This is the famous Mont Saint-Michel: au péril de la mer—in periculo mortis, as our fathers were wont to say in their strong and simple language, which, like nature, speaks in images.
The first time we saw St. Michael’s Mount was in sailing from Southampton to St. Malo, towards four o’clock one bright morning in June. The early sunshine lighted up the higher part of the rock, with all its wealth of natural and architectural inequalities, in one blaze of gold, while its base lay still in shadow. The only illuminated object, rising from a purplish haze, its brightness heightened by the blue of sea and sky, above, beneath, and around, it appeared rather like an ethereal vision than anything of earth.
Mount St. Michael! What memories are awakened only by the name, which is in itself a magical evocation of bygone centuries! Here, too, present realities still rival the memories of the past. With respect to its natural situation, as well as the share which human hands have had in its formation, there is about it much that defies comparison. It is at once a nest of legends, the home of religious thought, of prayer and meditation, as well as of learning and the arts. Mount St. Michael, being a monastery, a cathedral, and a fortress, is, in its triple unity, a summary of the three great elements of the life of France during all the poetic, heroic, and religious though stormy period of the middle ages.
Beaten into ruggedness by the storms of heaven, and discrowned of the golden statue of its patron archangel, the summit of the mount no longer springs upward into space with the same loftiness and lightness that used to strike so forcibly those who beheld it for the first time. The great human work thus seems as if arrested in its heavenward climbing; but, like other and grander majesties, St. Michael’s Mount has been uncrowned without undergoing any diminution of its glory, and it still presents its singular threefold aspect to the eye. On the western side the rock, stern and bare, seems to bid defiance to the hand of man; on the north a strong wall rises to the height of two hundred feet from base to battlements, strengthened with buttresses and flanked by bastions, pierced irregularly with pointed windows, and surmounted by a series of elegant arcades. To the south we find a rich display of architectural art, the exuberance of which is almost equalled by its caprice. Above all, and larger than all the rest, rises the church, with its forest of granite pinnacles and turrets overlooking the distant horizons of Normandy and Brittany, and, to use the language of the ancient chroniclers, imposing the fear of the archangel on the vast expanse of ocean—immensi tremor oceani.
In ages long anterior to any of its architectural constructions, and before the Christian era, this rock, much loftier then than now, rose from the midst of a vast forest which extended from Coutances to the rocks of Cesembre beyond St. Malo. This forest of Scissey, or Chesey (Sissiacum), took its name from the goddess Sessia, who was invoked at the time of sowing, and worshipped as the protectress of the corn while in the ground. The rock itself was called Tomba, and also Belenus, the name given by the Gauls and Druids to their sun-god,[[13]] and which was identical with Baal of the Phœnicians, Bel of the Assyrians, and the Apollo of the Greeks.
On Mount Belenus was a college of nine Druidesses, the eldest of whom, like the pythoness of Delphi, uttered oracles.[[14]] The Romans, in the course of their conquests in Gaul, made Bel give place to Jove: Tomba Belenus became Mons Jovis and was sacred to Jupiter.
In the year 708 Mount Belenus, which until that period had formed a part of the mainland of Armorica, was suddenly detached from it by a terrible catastrophe which spread desolation over the country. The sea, flowing in with tempestuous fury, overpassed its limits, submerged the ancient forest, as well as the inhabited parts of the coast, and, except when the tide is out, made an island of the Mount.[[15]] It was in this same year of 708, in the reign of Childebert II., that St. Aubert, the first Bishop of Avranches, in obedience to a vision built there a church dedicated to the Archangel St. Michael, and at the same time founded a monastery of clerks regular, who replaced the two or three hermits who had formerly lived in seclusion on the Mount.
This monastery acquired, later on, a fresh importance under the Dukes of Normandy. Duke Richard I. enlarged and made of it an abbey of the Order of St. Benedict. In 1002 or 1003, great part of the church and surrounding buildings being consumed by a fire which broke out, Duke Richard II. considerably enlarged as well as strengthened the foundation by the construction of the crypt, upon which the new edifice was raised. This crypt appears to be cut out of the solid rock, and is divided in two parts by a wall. Its low and vaulted roof is supported by massive pillars, round or square. A larger or grander subterranean vault does not perhaps exist, with its space of seventy metres in length by twelve in breadth, and its three aisles formed by about twenty pillars. The roof sustains the weight of two stories of building, the dormitory over the refectory, and the magnificent cloister over the Hall of the Knights.[[16]]
The original church soon becoming too small to contain the numerous pilgrims who flocked thither, the construction of a new one was begun by the Abbot Raoul, who, in 1048, raised the four pillars and the arch of the great tower. The nave, and that part of the monastery called La Merveille, were built by his successor, Renaud.
It was in 1091 that Henry, the youngest son of the Conqueror, was besieged in the fortress of Mont Saint-Michel by his brothers Robert and William. After the expulsion of the wretched John from Normandy, Abbot Jourdain wishing to preserve the Mount to the kings of England, Philip Augustus sent against him Guy de Thouars, who, after a lengthened siege, being unable to take it, set in on fire. It suffered severely from another conflagration in 1350, when struck by lightning during a terrible storm. The liberality of Philip de Valois restored the church and monastery to more than their former splendor.