[30] During the last few years the prisoners have all been removed from Mont St. Michael.
[31] The sands are so shifting and variable, that it is impossible to cross with safety, excepting by well-known routes, and at certain times of the tide; many lives, even of the fishermen and women, have been lost on these sands.
[32] It a irresistible, here, not to compare in our minds, with these twelfth-century relics of magnificence and festivity, certain emblazoned 'civic banquets,' and the gay 'halls by the sea,' with which the child (old or young) of the nineteenth century is enraptured—the former being the realities of a chivalrous epoch; the latter, masquerades or money speculations, of a more advanced century. The comparison may be considered unjust, but it is one that suggests itself again and again, as typical of a curiously altered state of society and manners.
[33] The latest, and perhaps the most complete, description of Mont St Michael, will be found in the 'People's Magazine' for August, 1869.
[34] French artists flock together in the valleys of the Seine and the Somme, like English landscape painters at the junction of the Greta and the Tees—Mortain and Vire not being yet fashionable. It is hard, indeed, to get English artists out of a groove; to those who, like ourselves, have had to examine the pictures at our annual Exhibitions, year by year, somewhat closely, the streams in Wales are as familiar on canvas, as 'Finding the Body of Harold.'
[35] We speak of Mortain as we found it a few years ago; its sanitory arrangements have, we understand, been improved, but people are not yet enthusiastic about Mortain as a residence.
[36] Notwithstanding this apparent indifference to landscape, we remember finding at a country inn, the walls covered with one of Troyon's pictures (a hundred times repeated in paper-hanging); a pretty pastoral scene which Messrs. Christie would have catalogued as 'a landscape with cattle.'
[37] The neatness and precision with which they make their piles of stones at the roadside will be remembered by many a traveller in this part of Normandy. They accomplish it by putting the stones into a shape (as if making a jelly), and removing the boards when full; and, as there are no French boys, the loose pile remains undisturbed for months.
[38] Submitting to the exigencies of publishing expediency, we have been unable to have this drawing reproduced on wood; although we were anxious to draw attention to the bold forms of rocks which crown these heights, and to the line old trees which surround the castle.
[39] There are' deeds of valour' (according to the affiches) to be witnessed in these days at Falaise; we once saw a woman here, in a circus, turning somersaults on horseback before a crowd of spectators. The people of Falaise cannot be accused of being behind the age; one gentleman advertises as his specialité,' the cure of injuries caused by velocipedes'!