AN HISTORICAL OMELETTE--THE PILGRIMS AND THE SHRINE.
To awake on a hill-top at sea. This was what morning brought.
Crowd this hill with houses plastered to the sides of rocks, with great
walls girdling it, with tiny gardens lodged in crevices, and with a
forest tumbling seaward. Let this hill yield you a town in which to
walk, with a street of many-storied houses; with other promenades along
ramparts as broad as church aisles; with dungeons, cloisters, halls,
guard-rooms, abbatial gateways, and a cathedral whose flying buttresses
seemed to spring from mid-air and to end in a cloud--such was the world
into which we awoke on the heights of Mont St. Michel.
The verdict of the shore on the hill had been a just one; this world on
a rock was a world apart. This hill in the sea had a detached air--as
if, though French, at heart a true Gaul, it had had from the beginning
of things a life of adventure peculiar to itself. The shore, at best,
had been only a foster-mother; the hill was the true child of the sea.
Since its birth it has had a more or less enforced separateness, in
experience, from the country to which it belonged. Whether temple or
fortress, whether forest-clad in virginal fierceness of aspect, or
subdued into beauty by the touch of man's chisel, its destiny has ever
been the same--to suffice unto itself--to be, in a word, a world in
miniature.
The Mont proved by its appearance its history in adventure; it had the
grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features, whether of rock
or of more plastic human mould--that have been carved by the rough
handling of experience.
It is the common habit of hills and mountains, as we all know, to turn
disdainful as they grow skyward; they only too eagerly drop, one by
one, the things by which man has marked the earth for his own. To stand
on a mountain top and to go down to your grave are alike, at least in
this--that you have left everything, except yourself, behind you. But
it is both the charm and the triumph of Mont St. Michel, that it
carries so much of man's handiwork up into the blue fields of air; this
achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills. It appears as if
for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a
masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural beauties it
carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper
heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud,
"See what we can do, against your tempests and your futile tides--when
we try."
On that particular morning, the taunt seemed more like an
epithalamium--such marriage-lines did sea and sky appear to be reading
over the glistening face of the rock. June had pitched its tent of blue
across the seas; all the world was blue, except where the sun smote it
into gold. To eyes in love with beauty, what a world at one's feet!
Beneath that azure roof, toward the west, was the world of water,
curling, dimpling, like some human thing charged with the conscious joy
of dancing in the sun. Shoreward, the more stable earth was in the
Moslem's ideal posture--that of perpetual prostration. The Brittany
coast was a long, flat, green band; the rocks of Cancale were brown,
but scarcely higher in point of elevation than the sand-hills; the
Normandy forests and orchards were rippling lines that focussed into
the spiral of the Avranches cathedral spires: floating between the two
blues, hung the aerial shapes of the Chaunsey and the Channel Islands;
and nearer, along the coast-line, were the fringing edges of the shore,
broken with shoals and shallows--earth's fingers, as it were, touching
the sea--playing, as Coleridge's Abyssinian maid fingered the dulcimer,
that music that haunts the poet's ear.
We were seated at the little iron tables, on the terrace. We were
sipping our morning coffee, beneath the plane-trees. The terrace, a
foot beyond our coffee-cups, instantly began its true career as a
precipice. We, ourselves, seemed to have begun as suddenly our own
flight heavenward--on such astonishing terms of intimacy were we with
the sky. The clapping close to our ears of large-winged birds; the
swirling of the circling sea-gulls; the amazing nearness of the cloud
drapery--all this gave us the sense of being in a new world, and of its
being a strangely pleasant one.
Suddenly a cock's crow, shrill and clear, made us start from the
luxurious languor of our contentment; for we had scarcely looked to
find poultry on this Hill of Surprises. Turning in the direction of the
homely, familiar note, we beheld a garden. In this garden walked the
cock--a two-legged gentleman of gorgeous plumage. If abroad for purely
constitutional purposes, the crowing chanticleer must be forced to pass
the same objects many times in review. Of all infinitesimal,
microscopic gardens, this one, surely, was a model in minuteness. Yet
it was an entirely self-respecting little garden. It was not much
larger than a generous-sized pocket handkerchief; yet how much
talent--for growing--may be hidden in a yard of soil--if the soil have
the right virtue in it. Here were two rocks forming, with a fringe of
cliff, a triangle; in that tri-cornered bit of earth a lively crop of
growing vegetables was offering flattering signs of promise to the
owner's eye. Where all land runs aslant, as all land does on this Mont,
not an inch was to be wasted; up the rocks peach and pear-split trees
were made to climb--and why should they not, since everything
else--since man himself must climb from the moment he touches the base
of the hill?
Following the cock's call, came the droning sweetness of bees; the rose
and the honeysuckle vines were loading the morning air with the perfume
of their invitations. Then a human voice drowned the bees' whirring,
and a face as fresh and as smiling as the day stood beside us. It was
the voice and the face of Madame Poulard, on the round of her morning
inspections. Our table and the radiant world at her feet were included
in this, her line of observations.
"_Ah, mesdames, comme vous savez bien vous placer!_--how admirably you
understand how to place yourselves! Under such a sky as this--before
such a spectacle--one should be in the front row, as at a theatre!"
And that was the beginning of our deeds finding favor in the eyes of
Madame Poulard.
It was our happy fate to drink many a morning cup of coffee at those
little iron tables; to have many a prolonged chat with the charming
landlady of the famous inn; to become as familiar with the glories and
splendors of the historical hill as with the habits and customs of the
world that came up to view them.
For here our journey was to end.
The comedy of life, as it had played itself out in Normandy inns, was
here, in this Inn on a Rock, to give us a series of farewell
performances. On no other stage, we were agreed, could the versatile
French character have had as admirable and picturesque a setting; and
surely, on no other bit of French soil could such an astonishing and
amazing variety of types be assembled for a final appearance, as came
up, day after day, to make the tour of the Mont.
To the shore, and for the whole of the near-lying Breton and Norman
rustic world, the Mont is still the Hill of Delight. It is their Alp,
their shrine, the tenth wonder of the world, a prison, a palace, and a
temple still. In spite of Parisian changes in religious fashions, the
blouse is still devout; for curiosity is the true religion of the
provincial, and all love of adventure did not die out with the Crusades.
Therefore it is that rustic France along this coast still makes
pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michael. No marriage is
rightly arranged which does not include a wedding-journey across the
_grève_; no nuptial breakfast is aureoled with the true halo of romance
which is eaten elsewhere than on these heights in mid-air. The young
come to drink deep of wonders; the old, to refresh the depleted
fountains of memory; and the tourist, behold, he is as a plague of
locusts let loose upon the defenceless hill!
