The road to Mont St. Michel is colourless and dreary. On either side are flat gray marshes, with little patches of scrubby grass. Here and there a few sheep are grazing. How the poor beasts can find anything to eat at all on such barren land is a marvel. Gradually the scenery becomes drearier, until at last you are driving on a narrow causeway, with a river on one side and a wilderness of treacherous sand on the other.

Suddenly, on turning a corner, you come within view of Mont St. Michel. No matter how well prepared you may be for the apparition, no matter what descriptions you may have read or heard beforehand, when you see that three-cornered mass of stone rising from out the vast wilderness of sand, you cannot but be astonished and overwhelmed. You are tempted to attribute this bizarre achievement to the hand of the magician. It is uncanny.

Just now it is low tide, and the Mount lies in the midst of an immense moving plain, on which three rivers twist, like narrow threads intersecting it—Le Conesnon, La SÉe, and La Seline. Several dark islands lie here and there uncovered, and groups of small boats are left high and dry. It is fascinating to watch the sea coming up, appearing like a circle on the horizon, and slipping gently over the sands, the circle ever narrowing, until the islands are covered once more, the boats float at anchor, and the waves precipitate themselves with a loud booming sound, heard for miles round, against the double walls that protect the sacred Mount.

Many are the praises that have been sung of Mont St. Michel by poets and artists, by historians and architects. She has been called 'A poem in stone,' 'Le palais des angles,' 'An inspiration of the Divine,' 'La citÉ des livres,' 'Le boulevard de la France,' 'The sacred mount,' etc. Normandy and Brittany dispute her. She is in the possession of either, as you will.

Mont St. Michel is not unlike Gibraltar. As you come suddenly upon the place, rising from out the misty grayish-yellow, low-lying marshes, it appears to be a dark three-cornered mass, surrounded by stout brownish battlemented walls, flanked by rounded turrets, against a background of blue sky. At the base of the Mount lies the city, the houses built steeply one above the other, some with brownish lichen-covered roofs, others of modern slate. Above the city is the monastery—brown walls, angry and formidable, rising steeply, with many windows and huge buttresses. Beyond, on the topmost point, is the grand basilica consecrated to the archangel, the greenish light of whose windows you can see clearly. Above all rises a tall gray spire culminating in a golden figure.

There is only one entrance to Mont St. Michel—over a footbridge and beneath a solid stone archway, from which the figure of the Virgin in a niche looks down. You find yourself in a narrow, steep street, black and dark with age, and crowded with shops and bazaars and cafÉs. The town appears to be given up to the amusement and entertainment of visitors; and, as St. Michael is the guardian saint of all strangers and pilgrims, I suppose this is appropriate. Tourists fill the streets and overflow the hotels and cafÉs; the town seems to live, thrive, and have its being entirely for the tourists. Outside every house hangs a sign advertising coffee or china or curios, as the case may be, and so narrow is the street that the signs on either side meet.

Your first thought on arriving is about getting something to eat. The journey from St. Malo is long, and, although the sun is shining and the sky is azure blue, the air is biting. Of course, everyone who comes to the Mount has heard of Mme. Poulard. She is as distinctly an institution as the very walls and fortresses. All know of her famous coffee and delicious omelettes; all have heard of her charm. It is quite an open question whether the people flock there in hundreds on a Sunday morning for the sake of Mme. Poulard's luncheon or for the attractions of Mont St. Michel itself. There she stands in the doorway of her hotel, smiling, gracious, affable, handsome. No one has ever seen Mme. Poulard ruffled or put out. However many unexpected visitors may arrive, she greets them all with a smile and words of welcome.

We were amid a very large stream of guests; yet she showed us into her great roomy kitchen, and seated us before the huge fireplace, where a brace of chickens, steaming on a spit, were being continually basted with butter by stout, gray-haired M. Poulard. She found time to inquire about our journey and our programme for the day, and directed us to the various show-places of the Mount.

There is only one street of any importance in Mont St. Michel, dark and dim, very narrow, no wider than a yard and a half; a drain runs down the middle. Here you find yourself in an absolute wilderness of Poulard. You are puzzled by the variety and the relations of the Poulards. Poulard greets you everywhere, written in large black letters on a white ground.

If you mount some steps and turn a corner suddenly, Poulard frÈre greets you; if you go for a harmless walk on the ramparts, the renowned coffee of Poulard veuve hits you in the face. Each one strives to be the right and only Poulard. You struggle to detach yourselves from these Poulards. You go through a fine mediÆval archway, past shops where valueless, foolish curios are for sale; you scramble up picturesque steps, only to be told once more in glaring letters that POULARD spells Poulard.

A very picturesque street is the main thoroughfare of Mont St. Michel, mounting higher and higher, with tall gray-stone and wooden houses on either side, the roofs of which often meet overhead. Each window has its pots of geraniums and its show of curios and useless baubles. Fish-baskets hang on either side of the doors. Some of the houses have terrace gardens, small bits of level places cut into the rock, where roses grow and trailing clematis. Ivy mainly runs riot over every stone and rock and available wall. The houses are built into the solid rock one above another, and many of them retain their air of the fourteenth or the fifteenth century.

You pass a church of Jeanne d'Arc. A bronze statue of the saint stands outside the door. One always goes upwards in Mont St. Michel, seeing the dark purplish-pink mass of the grand old church above you, with its many spires of sculptured stone. Stone steps lead to the ramparts. Here you can lean over the balustrade and look down upon the waste of sand surrounding Mont St. Michel. All is absolutely calm and noiseless. Immediately below is the town, its clusters of new gray-slate roofs mingling with those covered in yellow lichen and green moss; also the church of the village, looking like a child's plaything perched on the mountain-side. Beyond and all around lies a sad, monotonous stretch of pearl-gray sand, with only a darkish, narrow strip of land between it and the leaden sky—the coast of Normandy. Sea-birds passing over the country give forth a doleful wail. The only signs of humanity at all in the immensity of this great plain are some little black specks—men and women searching for shellfish, delving in the sand and trying to earn a livelihood in the forbidding waste.

