continued; Amsterdam is connected with the sea; international
communications are established.
“In Italy, in Spain, the great arteries are provided with iron
roads, and the products of their working are notoriously below
what one could reckon as remuneration upon the capital. The
seaports, the mines, are sufficiently provided for in these
countries; the towns, there as elsewhere, have their markets,
their water and gas works, their new quarters, their tramways.
“As for the Pyrenees, they are crossed; the Alps also; and after
the tunnel already made by Mont Cenis toward France, the road in
construction through Saint-Gothard toward Germany, and the very
sufficient pass through the Brenner toward Austria, industrial
activity will no longer find any occupation in this quarter.
“In Russia the principal railroad lines are completed.
“The railway system of Prussia is finished, and in that country
industry is so well furnished that she is murdered with her own
tools; the means of production and of transportation are too
vast, and in evident disproportion to the possible business of
the country.
“Austria is supplied, and there it would be rash to go further.
“Turkey has railroads. It has been difficult enough to construct
them; one does not speak of them willingly.
“The United States have borrowed enough from us to establish
their system; it is compact and well provided with lines, even
opposition lines. That country has regained its lost time; it is
necessary to watch its steps now that it is furnished
sufficiently to put itself in competition with the industry of
Western Europe.
“The Isthmus of Suez is opened.
“The transatlantic cables are laid.
“The transformation in the merchant marine is three-fourths
completed; the sailing ship has disappeared, or at least is
relegated to the second place; the steamers have the principal
trade.
“On whatever side we turn our eyes we see these accomplished
results of the work of the last forty years. These results may
not be always excellent from the financial point of view; many
errors have been brought out, and by the side of some brilliant
exceptions we must count a number of deceptions for the
capitalists engaged, and for the governments which have become
needy and insolvent. But, whatever may be the financial result,
these lands have been stirred up and dug out; the blocks and the
rails have been laid; the towns have been transformed; the
distances have been shortened; the new apparatus has been given
in profusion to the rich countries, in more reasonable limits to
countries less open; everywhere what was strictly necessary has
been done; often too much has been done.”
Here, very clearly expressed, is the result of the forty years of
activity which we have had, and this result is really the end toward
which tended the great industrial movement that, for so long a time, has
held minds awake, has kept the dockyards, the workshops, the factories,
the forges at work. This end is attained; we see it; and among the
serious consequences of this fact is one which M. De Laveleye exposes
with his usual lucidity:
“Thanks to the facilities of communication, to the new routes
opened, to steam and to electricity, the conditions of commerce
and industry are changed. There is no longer any place, as there
was at the beginning of this century, for the boldness of the
manufacturer or the trader, counting upon his skill as well as
on his risk to obtain a large remuneration due to his audacity,
to his special knowledge, and to his capital.
“Between the new and the old commerce and industry there exists
the same difference as between the wars of the empire and the
last campaigns of France and of Austria.
“The same causes have produced the same results. In war the
cannon and guns of perfection, the railways and the telegraphs,
the vast masses of men, have produced rapid campaigns, in which
personal valor and the chances of war, going almost for nothing,
contributed very little to the final result. In industry the
same perfection of apparatus has changed the conditions of
trade; and the masses of men are replaced by the abundance of
circulating capital and the facility of the means of credit—two
other products of this active period of forty years.
“Only, in war the final result places the vanquished at the
mercy of his foe, who can, as it appears, dictate his laws; in
industry and in commerce the final gain is not left arbitrarily
to the swiftest or to the best equipped. He must content himself
with little; he is forbidden to abuse the victory which, without
this moderation, will not be long in escaping him.”
This is what we have come to; and from a purely economic point
of view we can recognize, with the judicious writer who has
furnished us with the process of the struggle, that the most
certain consequences of all this will be the following:
.pm letter-start “There will be an excess of circulating
capital, free from employment.
“Now, as long as this has not been the case the product of
capital has been as follows:
“From three to four and a half per cent. on unquestionable
securities of the first class.
“From four and a half to six per cent. on real estate security
of the second class.