After a fortnight's sojourn, Charm and I held many a grave
consultation; close observation of this world that climbed the heights
had bred certain strange misgivings. What was it this world of
sight-seers came up to the Mont for to see? Was it to behold the great
glories thereof, or was it, oh, human eye of man! to look on the face
of a charming woman I It was impossible, after sojourning a certain
time upon the hill, not to concede that there were two equally strong
centres of attractions, that drew the world hither-ward. One remained,
indeed, gravely suspended between the doubt and the fear, as to which
of these potential units had the greater pull, in point of actual
attraction. The impartial historian, given to a just weighing of
evidence, would have been startled to find how invariably the scales
tipped; how lightly an historical Mont, born of a miracle, crowned by
the noblest buildings, a pious Mecca for saints and kings innumerable,
shot up like feathers in lightness when over-weighted by the modern
realities of a perfectly appointed inn, the cooking and eating of an
omelette of omelettes, and the all-conquering charms of Madame Poulard.
The fog of doubt thickened as, day after day, the same scenes were
enacted; when one beheld all sorts and conditions of men similarly
affected; when, again and again, the potentiality in the human magnet
was proved true. Doubt turned to conviction, at the last, that the holy
shrine of St. Michael had, in truth, been, violated; that the Mont had
been desecrated; that the latter exists now solely as a setting for a
pearl of an inn; and that within the shrine--it is Madame Poulard
herself who fills the niche!
The pilgrims come from darkest Africa and the sunlit Yosemite, but they
remain to pray at the Inn of the Omelette. Yonder, on the _grèves,_ as
we ourselves had proved, one crosses the far seas and one is wet to the
skin, only to hear the praises sung of madame's skill in the handling
of eggs in a pan; it is for this the lean guide strides before the
pilgrim tourist, and that he dippeth his trident in the waters. At the
great gates of the fortifications the pilgrim descends, and behold, a
howling chorus of serving-people take up the chant of: "_Chez Madame
Poulard, à gauche, à la renommée de l'omelette!_" The inner walls of
the town lend themselves to their last and best estate, that of
proclaiming the glory of "_L'Omelette_." Placards, rich in indicative
illustrations of hands all forefingers, point, with a directness never
vouchsafed the sinner eager to find the way to right and duty, to the
inn of "_L'Incomparable, la Fameuse Omelette!_" The pilgrims meekly
descend at that shrine. They bow low to the worker of the modern
miracle; they pass with eager, trembling foot, into the inner
sanctorum, to the kitchen, where the presiding deity receives them with
the grace of a queen and the simplicity of a saint.
Life on the Mont, as we soon found, resolved itself into this--into so
arranging one's day as to be on hand for the great, the eventful hour.
In point of fact there were two such hours in the Mont St. Michel day.
There was the hour of the cooking of the omelette. There was always the
other really more tragic hour, of the coming across the dike, of the
huge lumbering omnibuses. For you see, that although one may be
beautiful enough to compete successfully against dead-and-gone saints,
against worn out miracles, and wonders in stone, human nature, when it
is alive, is human nature still. It is the curse of success, the world
over, to arouse jealousy; and we all have lived long enough to know
that jealousy's evil-browed offspring are named Hate and Competition.
Up yonder, beyond the Porte du Roi, rivalry has set up a
counter-shrine, with a competing saint, with all the hateful
accessories of a pretty face, a younger figure, and a graceful if less
skilled aptitude in the making of omelettes in public.
The hour of the coming in of the coaches, was, therefore, a tragic hour.
On the arrival of the coaches Madame was at her post long before the
pilgrims came up to her door. Being entirely without personal
vanity--since she felt her beauty, her cleverness, her grace, and her
charm to be only a part of the capital of the inn trade--a higher order
of the stock in trade, as it were--she made it a point to look
handsomer on the arrival of coaches than at any other time. Her cheeks
were certain to be rosier; her bird's head was always carried a trifle
more takingly, perched coquettishly sideways, that the caressing smile
of welcome might be the more personal; and as the woman of business,
lining the saint, so to speak, was also present, into the deep pockets
of the blue-checked apron, the calculating fingers were thrust, that
the quick counting of the incoming guests might not be made too obvious
an action. After such a pose, to see a pilgrim escape! To see him pass
by, unmoved by that smile, turning his feelingless back on the true
shrine! It was enough to melt the stoutest heart. Madame's welcome of
the captured, after such an affront, was set in the minor key; and her
smile was the smile of a suffering angel.
"_Cours, mon enfant_, run, see if he descends or if he pushes on; tell
him _I_ am Madame Poulard!" This, a low command murmured between a
hundred orders, still in the minor key, would be purred to Clémentine,
a peasant in a cap, exceeding fleet of foot, and skilled in the capture
of wandering sheep.
And Clémentine would follow that stray pilgrim: she would attack him in
the open street; would even climb after him, if need be, up the steep
rock steps, till, proved to be following strange gods, he would be
brought triumphantly back to the kitchen-shrine, by Clémentine,
puffing, but exultant.
"Ah, monsieur, how could you pass us by?" madame's soft voice would
murmur reproachfully in the pilgrim's ear. And the pilgrim, abashed,
ashamed, would quickly make answer, if he were born of the right
parents: "_Chère_ madame, how was I to believe my eyes? It is ten years
since I was here, and you are younger, more beautiful than ever! I was
going in search of your mother!" at which needless truism all the
kitchen would laugh. Madame Poulard herself would find time for one of
her choicest smiles, although this was the great moment of the working
of the miracle. She was beginning to cook the omelette.
The head-cook was beating the eggs in a great yellow bowl. Madame had
already taken her stand at the yawning Louis XV. fireplace; she was
beginning gently to balance the huge _casserole_ over the glowing logs.
And all the pilgrims were standing about, watching the process. Now,
the group circling about the great fireplace was scarcely ever the
same; the pilgrims presented a different face and garb day after
day--but in point of hunger they were as one man; they were each and
all as unvaryingly hungry as only tourists could be, who, clamoring for
food, have the smell of it in their nostrils, with the added ache of
emptiness gnawing within. But besides hunger, each one of the pilgrims
had brought with him a pair of eyes; and what eyes of man can be pure
savage before the spectacle of a pretty woman cooking, _for him_,
before an open fire? Therefore it was that still another miracle was
wrought, that of turning a famished mob into a buzzing swarm of
admirers.
"_Mais si, monsieur_, in this pan I can cook an omelette large enough
for you all; you will see. Ah, madame, you are off already? Célestine!
Madame's bill, in the desk yonder. And you, monsieur, you too leave us?
