Vernon Lee - Mont Saint-Michel

Vernon Lee

The Enchanted Woods

(1905)

MONT ST. MICHEL

WHEN the omnibus was due to take me from Mont St. Michel to the main land, I ran back to tip the maid of the little private house where the inn had billeted me, and asked for a glass of water. The old lady of the house, Mdlle. de Blangine, who was writing near her dining-room window, heard my request, and, calling to the maid, insisted on my having something in the water : a little fleur d'oranger . . . . This was the pleasantest and (such is human perverseness !) the most suggestive impression I derived from this historic place I had read so much about, and wanted so long to see.

The little house, just underneath the abbey, is on the southern side of the rock, covered with wild white clematis, big fig-trees growing in its scrambling garden ; and as I went to and fro my tidy little room, I had had glimpses of quaint eighteenth-century furniture, and antique warming-pans, like ornamental glowing suns, hanging up in the pantry. This charming old maiden lady with her aristocratic name, letting out rooms to Mme. Poulard Aîné's superfluous tourists ; never showing herself except to make that gracious hospitable offer at my departure ; I have often thought of her since. She has put a little human romance, in Balzac's gentler vein, into my recollections of the Mont St. Michel.

The first impression had been dreary : the brakes from the mainland crowded with jostling tourists ; the main street arched and turreted suspiciously like some cardboard "Old London" ; every alternate house a restaurant or shop for Souvenirs du Mont St. Michel ; then, once beyond the tourists' shouts, the endless evil-smelling steps and dust-heap corners, and ramparts with unvarying view of leagues of sad, wet sands. A hidden sunset was going on when I reached the top of the rock. I walked up and down, in and out of the desecrated abbey church, choked with dusty scaffoldings inside, and barricaded outside with unused cranes and trolleys ; and, for all this desecration of supposed repair, mouldy and green with damp. In front, below, stretched miles of grey sands to an invisible sea ; and over them hung a pall of leaden clouds with ladders of pale-grey beams. The tourists were at dinner in the various Poulard inns ; and the only living sound was the screech of greedy seagulls round the rock. Rarely in all my life has any place filled me with such overwhelming sadness and desire to rush away.

But descending from the Abbey, and skirting the little churchyard in the dusk, I stumbled upon a little half-hidden church, and entered. It was dark, irregularly spotted with candlelight for service, and unseen women were chanting a litany. A church, I imagine, quite modern and trivial ; but in that darkness, only the altar blazing, with vague sheen of gold from the procession banners hanging all round, and the scanty, scarce visible, congregation bending over the prie-dieux, it might have been of any time ; and made me realize, with reverence and tenderness, the reality of this place of mediaeval pilgrimage, this sanctuary, girt with quicksands, of "St. Michael in the Peril of the Sea," to whom Roland commended his soul when he perished.

This put me in conceit with Mont St. Michel, and made me a little indignant with myself. What ! I had wanted a place of pilgrimage for my own private sentimental delectation, strictly without pilgrims, or at best only ghostly pilgrims made for myself ! Fie upon such superfineness ! Mankind is always vulgar, for vulgarity is mere misapplication of its energies, or perhaps misapplication of our squeamishness ; and without mankind, vulgarity and all, no Mont St. Michel and no me to cavil about it. The Canterbury pilgrims, judging by some of the stories they related, were vulgar ; the pilgrims to Eleusis, from words dropped by Aristophanes, were even vulgarer ; and there is considerable lack of dignity and sweetness in the crowd of ladies celebrating the entombment of Adonis, in the account left by Theocritus. And are not tourists the modern and lay representatives of pilgrims, starting on their journey, however much they yell on the brakes and squabble for Mme. Poulard Aîné's omelette, with desires of spiritual improvement and vague, unwonted feelings of romance ?