“From six to eight per cent. on loans and limited liabilities.
“From eight to ten per cent. and upwards on industrial,
financial, and speculative ventures.
“In the future and during a still indefinite period, which
cannot fail to be long, very long, this scale must be modified
by the excess of unemployed capital.
“Unquestionable securities will descend to three per cent., or
below that; those of the second class will bring four and a
half; men will be happy to make six per cent. in manufactures or
production; finally, one can obtain eight per cent. only by
running wild risks. There will be a general change in the rate
of capitalization, in the sense of lessening the interest while
increasing the amount of capital. Some exceptions—that is to
say, some happy chances, some skilful personal strokes—may occur
to confirm this rule. The general movement, however, will, we
believe, be that which we have indicated.”
But what remains, then, to be done? Little of anything, if we wish to
attribute to the revival of activity, which will come in its own time,
only the sense and the direction which the movement has had until now.
On the other hand, forced to admit that the human spirit has not at all
gone to sleep, and that the inventive genius which the Master of all
things in his goodness has bestowed upon his humble creatures has not in
the least diminished, it is necessary also to confess that in the future
it is the unknown which opens before us; and just as, before this
century, people had not even thought of all the beautiful applications
of heat, electricity, steam, and light which have made the material
glory of our age and of an illustrious galaxy of _savants_, even so
to-day we cannot say toward what end the efforts of humanity might tend
to-morrow. One Being only knows it—he who knows all and sees all, he for
whom the past, the present, and the future are but one, he who does not
depend at all on time—God, in fact, the creator of all that has been,
that is, and that shall be, the great dispenser of all good and of all
progress; he who disposes of man at his will in one way or the other,
often while the latter, in his folly, refuses to abase his blind
presumption sufficiently to recognize him.
Let us, then, leave to the future that which belongs to the future, and
let us hold ourselves, each one for his own account, ready to obey the
impulse which it may please God to give us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LAST PILGRIMAGE TO MONT SAINT-MICHEL.
When the traveller who is visiting the beautiful localities of the
Channel Peninsula quits the southern faubourg of Avranches—a picturesque
little town built of sparkling granite—a road, marked by a succession of
rapid declivities, brings him to the shore of a large bay formed by the
sinking of the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Before him reaches, far
away and out of sight, the flat extent of sands, furrowed by the rivers
Sée, Sélunce, and Coësnon, whose silvery windings the eye can follow to
a considerable distance. On the higher parts of these sands grows a fine
kind of grass, the _poa_ of the salt-meadows, and which, mingled with
marine plants and sand-weeds, furnishes a favorite pasture for sheep.
The lower and barren portion of the sands disappears twice a day beneath
the tide, which at times spreads gently and caressingly over them, while
at others it rolls foaming in with precipitate fury, as if eager to pass
its appointed boundary. At high tide nothing is visible but an immense
lake, partially engirdled with hills; and in the distance, like a
pyramid of granite, sometimes from the bosom of the waves, sometimes
from the expanse of sand, rises a nearly circular rock, laden with
constructions of various kinds intermingled with vigorous vegetation,
and crowned by large and lofty buildings.
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.
Early in the fifteenth century Abbot Jolivet surrounded the town with
fortifications. The English, at this time invading France, besieged Mont
Saint-Michel, but were repulsed by the brave d’Estouteville and his
companions-in-arms, one hundred and twenty-nine in all, who successfully
defended the post entrusted to them when the greater part of France had
submitted to the conquerors.
During the religious wars Mont St. Michel was several times attacked by
the Protestants. On the Feast of St. Mary Magdalen, July 22, 1577, a
number of them, habited as pilgrims and concealing their weapons, were
admitted without suspicion into the church, where, after hearing several
Masses with great show of devotion, they divided into small groups, and,
with an air of calm indifference, occupied different parts of the
buildings, until, secure of their position, they murdered such of the
guards as did not escape by flight or concealment, and then fell not
only upon the garrison but on the monks, even massacring the priests who
had been saying Mass for them.