_Deux cognacs?_ Victor--_deux cognacs et une demi-tasse pour monsieur!_"
These and a hundred other answers and questions and orders, were
uttered in a fluted voice or in a tone of sharp command, by the
miracle-worker, as the pan was kept gently turning, and the eggs were
poured in at just the right moment--not one of the pretty poses of head
and wrist being forgotten. Madame Poulard, like all clever women who
are also pretty, had two voices: one was dedicated solely to the
working of her charms; this one was soft, melodious, caressing, the
voice of dove when cooing; the other, used for strictly business
purposes, was set in the quick, metallic _staccato_ tones proper for
such occasions.
The dove's voice was trolling its sweetness, as she went on--
"Eggs, monsieur? How many I use? Ah, it is in the season that counting
the dozens becomes difficult--seventy dozen I used one day last year!"
"Seventy dozen!" the pilgrim-chorus ejaculated, their eyes growing the
wider as their lips moistened. For behold, the eggs were now cooked to
a turn; the long-handled pan was being lifted with the effortless skill
of long practice, the omelette was rolled out at just the right instant
of consistency, and was being as quickly turned into its great flat
dish.
There was a scurrying and scampering up the wide steps to the dining
room, and a hasty settling into the long rows of chairs. Presently
madame herself would appear, bearing the huge dish. And the
omelette--the omelette, unlike the pilgrims, would be found to be
always the same--melting, juicy, golden, luscious, and above all _hot!_
The noon-day table d'hôte was always a sight to see. Many of the
pilgrim-tourists came up to the Mont merely to pass the day, or to stop
the night; the midday meal was therefore certain to be the liveliest of
all the repasts.
The cloth was spread in a high, white, sunlit room. It was a trifle
bare, this room, in spite of the walls being covered with pictures, the
windows with pretty draperies, and the spotless linen that covered the
long table. But all temples, however richly adorned, have a more or
less unfurnished aspect; and this room served not only as the
dining-table, but also as a foreshadowing of the apotheosis of Madame
Poulard. Here were grouped together all the trophies and tributes of a
grateful world; there were portraits of her charming brunette face
signed by famous admirers; there were sonnets to her culinary skill and
her charms as hostess, framed; these alternated with gifts of horned
beasts that had been slain in her honor, and of stuffed birds who, in
life, had beguiled the long winters for her with their songs. About the
wide table, the snow of the linen reflected always the same picture;
there were rows of little palms in flower-pots, interspersed with fruit
dishes, with the butter pats, the almonds, and raisins, in their flat
plates.
The rows of faces above the cloth were more varied. The four corners of
the earth were sometimes to be seen gathered together about the
breakfast-table. Frenchmen of the Midi, with the skin of Spaniards and
the buzz of Tartarin's _ze ze_ in their speech; priests, lean and fat;
Germans who came to see a French stronghold as defenceless as a woman's
palm; the Italian, a rarer type, whose shoes, sufficiently pointed to
prick, and whose choice for décolleté collars betrayed his nationality
before his lisping French accent could place him indisputably beyond
the Alps; herds of English--of all types--from the aristocrat, whose
open-air life had colored his face with the hues of a butcher, to the
pale, ascetic clerk, off on a two weeks' holiday, whose bending at his
desk had given him the stoop of a scholar; with all these were mixed
hordes of French provincials, chiefly of the _bourgeois type,_ who
singly, or in family parties, or in the nuptial train of sons or
daughters, came up to the shrine of St. Michel.
To listen to the chatter of these tourists was to learn the last word
of the world's news. As in the days before men spoke to each other
across continents, and the medium of cold type had made the event of
to-day the history of to-morrow, so these pilgrims talked through the
one medium that alone can give a fact the real essence of
freshness--the ever young, the perdurably charming human voice. It was
as good as sitting out a play to watch the ever-recurring
characteristics, which made certain national traits as marked as the
noses on the faces of the tourists. The question, for example, on which
side the Channel a pilgrim was born, was settled five seconds after he
was seated at table. The way in which the butter was passed was one
test; the manner of the eating of the famous omelette was another. If
the tourist were a Frenchman, the neat glass butter-dish was turned
into a visiting-card--a letter of introduction, a pontoon-bridge, in a
word, hastily improvised to throw across the stream of conversation.
"_Madame_" (this to the lady at the tourist's left), "_me permet-elle
de lui offrir le beurre?_" Whereat madame bowed, smiled, accepted the
golden balls as if it were a bouquet, returning the gift, a few seconds
later, by the proffer of the gravy dish. Between the little ceremony of
the two bows and the smiling _mercis_, a tentative outbreak of speech
ensued, which at the end of a half-hour, had spread from _bourgeois_ to
countess, from curé to Parisian _boulevardier_, till the entire side of
the table was in a buzz of talk. These genial people of a genial land
finding themselves all in search of the same adventure, on top of a
hill, away from the petty world of conventionality, remembered that
speech was given to man to communicate with his fellows. And though
neighbors for a brief hour, how charming such an hour can be made when
into it are crowded the effervescence of personal experience, the witty
exchange of comment and observation, and the agreeable conflict of
thought and opinion!
On the opposite side of the table, what a contrast! There the English
were seated. There was the silence of the grave. All the rigid figures
sat as upright as posts. In front of these severe countenances, the
butter-plates remained as fixtures; the passing of them to a neighbor
would be a frightful breach of good form--besides being dangerous. Such
practices, in public places, had been known to lead to things--to
unspeakable things--to knowing the wrong people, to walks afterward
with cads one couldn't shake off, even to marriages with the
impossible! Therefore it was that the butter remained a fixture. Even
between those who formed the same tourist-party, there was rarely such
an act of self-forgetfulness committed as an indulgence in talk--in
public. The eye is the only active organ the Englishman carries abroad
with him; his talking is done by staring. What fierce scowls, what dark
looks of disapproval, contempt, and dislike were levelled at the
chattering Frenchmen opposite.
[Illustration: MONT SAINT MICHEL SNAIL-GATHERERS]
Across the table, the national hate perpetuated itself. It appears to
be a test of patriotism, this hatred between Frenchmen and Englishmen.
That strip of linen might easily have been the Channel itself; it could
scarcely more effectually have separated the two nations. A whole
comedy of bitterness, a drama of rivalry, and a five-act tragedy of
scorn were daily played between the Briton who sat facing the south,
and the Frenchman who faced north. Both, as they eyed their neighbor
over the foam of their napkins, had the Island in their eye!--the
Englishman to flaunt its might and glory in the teeth of the hated
Gaul, and the Frenchman to return his contempt for a nation of moist
barbarians.
Meanwhile, the omelette was going its rounds. It was being passed at
that moment to Monsieur le Curé. He had been watching its progress with
glistening eye and moistening lips. Madame Poulard, as she slipped the
melting morsel beneath his elbow, had suddenly assumed the role of the
penitent. Her tone was a reminder of the confessional, as of one who
passed her masterpiece apologetically. She, forsooth, a sinner, to have
the honor of ministering to the carnal needs of a son of the Church!
