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.
Three times did the vision of St. Michael 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 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 aërial passageways, 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 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.
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 a tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions, emotions, sensations crowding upon the mind; of one's whole meager 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-scéne.
For, in a certain sense, I know no other medieval 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 cortege, up the steep steps of the narrow streets, swarm other groups—the medieval pilgrim host that rushes into 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 fixt 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.