of the task may be gauged by the fact that only a very small part of the building rests on the solid rock, most of it being founded on a platform or platforms. It seems curious that the apex of the rock was not cut down to make a basis instead of being built up to the required level, but from whatever reason, the more arduous method was chosen. The choir fell down in 1421, and was rebuilt, so that it is of later date than the rest.