The son of the Church took two heaping spoonfuls. His eye gave her,
with his smile, the benediction of his gratitude, even before he had
tasted of the luscious compound.
"_Ah, chère madame! il n'y a que vous_--it is only you who can make the
ideal omelette! I have tried, but Suzette has no art in her fingers;
your receipt doesn't work away from the Mont!" And the good man sighed
as he chuckled forth his praises.
He had come up to the hill in company with the two excellent ladies
beside him, of his flock, to make a little visit to his brethren
yonder, to the priests who were still here, wrecks of the once former
flourishing monastery. He had come to see them, and also to gaze on La
Merveille. It was a good five years since he had looked upon its
dungeons and its lace-work. But after all, in his secret soul of souls,
he had longed to eat of the omelette. _Dieu!_ how often during those
slow, quiet years in the little hamlet yonder on the plain, had its
sweetness and lightness mocked his tongue with illusive tasting! Little
wonder, therefore, that the good curé's praises were sweet in madame's
ear, for they had the ring of truth--and of envy! And madame herself
was only mortal, for what woman lives but feels herself uplifted by the
sense of having found favor in the eyes of her priest?
The omelette next came to a halt between the two ladies of the curé's
flock. These were two _bourgeoises_ with the deprecating, mistrustful
air peculiar to commonplace the world over. The walk up the steep
stairs was still quickening their breath their compressed bosoms were
straining the hooks of their holiday woollen bodices--cut when they
were of slenderer build. Their bonnets proclaimed the antique fashions
of a past decade; but the edge of their tongues had the keenness that
comes with daily practice--than which none has been found surer than
adoration of one's pastor, and the invigorating gossip of small towns.
These ladies eyed the omelette with a chilled glance. Naturally, they
could not see as much to admire in Madame Poulard or in her dish as did
their curé. There was nothing so wonderful after all in the turning of
eggs over a hot fire. The omelette!--after all, an omelette is an
omelette! Some are better--some are worse; one has one's luck in
cooking as in anything else. They had come up to the Mont with their
good curé to see its wonders and for a day's outing; admiration of
other women had not been anticipated as a part of the programme.
_Tiens_--who was he talking to now? To that tall blonde--a foreigner, a
young girl--_tiens_--who knows?--possibly an American--those Americans
are terrible, they say--bold, immodest, irreverent. And the two ladies'
necks were screwed about their over-tight collars, to give Charm the
verdict of their disapproval.
"Monsieur le Curé, they are passing you the fish!" cried the stouter,
more aggressive parishioner, who boasted a truculent mustache.
"Monsieur le Curé, the roast is at your elbow!" interpolated the
second, with the more timid voice of a second in action; this protector
of the good curé had no mustache, but her face was mercifully protected
by nature from a too-disturbing combination of attractions, by being
plentifully punctuated with moles from which sprouted little tufts of
hair. The rain of these ladies' interruption was incessant; but the
curé was a man of firm mind; their efforts to recapture his attention
were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear.
Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal
cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two
fussy, jealous _bourgeoises_, were others as importunate and
aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the
shifting eyes and the persistent courage which come to certain maidens
in whose lives there is but one fixed and certain fact--that of having
missed the matrimonial market. The shrine of their devotions, and the
present citadel of their attack, was seated between them--he also being
lean, pale, high-arched of brow, high anglican by choice, and
noticeably weak of chin, in whose sable garments there was framed the
classical clerical tie.
To this curate Madame was now passing her dish. She still wore her fine
sweet smile, but there was always a discriminating reserve in its edge
when she touched the English elbow. The curate took his spoonful with
the indifference of a man who had never known the religion of good
eating. He put up his one eye-glass; it swept Madame's bending face,
its smile, and the yellow glory floating beneath both. "Ah-h--ya-as--an
omelette!" The glass was dropped; he took a meagre spoonful which he
cut, presently, with his knife. He turned then to his neighbors--to
both his neighbors! They had been talking of the parish church on the
hill.
"Ah-h-h, ya-as--lovely porch--isn't it?"
"Oh, lovely--lovely!" chorussed the two maidens, with assenting fervor.
"_Were_ you there this morning?" and they lifted eyes swimming with the
rapture of their admiration.
"Ya-as."
"Only fancy--our missing you! We were _both_ there!"
"Dear me! Really, were you?"
"_Could_ you go this afternoon? I do want so to hear your criticism of
my drawing--I'm working on the arch now."
"So sorry--can't--possibly. I promised what's his name to go over to
Tombelaine, don't you know!"
"Oh-h! We do so want to go to Tombelaine!"
"Ah-h--do you, really? One ought to start a little before the tide
drops--they tell me!" and the clerical eye, through its correctly
adjusted glass, looked into those four pleading eyes with no hint of
softening. The dish that was the masterpiece of the house, meanwhile,
had been despatched as if it were so much leather.
The omelette fared no better with the brides, as a rule, than with the
English curates. Such a variety of brides as came up to the Mont! You
could have your choice, at the midday meal, of almost any nationality,
age, or color. The attempt among these bridal couples to maintain the
distant air of a finished indifference only made their secret the more
open. The British phlegm, on such a journey, did not always serve as a
convenient mask; the flattering, timid glance, the ripple of the tender
whispers, and the furtive touching of fingers beneath the table, made
even these English couples a part of the great human marrying family;
their superiority to their fellows would return, doubtless, when the
honey had dried out of their moon. The best of our adventures into this
tender country were with the French bridal tourists; they were certain
to be delightfully human. As we had had occasion to remark before, they
were off, like ourselves, on a little voyage of discovery; they had
come to make acquaintance with the being to whom they were mated for
life. Various degrees of progress could be read in the air and manner
of the hearty young _bourgeoises_ and their paler or even ruddier
partners, as they crunched their bread or sipped their thin wine. Some
had only entered as yet upon the path of inquiry; others had already
passed the mile-stone of criticism; and still others had left the earth
and were floating in full azure of intoxication. Of the many wedding
parties that sat down to breakfast, we soon made the commonplace
discovery that the more plebeian the company, the more certain-orbed
appeared to be the promise of happiness.
Some of the peasant weddings were noisy, boisterous performances; but
how gay were the brides, and how bloated with joy the hardy,
knotty-handied grooms! These peasant wedding guests all bore a striking
family likeness; they might easily all have been brothers and sisters,
whether they had come from the fields near Pontorson, or Cancale, or
Dol, or St. Malo. The older the women, the prettier and the more
gossamer were the caps; but the younger maidens were always delightful
to look upon, such was the ripe vigor of their frames, and the liquid
softness of eyes that, like animals, were used to wide sunlit fields
and to great skies full of light. The bride, in her brand-new stuff
gown, with a bonnet that recalled the bridal wreath only just laid
aside, was also certain to be of a general universal type with the
broad hips, wide waist, muscular limbs, and the melting sweetness of
lips and eyes that only abundant health and a rich animalism of nature
bring to maidenhood.