The melancholy of the place is terrible. I have seen people of the gayest-hearted natures lean over that parapet and gaze ahead for hours. This great gray plain has a strange attraction. It draws out all that is sad and serious from the very depths of you, forcing you to think deeply, moodily. Joyous thoughts are impossible. At first you imagine that the scenery is colourless; but as you stand and watch for some time, you discover that it is full of colour. There are pearly greens and yellows and mauves, and a kind of phosphorescent slime left by the tide, glistening with all the hues of the rainbow.

Terribly dangerous are these shifting sands. In attempting to cross them you need an experienced guide. The sea mounts very quickly, and mists overtake you unexpectedly. Many assailants of the rock have been swallowed in the treacherous sands.

Being on this great height reminded me of a legend I had heard of the sculptor Gautier, a man of genius, who was shut up in the Abbey of Mont St. Michel and carved stones to keep himself from going mad—you can see these in the abbey to this day. For some slight reason FranÇois I. threw the unfortunate sculptor into the black cachot of the Mount, and there he was left in solitude, to die by degrees. His hair became quite white, and hung long over his shoulders; his cheeks were haggard; he grew to look like a ghost. His youth could no longer fight against the despair overhanging him; his miseries were too great for him to bear; he became almost insane. One day, by a miracle, Mass was held, not in the little dark chapel under the crypts, but in the church on high, on the topmost pinnacle of the Mount. It was a Sunday, a fÊte-day. The sun shone, not feebly, as I saw it that day, but radiantly, the windows of the church glistening. It was blindingly beautiful. The joy of life surrounded him; the sweetness and freshness of the spring was in the air. The irony of men and things was too great for his poor sorrow-laden brain. He cleared the parapet, and was dashed to atoms below. Poor Gautier! It was his only chance of escape. One realized that as one looked up at those immense prison walls, black and frowning, sheer and unscaleable, every window grated and barred. What chance would a prisoner have? If it were possible for him to escape from the prison itself, there would be the town below to pass through. Only one narrow causeway joins the island to the mainland, and all round there is nothing but sea and sandy wastes.

I was disturbed in my reverie by a loud nasal voice shouting, 'Par ici, messieurs et dames, s'il vous plaÎt.' It was the guide, and willy-nilly we must go and make the rounds of the abbey among a crowd of other sightseers. An old blind woman on the abbey steps, evidently knowing that we were English by our tread, moistened her lips and drew in her breath in preparation for a begging whine as we approached. We passed through a huge red door of a glorious colour, up a noble flight of wide steps, with hundreds of feet of wall on either side, into a lofty chapel, falling to decay, and being renovated in parts. It was of a ghostly greenish stone, with fluted pillars of colossal height, ending in stained-glass windows and a vaulted roof, about which black-winged bats were flying. Room after room we passed through, the guide making endless and monotonous explanations and observations in a parrot-like voice, until we reached the cloister. This is the pearl of Mont St. Michel, the wonder of wonders. It is a huge square court. In the middle of the quadrangle it is open to the sky, and the sun shines through in a golden blaze. All round are cool dim walks roofed overhead by gray arches supported by small, graceful, rose-coloured pillars in pairs. This is continued round the whole length of the court. Let into the wall are long benches of stone, to which, in olden days, the monks came to meditate and pray. The ancient atmosphere has been well preserved; yet the building is so little touched by time, owing to the careful renovations of a clever architect, that one almost expects at any moment to see a brown-robed monk disturbed in his meditations.

From the quiet courtyard we are taken down into the very heart of the coliseum—into the mysterious cells where the damp of the rock penetrates the solid stone. How gloomy it was down in these crypts! Even the names of them made one tremble—'Galerie de l'Aquilon,' 'Petit Exil,' and 'Grand Exil.' You think of Du Bourg, tightly fettered hand and foot, being eaten alive by rats; of the Comte Grilles, condemned to die of starvation, being fed by a peasant, who bravely climbed to his window; of a hundred gruesome tales. There is the chapel where the last offices of the dead were performed—a cell in which the light struggled painfully through the narrow windows, feebly combating with the dark night of the chamber; and there is the narrow stairway, in the thickness of the wall, by which the bodies of the prisoners were taken.

We were shown the cachot and the oubliette where the living body of the prisoner was attacked by rats. That, however, was a simple torture compared with the strait-jacket and the iron cage. In the oubliette the miserable men could clasp helpless hands, curse or pray, as the case might be; but in the iron cage the death agony was prolonged.

Even now, although the poor souls took wings long ago, the cachot and the oubliette fill you with disgust. You feel stifled there. The atmosphere is vitiated. Even though centuries have passed since those terrible times, the walls seem to be still charged with iniquity, with all the sighs exhaled, with all the smothered cries, with all the tears, with all the curses of impatient sufferers, with all the prayers of saints.

It seems impossible to believe, down in the heart of this world of stone, in the impenetrable darkness, that the architect that designed this thick and cruel masonry constructed those airy belfries, those balustrades of lace, those graceful arches, those towers and minarets. It is as if he had wished to shut up the sorrow and the maniacal cries of the men who had lost their reason in a fair exterior, attracting the eyes of the world to that which was beautiful, and making it forget the misery beneath.

MARIE