Michelet’s was not wholly a cheerful view. He was rather a gloomy man, it would seem, but it is perhaps proper enough to record his views here, as most of us will praise this wonderful work to the limit of our imagination.
Really Mont St. Michel is not of Brittany. To-day the changing of the boundary westward to the little river Couesnon brings it just over the line into Normandy, though both ramblers in Normandy and ramblers in Brittany may properly enough include it in their itineraries, and should do so.
To such spirits as like that sort of thing, there is a way open to the landing, high up in the tower of the abbey, whence there is a wonderful view. Michelet wrote of it, on the occasion of a visit, that it was a place for fools; that he knew no spot more suitable to bring on an attack of vertigo.
Michelet’s description of the quicksands which surround the mount is distinctly good. The native will tell you that you must not venture upon them, but he himself does so, and nothing happens. In spite of this, let the visitor so much as leave the causeway a dozen yards—to focus his camera—and a half-dozen burly fellows will hurl themselves upon him and drag him back, declaring they have saved his life, which means that one ultimately pays them something; a franc each is about the price that they apparently consider a life worth. Sometimes some poor soul is engulfed, but it is a first-class scare in most instances. Michelet says of these quicksands (“cendre blanche”), “It is not land; it is not sea; I myself only just escaped being engulfed.”
As a sort of side-show to the wonderful Abbey of Mont St. Michel is the stern and barren Isle of Tombelaine.
It lies, also amid its own desert of sand or water, according to the state of the tide, about a mile, or perhaps a little more, to the north-east of the mount.
It is a simple islet of granite, uncultivated, and as wild as it always has been. It rises perhaps 125 feet above the sea-level, like a giant stepping-stone, between the mount and the neighbouring coast before Avranches in Normandy.
Its history is intimately bound with that of the mount itself, but to-day it has few, if any, visitors. It played a certain minor part in the war of the Hundred Years, when it served as a sturdy buttress for the English fleet.
From the tenth to the seventeenth century it was occupied by a religious colony from the abbey of the mount, and held a diminutive priory bearing the vocable of Our Lady la Gisant; “a gentle Madonna,” says an imaginative Frenchman, “standing beside the archangel with the sword.”
In the midst of the Marsh of Dol—the great Bay of Mont St. Michel—is a granite eminence some two hundred feet above the surrounding plain, at the summit of which is built the little village of Mont Dol. It is supposed to be the site of an ancient shrine consecrated to the druids.