Madame Poulard's air with this, her world, was as full of tact as with
the tourists. Many of the older women would give her the Norman kiss,
solemnly, as if the salute were a part of the ceremony attendant on the
eating of a wedding breakfast at Mont St. Michel. There would be a
three times' clapping of the wrinkled or the ruddy peasant cheeks
against the sides of Madame Poulard's daintier, more delicately
modelled face. Then all would take their seats noisily at table. It was
Madame Poulard who then would bring us news of the party; at the end of
a fortnight, Charm and I felt ourselves to be in possession of the
hidden and secret reasons for all the marrying that had been done along
the coast, that year. "_Tiens, ce n'est pas gai, la noce!_ I must learn
the reason!" Madame would then flutter over the bridal breakfasters as
a delicate plumaged bird hovers over a mass of stuff out of which it
hopes to make a respectable meal. She presently would return to murmur
in a whisper, "it is a _mariage de raison_. They, the bride and groom,
love elsewhere, but they are marrying to make a good partnership; they
are both hair-dressers at Caen. They have bought a new and fine shop
with their earnings." Or it would be, "Look, madame, at that _jolie
personne_; see how sad she looks. She is in love with her cousin who
sits opposite, but the groom is the old one. He has a large farm and a
hundred cows." To look on such a trio would only be to make the
acquaintance anew of Sidonie and Risler and of Froment Jeune. Such
brides always had the wandering gaze of those in search of fresh
horizons, or of those looking already for the chance of escape. For
such "unhappies," _ces malheureuses_, Madame's manner had an added
softness and tenderness; she passed the frosted bridal cake as if it
were a propitiatory offering to the God of Hymen. However melancholy
the bride, the cake and Madame's caressing smiles wrought ever the same
spell; for an instant, at least, the newly-made wife was in love with
matrimony and with the cake, accepting the latter with the pleased
surprise of one who realizes that, at least, on one's wedding day, one
is a person of importance; that even so far as Mont St. Michel the news
of their marriage had turned the ovens into a baking of wedding-cakes.
This was destined to be the first among the deceptions that greeted
such brides; for there were hundreds of such cakes, alas! kept
constantly on hand. They were the same--a glory of sugar-mouldings and
devices covering a mountain of richness--that were sent up yearly at
Christmas time to certain mansard studios in the Latin quarter, where
the artist recipients, like the brides, eat of the cake as did Adam
when partaking of the apple, believing all the woman told them!
There were other visitors who came up to the Mont, not as welcome as
were these tourist parties.
One morning, as we looked toward Pontorson, a small black cloud
appeared to be advancing across the bay. The day was windy; the sky was
crowded with huge white mountains--round, luminous clouds that moved in
stately sweeps. And the sea was the color one loves to see in an
earnest woman's eye, the dark-blue sapphire that turns to blue-gray.
This was a setting that made that particular cloud, making such slow
progress across from the shore, all the more conspicuous. Gradually, as
the black mass neared the dike, it began to break and separate; and we
saw plainly enough that the scattering particles were human beings.
It was, in point of fact, a band of pilgrims; a peasant pilgrimage was
coming up to the Mont. In wagons, in market carts, in _char-à-bancs_,
in donkey-carts, on the backs of monster Percherons--the pilgrimage
moved in slow processional dignity across the dike. Some of the younger
black gowns and blue blouses attempted to walk across over the sands;
we could see the girls sitting down on the edge of the shore, to take
off their shoes and stockings and to tuck up their thick skirts. When
they finally started they were like unto so many huge cheeses hoisted
on stilts. The bare legs plunged boldly forward, keeping ahead of the
slower-moving peasant-lads; the girls' bravery served them till they
reached the fringe of the incoming tide; not until their knees went
under water did they forego their venture. A higher wave came in,
deluging the ones farthest out; and then ensued a scampering toward the
dike and a climbing up of the stone embankment. The old route across
the sands, that had been the only one known to kings and barons, was
not good enough for a modern Norman peasant. The religion of personal
comfort has spread even as far as the fields.
At the entrance gate a tremendous hubbub and noise announced the
arrival of the pilgrimage. Wagons, carts, horses, and peasants were
crowded together as only such a throng is mixed in pilgrimages, wars,
and fairs. Women were taking down hoods, unharnessing the horses,
fitting slats into outsides of wagons, rolling up blankets, unpacking
from the _char-à-bancs_ cooking utensils, children, grain-bags, long
columns of bread, and hard-boiled eggs. For the women, darting hither
and thither in their blue petticoats, their pink and red kerchiefs, and
the stiff white Norman caps, were doing all the work. The men appeared
to be decorative adjuncts, plying the Norman's gift of tongue across
wagon-wheels and over the back of their vigorous wives and daughters.
For them the battle of the day was over; the hour of relaxation had
come. The bargains they had made along the route were now to be
rehearsed, seasoned with a joke.
"_Allons, toi, on ne fait pas de la monnaie blanche comme ca!_"
"_Je t'ai offert huit sous, tu sais, lapin!_"
"_Farceur, va-t'en--_"
"Come, are you never going to have done fooling?" cried a tan-colored,
wide-hipped peasant to her husband, who was lounging against the wagon
pole, sporting a sprig of gentian pinned to his blouse. He was fat and
handsome; and his eye proclaimed, as he was making it do heavy work at
long range at a cluster of girls descending from an antique gig, that
the knowledge of the same was known unto him.
"That's right, growl ahead, thou, _tes beaux jours sont passés_, but
for me _l'amour, l'amour--que c'est gai, que c'est frais!_" he half
sung, half shouted.
The moving mass of color, the Breton caps, and the Norman faces, the
gold crosses that fell from dented bead necklaces, the worn hooped
earrings, the clean bodices and home-spun skirts, streamed out past our
windows as we looked down upon them. How pretty were some of the faces,
of the younger women particularly! and with what gay spirits they were
beginning their day! It had begun the night before, almost; many of the
carts had been driven in from the forests beyond Avranches; some of the
Brittany groups had started the day before. But what can quench the
fountain of French vivacity? To see one's world, surely, there is
nothing in that to tire one; it only excites and exhilarates; and so a
fair or market day, and above all a pilgrimage, are better than balls,
since they come more regularly; they are the peasant's opera, his
Piccadilly and Broadway, club, drawing-room, Exchange, and parade, all
in one.
A half-hour after a landing of the pilgrims at the outer gates of the
fortifications, the hill was swarming with them. The single street of
the town was choked with the black gowns and the cobalt-blue blouses.
