'Les liévres? mais certainement, nous avons des liévres. Nous irons dans la forêt, je prendrai mes chiens, et je vous montrerai de belles lièvres. J'en ai trois—Josephine, Alphonse, et le vieux Adolphe. Pour le moment Josephine est sacrée—elle est mère. Le petit Alphonse s'est marié avec elle, comme ça il est un peu père de famille; nous l'épargnerons, n'est-ce-pas, monsieur? Mais le vieux Adolphe, nous le tuerons; c'est déjà temps; voilà cinq ans que je le chasse!'
MONT ST. MICHAEL.
From the terrace of the Jardin des Plantes, where we are never tired of the view (although some residents complain that it becomes monotonous, because they are too far from the sea to enjoy its variety), the grey mount of St. Michael is ever before us, gleaming in the sunshine or looming through the storm. In our little sketch we have given as accurately as possible its appearance from Avranches on a summer's day after rain;[29] but it should be seen when a storm passes over it, when the same clouds that we have watched so often on summer nights, casting deep shadows on the intervening plain—some silver-lined that may have expressed hope, some black as midnight that might mean despair—come over to us like messengers from the great rock, and take our little promontory by storm. They come silently one by one, and gather round and fold over us; then suddenly clap their hands and burst with such a deluge of rain that it seems a matter for wonder that any little creeping human things could survive the flood. And it does us good; we are thoroughly drenched, our houses and gardens do not recover their fair presence for weeks; our little prejudices and foibles are well nigh washed out of us, and we are reminded of the dread reality of the lives of our neighbours on the island, who form a much larger colony than ourselves.[30]
'On no account omit a visit to Mont St. Michael,' say the guide-books, and accordingly we charter a carriage on a summer's morning and are driven in a few hours along a bad road, to the edge of the sands about a mile from the mount—the same sands that we saw depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, when William and Harold marched on Dinan. We choose a favourable time of the tide, and approach the gates at the foot of the mount dryshod.[31]
For a thousand years pilgrims have crossed these treacherous sands to lay their offerings at the feet of the Archangel Michael; Norman dukes and monks of the middle ages have paid their devotion at his shrine, and troops of pilgrims in all ages, even to this day, when a party of English school-girls come tripping across the bay, provided with a passport and a fee, bent upon having the terrors of the prison-house shewn to them as easily as the 'chamber of horrors' at Madame Tussaud's.
Before us, as we walk the last mile, the granite rock gradually becomes a mountain surrounded by a wide plain of sand, covered with clustering houses, towers, turrets, and fortifications, and surmounted by a Gothic church nearly 400 feet above the sea. There is a little town upon the rock, old, tumble-down, irregular, and picturesque, like Bastia in Corsica—constructed by a hardy sea-faring people, who have built their dwellings in the sides of this conical rock, like the sea-birds; and there is a little inn called the Lion d'or, with windows built out over the ramparts, from which we can see the shore.
On arriving at the island we pass under two ancient towers, and into 'the court of the Lion;' then to a third gate, with its towers and battlements, and frowning portcullis; and we see, as we pass, the lion (the insignia of the knights of Mont St. Michael) carved in stone, and set into the wall. We are received in the ancient guard-room by a 'young brother,' who has (shall it be repeated?) 'turned the guard-room into a cheerful bazaar for the sale of photographs, ivory carvings and the like.' We are on the threshold of the sanctuary, at the end of our pilgrimage; we offer up no prayers, as of old, for safe deliverance from peril, but we set to work at once, and 'invest in a pocketful of little presents, which another brother (on business thoughts intent) packs for us neatly in a pasteboard box.' We are shewn the apartments in the 'Tour des Corbins,' with its grand staircase, called 'l'escalier des exils,' and the crypt one hundred feet long, built by the monks in the eleventh century; we see the great Gothic hall of the Knights of Mont St. Michael, with its carved stone-work and lofty roof, supported by three rows of pillars, beautiful in proportion, and grand in effect, although the Revolution, as usual, has left us little but the bare walls; but, as we look down upon it from a gallery, it is easy to picture the splendour of a banquet of knights in the twelfth century, with the banners and insignia of chivalry ranged upon the walls.[32] But it is now a silent gloomy chamber, and the atmosphere is so close and the moral atmosphere so heavy withal, that we are glad to leave it, and to ascend to another story of this wonderful pile; through the beautiful Gothic cloisters, and out upon the cathedral roof, where we suddenly emerge upon a view more wonderful in its extent and flatness than anything, save that from the cathedral tower of Chartres; before us an horizon of sea, behind us the coast line, and the hills of Avranches; all around, a wide plain of sand, and northward, in the far distance, the low dark lines of the channel islands.
That 'Saint Michael's Mount has become a popular lion, and can only be seen under the vexatious companionship of a guide and a party' is true enough; nevertheless, we can stay at the inn on the island, and thus be enabled to examine and make drawings of some of the most beautiful thirteenth-century work in the cloisters that we shall meet with in Normandy. These cloisters and open arcades (supported by upwards of two hundred slender pillars) are carved and decorated with grotesque and delicate ornament, the capitals to the pillars are richly foliated, and the fringe that surrounds them has been well described as a 'wilderness of vines and roses, and dragons, winged and crowned.'
Like the churches in Normandy, the architecture of these monastic buildings is in nearly every style, from the simple romanesque of the eleventh century to the rich flamboyant of the fifteenth; and, like many of the churches, its history dates from the time when the Druids took possession of the island to the days when the storm of the Revolution broke upon its shores.
The ordinary time for visiting the rock is when the tide is out, but we have not seen Mont St. Michael to advantage until it is completely surrounded by water, as it is during the spring tides; it is then that, approached from the west, we may see it half-obscured by sea-foam, with its turrets shining through the clouds, and the heavy Atlantic waves booming against its foundations.