This altered, and more humane, attitude of mind allowed me to take a certain pleasure, later in the evening, in watching trom the little garden gate the bands of tourists going from the eating-houses to their various resting-places for the night : moving blobs of Japanese lanterns, red and orange and green, and yellow lights and grotesque shadows moving along the old wooden house fronts, and across the turrets and battlements, with snatches of comic songs and goblin laughter. Thus, no doubt, the rollicking pilgrims of old, for whom the abbey was built, and the great vaulted and pillared refectories and foresteries.

The most painful circumstance, I mused next morning, as I watched the bands of shopkeepers from Paris, and peasants in blouses, and peasant women in delicate starched caps — the most painful circumstance about pilgrims, antique or mediaeval or modern (and then called tourists), is that the thing which attracts them most, more than crowding on the brake, and shouting in the street, and fighting for the omelettes, happens to be the gruesome element — the horrid gaping wounds of young Adonis and his various divine brothers or successors ; the place where Becket was murdered, the stone whence St. Paul's decollated head made the three jumps, the cupboard where Catherine de Medicis kept her poisons, the planks still stained with Rizzio's blood ; and here, at Mont St. Michel, the dungeons.

It had cost me half-an-hour's parley in an office, much misrepresentation of myself as a student of architecture, and a good silver piece of a hundred sous, to be exempted from the sight and full-length description of those dungeons. "The dungeons form an integral portion of the celebrated Abbey of Mont St. Michel and of its history ; the official guides are under strictest orders to conduct all visitors to them between the church and the refectories; if Madame therefore desires to see the cloisters, Madame cannot logically be exempted from the visit of the dungeons." Madame, however, as stated above, being possessed of an illogical mind, circumvented the logical French nation on this occasion, and sat for a couple of hours in the cloisters while party after party streamed through, at regular intervals, to and fro the dungeons.

The official guide turned the key on me every time, feigning not to notice my presence ; and the solitude and silence between each clattering and vociferating incursion was only the more absolute. The charm of that cloister (to my mind, far greater than that of its elaborate granite carvings) is due to its being overlooked on one side by the pinnacles and flying buttresses, the whole blackened rockery, with haunting gargoyles, of the apse of the abbey church ; while, by a very wide window, it overlooks the sands, the pale pinky-brown incoming tide, and the band of blue offing under the rainy, mottled sky. And, sheer underneath, are the roots, so to speak, of the fortified abbey, broken black walls and turrets striking into the rock and the grass like the big ash trees which grow among them. There are the remains of a kitchen garden and what was perhaps a bowling-green, and great thickets of grass and cow parsley, haunted by rabbits and magpies ; and plumb below the pale curdled sands. No monk of old, I said to myself, ever enjoyed or conceived such solitude in these cloisters as I am enjoying, thanks to those tourists. . . .

I thought, however, that, as I have already said, the most notable impression I should carry away that day would be of old Mlle, de Blangine, in her neat Louis XV. parlour, sending out the maid to offer me the orange flowerwater. But it was not so. After leaving the cloister, and watching Mme. Poulard Aîné, deftly reverse, between the two plates, omelette after omelette (the main live interest of Mont St. Michel consists in the feuds of innumerable Poulards, elder, younger, sons, nephews, grandsons, each setting forth on posters and by word of mouth that he alone is possessed of the genuine recipe for the classic omelette soufflée) — and after waiting on the ramparts above the inn, above the slate roofs and turrets and figtrees, for my own turn, my own little share of omelette to come, I had to wait again for the train at Pontorson, and elected to do so not among the raging tourists and porters and omnibus drivers, but in the churchyard. And in a corner, among a heap of rubbish and watched over by the great wolf gargoyles of the granite tower, I found an English inscription :

"Sacred to the memory of Sarah Webster, of Biddeford, North Devon, England, who fell asleep in Jesu, August 24, 1869, aged 29 years, leaving an affectionate husband and child."

This grave seemed sadder even than that of the Neapolitan sailor-boy in the churchyard at Tintagel ; the moral distance between some flowery English village, and this dirty, black Norman graveyard even greater. She must have died on a journey, a pleasure trip to this very Mont St. Michel with her husband and baby ; she must have been, poor young creature, thus left behind in alien land, a pilgrim, a tourist.

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