Before these latter took a turn at their devotions they did homage to
Bacchus. Crowds of peasants were to be seen seated about the long,
narrow inn-tables, lifting huge pewter tankards to bristling beards.
Some of these taverns were the same that had fed and sheltered bands of
pilgrims that are now mere handfuls of dust in country churchyards.
Those sixteenth century pilgrims, how many of them, had found this same
arched doorway of La Licorne as cool as the shade of great trees after
the long hot climb up to the hill! What a pleasant face has the
timbered facade of the Tête d'Or, and the Mouton Blanc, been to the
weary-limbed: and how sweet to the dead lips has been the first taste
of the acid cider!
Other aspects of the hill, on this day of the pilgrimage, made those
older dead-and-gone bands of pilgrims astonishingly real. On the tops
of bastions, in the clefts of the rocks, beneath the glorious walls of
La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a
tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected. The crude
blues and scarlets of banners were fluttering, like so many pennants,
in the light breeze. Beneath the improvised altar-roofs--strips of gay
cloth stretched across poles stuck into the ground--were groups not
often seen in these less fervent centuries. High up, mounted on the
natural pulpit formed of a bit of rock, with the rude altar before him,
with its bit of scarlet cloth covered with cheap lace, stood or knelt
the priest. Against the wide blue of the open heaven his figure took on
an imposing splendor of mien and an unmodern impressiveness of action.
Beneath him knelt, with bowed heads, the groups of the
peasant-pilgrims; the women, with murmuring lips and clasped hands,
their strong, deeply-seamed faces outlined, with the precision of a
Francesco painting, against the gray background of a giant mass of
wall, or the amazing breadth of a vast sea-view; children, squat and
chubby, with bulging cheeks starting from the close-fitting French
_bonnet_; and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the older varieties, whose
stiffened or rheumatic knees and knotty hands made their kneeling real
acts of devotional zeal. 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.
All day little processions were going up and down the steep stone steps
that lead from fortified rock to parish church, and from the town to
the abbatial gateway. The banners and the choir-boys, the priests in
their embroideries and lace, the peasants in cap and blouse, were
incessantly mounting and descending, standing on rock edges, caught for
an instant between a medley of perpendicular roofs, of giant gateways,
and a long perspective of fortified walls, only to be lost in the curve
of a bastion, or a flying buttress, that, in their turn, would be found
melting into a distant sea-view.
All the hours of a pilgrimage, we discovered, were not given to prayer;
nor yet is an incessant bowing at the shrine of St. Michel the sole
other diversion in a true pilgrim's round of pious devotions. Later on
in this eventful day, we stumbled on a somewhat startling variation to
the penitential order of the performances. In a side alley, beneath a
friendly overhanging rock and two protecting roof-eaves, an acrobat was
making her professional toilet. When she emerged to lay a worn strip of
carpet on the rough cobbles of the street, she presented a pathetic
figure in the gold of the afternoon sun. She was old and wrinkled; the
rouge would no longer stick to the sunken cheeks; the wrinkles were
become clefts; the shrunken but still muscular legs were clad in a pair
of tights, a very caricature of the silken webs that must once have
encased the poor old creature's limbs, for these were knitted of the
coarse thread the commonest peasant uses for the rough field stocking.
Over these obviously home-made coverings was a single skirt of azure
tarlatan, plentifully besprinkled with golden stars. The gossamer skirt
and its spangles turned, for their _début_, a somersault in the air,
and the knitted tights took strange leaps from the bars of a rude
trapeze. The groups of peasants were soon thicker about this spectacle
than they had gathered about the improvised altars. All the men who had
passed the day in the taverns came out at the sound of the hoarse
cracked voice of the aged acrobat. As she hurled her poor old twisted
shape from swinging bar to pole, she cried aloud, "_Ah, messieurs,
essayez ça seulement!_" The men's hands, when she had landed on her
feet after an uncommonly venturous whirl of the blue skirts in mid-air,
came out of their deep pockets; but they seasoned their applause with
coarse jokes which they flung, with a cruel relish, into the
pitifully-aged face. A cracked accordion and a jingling tambourine were
played by two hardened-looking ruffians, seated on their heels beneath
a window--a discordant music that could not drown the noise of the
peasants' derisive laughter. But the latter's pennies rattled a louder
jingle into the ancient acrobat's tin cup than it had into the priest's
green netted contribution box.
"No, madame, as for us, we do not care for pilgrimages," was Madame
Poulard's verdict on such survivals of past religious enthusiasms. And
she seasoned her comments with an enlightening shrug. "We see too well
how they end. The men go home dead drunk, the women are dropping with
fatigue, _et les enfants même se grisent de cidre!_ No; pilgrimages are
bad for everyone. The priests should not allow them."
This was at the end of the day, after the black and blue swarm had
passed, a weary, uncertain-footed throng, down the long street, to take
its departure along the dike. At the very end of the straggling
procession came the three acrobats; they had begged, or bought, a drive
across the dike from some of the pilgrims. The lady of the knitted
tights, in her conventional skirts and womanly fichu, was scarcely
distinguishable from the peasant women who eyed her askance; though
decently garbed now, they looked at her as if she were some plague or
vice walking in their midst.
The verdict of Madame Poulard seemed to be the verdict of all Mont St.
Michel. The whole town was abroad that evening, on its doorsteps and in
its garden beds, repairing the ravages committed by the band of the
pilgrims. Never had the town, as a town, been so dirty; never had the
street presented so shocking a collection of abominations; never had
flowers and shrubs been so mercilessly robbed and plundered--these were
the comments that flowed as freely as the water that was rained over
the dusty cobbles, thick with refuse of luncheon and the shreds of torn
skirts and of children's socks.
At any hour of the day, of even an ordinary, uneventful day, to take a
walk in the town is to encounter a surprise at every turning. Would you
call it a town--this one straggling street that begins in a King's
gateway and ends--ah, that is the point, just where does it end? I, for
one, was never once quite certain at just what precise point this one
single Mont St. Michel street stopped--lost itself, in a word, and
became something else. That was also true of so many other things on
the hill; all objects had such an astonishing way of suddenly becoming
something else. A house, for example, that you had passed on your
upward walk, had a beguiling air of sincerity. It had its cellar
beneath the street front like any other properly built house; it
continued its growth upward, showing the commonplace features of a
door, of so many windows--queerly spaced, and of an amazing variety of
shapes, but still unmistakably windows. Then, assured of so much
integrity of character, you looked to see the roof covering the house,
and instead-like the eggs in a Chinese juggler's fingers, that are
turned in a jiffy into a growing plant--behold the roof miraculously
transformed into a garden, or lost in a rampart, or, with quite
shameless effrontery, playing deserter, and serving as the basement of
another and still fairer dwelling. That was a sample of the way all
things played you the trick of surprise on this hill. Stairways began
on the cobbles of the streets, only to lose themselves in a side wall;
a turn on the ramparts would land you straight into the privacy of a
St. Michelese interior, with an entire household, perchance, at the
mercy of your eye, taken at the mean disadvantage of morning
dishabille. As for doors that flew open where you looked to find a
bastion; or a school--house that flung all the Michelese _voyous_ over
the tops of the ramparts at play-time; or of fishwives that sprung, as
full-armed in their kit as Minerva from her sire's brows, from the very
forehead of fortified places; or of beds and settees and wardrobes
(surely no Michelese has ever been able, successfully, to maintain in
secret the ghost of a family skeleton!) into which you were innocently
precipitated on your way to discover the minutest of all
cemeteries--these were all commonplace occurrences once your foot was
set on this Hill of Surprises.
There are two roads that lead one to the noble mass of buildings
crowning the hill. One may choose the narrow street with its moss-grown
steps, its curves, and turns; or one may have the broader path along
the ramparts, with its glorious outlook over land and sea. Whichever
approach one chooses, one passes at last beneath the great doors of the
Barbican.
Three times did the vision of St. Michel 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 a 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 aerial passage-ways,
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 the 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 in. 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
tremendously high mental pressure; of impressions, emotions, sensations
crowding upon the mind; of one's whole meagre 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-scène._ For, in a certain
sense, I know no other mediaeval 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 _cortège_, up the steep steps of the narrow
street, swarm other groups--the mediaeval pilgrim host that rushes into
the 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 fixed 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. Will you have a less stormy and belligerent company to
people the hill? In the quieter days of the fourteenth century, on any
bright afternoon, you could have sat beside some friendly artist-monk,
and watched him color and embellish those wondrous missals that made
the manuscripts of the Brothers famous throughout France. Earlier yet,
in those naive centuries, Robert de Torigny, that "bouche des Papes,"
would doubtless have discoursed to you on any subject dear to this
"counsellor of kings"--on books, or architecture, or the science of
fortifications, or on the theology of Lanfranc; from the helmeted locks
of Rollon to the veiled tresses of the lovely Tiphaine Raguenel,
Duguesclin's wife; from the ghastly rat-eaten body of the Dutch
journalist, who offended that tyrant King, Louis XIV., to the
Revolutionary heroes, as pitilessly doomed to an odious death under the
gentle Louis Philippe--there is no shape or figure in French history
which cannot be summoned at will to refill either a dungeon or a palace
chamber at Mont St. Michel.
Even in these, our modern days, one finds strange relics of past
fashions in thought and opinion. The various political, religious, and
ethical forms of belief to be met with in a fortnight's sojourn on the
hill, give one a sense of having passed in review a very complete
gallery of ancient and modern portraits of men's minds. In time one
learns to traverse even a dozen or more centuries with ease. To be in
the dawn of the eleventh century in the morning; at high noon to be in
the flood-tide of the fifteenth; and, as the sun dipped, to hear the
last word of our own dying century--such were the flights across the
abysmal depths of time Charm and I took again and again.
One of our chosen haunts was in a certain watch-tower. From its top
wall, the loveliest prospect of Mont St. Michel was to be enjoyed. Day
after day and sunset after sunset, we sat out the hours there. Again
and again the world, as it passed, came and took its seat beside us.
Pilgrims of the devout and ardent type would stop, perchance, would
proffer a preliminary greeting, would next take their seat along the
parapet, and, quite unconsciously, would end by sitting for their
portrait. One such sitter, I remember, was clad in carmine crepe shawl;
she was bonneted in the shape of a long-ago decade. She had climbed the
hill in the morning before dawn, she said; she had knelt in prayer as
the sun rose. For hers was a pilgrimage made in fulfilment of a vow.
St. Michel had granted her wish, and she in return had brought her
prayers to his shrine.
"Ah, mesdames! how good is God! How greatly He rewards a little
self-sacrifice. Figure to yourselves the Mont in the early mists, with
the sun rising out of the sea and the hills. I was on my knees, up
there. I had eaten nothing since yesterday at noon. I was full of the
Holy Ghost. When the sun broke at last, it was God Himself in all His
glory come down to earth! The whole earth seemed to be
listening--_prêtait l'oreille_--and with the great stillness, and the
sea, and the light breaking everywhere, it was as if I were being taken
straight up into Paradise. Saint Michel himself must have been
supporting me."
The carmine crepe shawl covered a poet, you see, as well as a devotee.
Up yonder, in the little shops and stalls tucked away within the walls
of the Barbican, a lively traffic, for many a century now, has been
going on in relics and _plombs de pèlerinage_. Some of these mediaeval
impressions have been unearthed in strange localities, in the bed of
the Seine, as far away as Paris. Rude and archaic are many of these
early essays in the sculptor's art. But they preserve for us, in quaint
intensity, the fervor of adoration which possessed that earlier, more
devout time and period. On the mind of this nineteenth century pilgrim,
the same lovely old forms of belief and superstition were imprinted as
are still to be seen in some of those winged figures of St. Michel,
with feet securely set on the back of the terrible dragon, staring,
with triumphant gaze, through stony or leaden eyes.
On the evening of the pilgrimage our friend, the Parisian, joined us on
our high perch. The Mont seemed strangely quiet after the noise and
confusion the peasants had brought in their train. The Parisian, like
ourselves, had been glad to escape into the upper heights of the wide
air, after the bustle and hurry of the day at our inn.
"You permit me, mesdames?" He had lighted his after-dinner cigar; he
went on puffing, having gained our consent. He curled a leg comfortably
about the railings of a low bridge connecting a house that sprang out
of a rock, with the rampart. Below, there was a clean drop of a few
hundred feet, more or less. In spite of the glories of a spectacular
sunset, yielding ceaseless changes and transformations of cloud and sea
tones, the words of Madame Poulard alone had power to possess our
companion. She had uttered her protest against the pilgrimage, as she
had swept the Parisian's _pousse-café_ from his elbow. He took up the
conversation where it had been dropped.
"It is amusing to hear Madame Poulard talk of the priests stopping the
pilgrimages! The priests? Why, that's all they have left them to live
upon now. These peasants' are the only pockets in which they can fumble
nowadays."
"All the same, one can't help being grateful to those peasants,"
retorted Charm. "They are the only creatures who have made these things
seem to have any meaning. How dead it all seems! The abbey, the
cloisters, the old prisons, the fortifications, it is like wandering
through a splendid tomb!
"Yes, as the curé said yesterday, '_l'âme n'y est plus_,'--since the
priests have been dislodged, it is the house of the dead."
"The priests"--the Parisian snorted at the very sound of the
word--"they have only themselves to blame. They would have been here
still, if they had not so abused their power."
"How did they abuse it?" Charm asked.
"In every possible way. I am, myself, not of the country. But my
brother was stationed here for some years, when the Mont was
garrisoned. The priests were in full possession then, and they
conducted a lively commerce, mademoiselle. The Mont was turned into a
show--to see it or any part of it, everyone had to pay toll. On the
great fête-days, when St. Michel wore his crown, the gold ran like
water into the monks' treasury. It was still then a fashionable
religious fad to have a mass said for one's dead, out here among the
clouds and the sea. Well, try to imagine fifty masses all dumped on the
altar together; that is, one mass would be scrambled through, no names
would be mentioned, no one save _le bon Dieu_ himself knew for whom it
was being said; but fifty or more believed they had bought it, since
they had paid for it. And the priests laughed in their sleeves, and
then sat down, comfortably, to count the gold. Ah, mesdames, those
were, literally, the golden days of the priesthood! What with the
pilgrimages, and the sale of relics, and _les benefices_--together with
the charges for seeing the wonders of the Mont--what a trade they did!
It is only the Jews, who, in their turn, now own us, up in Paris, who
can equal the priests as commercial geniuses!" And our pessimistic
Parisian, during the next half-hour, gave us a prophetic picture of the
approaching ruin of France, brought about by the genius for plunder and
organization that is given to the sons of Moses.
Following the Parisian, a figure, bent and twisted, opened a door in a
side-wall, and took his seat beside us. One became used, in time, to
these sudden appearances; to vanish down a chimney, or to emerge from
the womb of a rock, or to come up from the bowels of what earth there
was to be found--all such exits and entrances became as commonplace as
all the other extraordinary phases of one's life on the hill. This
particular shape had emerged from a hut, carved, literally, out of the
side of the rock; but, for a hut, it was amazingly snug--as we could
see for ourselves; for the venerable shape hospitably opened the low
wooden door, that we might see how much of a home could be made out of
the side of a rock. Only, when one had been used to a guard-room, and
to great and little dungeons, and to a rattling of keys along dark
corridors, a hut, and the blaze of the noon sun, were trying things to
endure, as the shape, with a shrug, gave us to understand.
"You see, mesdames, I was jailor here, years ago, when all La Merveille
was a prison. Ah! those were great days for the Mont! There were
soldiers and officers who came up to look at the soldiers, and the
soldiers--it was their business to look after the prisoners. The
Emperor himself came here once--I saw him. What a sight!--Dieu! all the
monks and priests and nuns, and the archbishop himself were out. What
banners and crosses and flags! The cannon was like a great thunder--and
the grève was red with soldiers. Ah, those were days! Dieu--why
couldn't the republic have continued those glories--_ces gloires?
Aujourd'hui nous ne sommes que des morts_--instead of prisoners to
handle--to watch and work, like so many good machines there is only the
dike yonder to keep in repair! What changes--mon Dieu! what changes!"
And the shape wrung his hands. It was, in truth, a touching spectacle
of grief for a good old past.
An old priest, with equally saddened vision, once came to take his
seat, quite easily and naturally, beside us, on our favorite perch. He
was one of the little band of priests who had remained faithful to the
Mont after the government had dispersed his brothers--after the
monastery had been broken up. He and his four or five companions had
taken refuge in a small house, close by the cemetery; it was they who
conducted the services in the little parish church; who had gathered
the treasures still grouped together in that little interior--the
throne of St. Michel, with its blue draperies and the golden
fleur-de-lis, the floating banners and the shields of the Knights of
St. Michel, the relics, and wondrous bits of carving rescued from the
splendors of the cathedral.
"_Ah, mesdames--que voulez-vous?_" was the old priest's broken chant;
he was bewailing the woes that had come to his order, to religion, to
France. "What will you have? The history of nations repeats itself, as
we all know. We, of our day, are fallen on evil times; it is the reign
of image-breakers--nothing is sacred, except money."
"France has worn herself out. She is like an old man, the hero of many
battles, who cares only for his easy chair and his slippers. She does
not care about the children who are throwing stones at the windows. She
likes to snooze, in the sun, and count her money-bags. France is too
old to care about religion, or the future--she is thinking how best to
be comfortable--here in this world, when she has rheumatism and a cramp
in the stomach!" And the old priest wrapped his own _soutane_ about his
lean knees, suiting his gesture to his inward convictions.
Was the priest's summary the last word of truth about modern France? On
the sands that lay below at our feet, we read a different answer.
The skies were still brilliantly lighted. The actual twilight had not
come yet, with its long, deep glow, a passion of color that had a
longer life up here on the heights than when seen from a lower level.
This twilight hour was always a prolonged moment of transfiguration for
the Mont.
The very last evening of our stay, we chose this as the loveliest light
in which to see the last of the hill. On that evening, I remember, the
reds and saffrons in the sky were of an astonishing richness. The sea
wall, the bastions, the faces of the great rocks, the yellow broom that
sprang from the clefts therein, were dyed as in a carmine bath. In that
mighty glow of color, all things took on something of their old, their
stupendous splendor. The giant walls were paved with brightness. The
town, climbing the hill, assumed the proportions of a mighty citadel;
the forest tree-tops were prismatic, emerald balls flung beneath the
illumined Merveille; and the Cathedral was set in a daffodil frame; its
aerial _escalier de dentelle_, like Jacob's ladder, led one easily
heavenward. The circling birds, in the lace-work of the spiral finials,
sang their night songs, as the glow in the sky changed, softened,
deepened.
This was the world that was in the west.
Toward the east, on the flat surface of the sands, this world cast a
strange and wondrous shadow. Jagged rocks, a pyramidal city, a Gothic
cathedral in mid-air--behold the rugged outlines of Mont St. Michel
carving their giant features on the shifting, sensitive surface of the
mirroring sands.
In the little pools and the trickling rivers, the fishermen--from this
height, Liliputians grappling with Liliputian meshes--were setting
their nets for the night. Across the river-beds, peasant women and
fishwives, with bared legs and baskets clasped to their bending backs,
appeared and disappeared--shapes that emerged into the light only to
vanish into the gulf of the night.
In was in these pictures that we read our answer.
Like Mont St. Michel, so has France carried into the heights of history
her glory and her power. On every century, she, like this world in
miniature, has also cast her shadow, dwarfing some, illuminating
others. And, as on those distant sands the toiling shapes of the
fishermen are to be seen, early and late, in summer and winter, so can
France point to her people, whose industry and amazing talent for toil
have made her, and maintain her, great.
Some of these things we have learned, since, in Normandy Inns, we have
sat at meat with her peasants, and have grown to be friends with her
fishwives.