This noble abbey had for more than a thousand years an existence worthy
of its origin. Mingling in the religious and warlike history of France,
it was simultaneously or by turns occupied by knights and monks; the
abode of faith and courage; an advanced sentinel in the direction of
England, and thus affording protection against the foes of this world
and of the next, defending alike with the cross and with the sword, and
held in veneration by the whole of Christendom.
During the ages of faith pilgrims came hither by thousands, from all
lands, braving the danger of these treacherous sands, to invoke in this
his sanctuary the prince and leader of the armies of heaven.
The sacrilegious impiety of modern times could no more spare St.
Michael’s Mount than so many other holy and beautiful relics of the past
which it has seen fit to mutilate or destroy. The First Republic
suppressed the monastery, drove out the monks, demolished a portion of
their church, changed the name of Mont Saint-Michel to that of _le Mont
Libre_, or the Free Mount, and turned it into a prison!—doubtless in
order to prove the suitability of its new appellation.
The first prisoners there were the priests of Brittany and Normandy.
Prayer was thus at least not yet banished from its ancient abode. In
1811 Napoleon made of it a _Maison de Réclusion_, which, in 1818, became
a _Maison de Détention_, and it was at the same time also a state
prison. Rarely has any place seen more sad and strange vicissitudes. The
chosen dwelling-place of those called to serve God in a religious life
became the sink of every crime pursued and punished by society, and the
population of Mount St. Michael was now recruited not from men who had
received a holy vocation, but from courts of assize.
A decree of 1863, however, relieved it from this unworthy fate, alike
saddening to Christians, archæologists, and poets, and Mont
Saint-Michel, which now belongs to the see of Coutances, has been
confided by the ecclesiastical administration to the charge of twelve
priests of the Congregation of Pontigny in the diocese of Sens, who
carry on the services in its church, receive the visitors drawn thither
by the sanctity or historical interest of the place, and fulfil the
office of preachers and missionaries to all the parishes of the Channel
Islands. An orphanage for boys is now flourishing in the old barracks,
and by its side are _ateliers_ where painting on glass is carried on—a
kind of painting (or staining, rather) which, more than any other, has a
religious object. All this is, so far, a return to a better state of
things, but the solicitude of its diocesan does not find it enough,
feeling that, though much has been done, still the present is too unlike
the past, and earnestly desiring to restore the abbey to its former
splendor. And he will do it yet. Already the pilgrimages thither are
renewed with a fervor worthy of ancient days.
Few things can be more beautiful and edifying than the holy festivities
of which the most recent of these pilgrimages has just been the
occasion, and which have left so deep an impression on those who took
part in them, and who followed the imposing order of the successive
religious ceremonies, stamped as they were with the character of dignity
and grandeur which the Catholic Church has impressed upon her liturgy
and worship.
From earliest dawn long bands of pilgrims, conducted by the priests of
their respective parishes and preceded by their banners, began to enamel
with picturesque groups the white monotony of the sands. On arriving at
the Mount they formed into regular columns and slowly ascended the steep
acclivity to the church. Towards nine in the morning the Mount presented
a singular aspect, not unlike a gigantic ant-hill: the flights of steps
disappeared under the long processions mounting them, while the ramparts
were as if crenellated with the heads of the crowds watching for the
arrival of the Bishop of Coutances and Avranches and the Bishop of
Bayeux and Lisieux. An involuntary delay on the part of the bishops was
for a time the cause of extreme anxiety. Anything may be feared from
this dangerous bay, whose shifting sands change their direction after
every tide, and engulf the late or unwary traveller in an abyss of mud.
The first carriage had passed safely on to _terra firma_, but the wheels
of the second were perceived to be sinking, and the horses, terrified at
no longer finding any footing, were becoming so unmanageable that a
fatal catastrophe would have been almost inevitable, had not the men of
the place hastened to the rescue and succeeded by their prompt energy in
dragging the carriage out of danger.
The two prelates presented themselves at the entrance gate as the clock
of the great tower began to strike eleven, and were saluted by
acclamations so enthusiastic that it seemed as if the whole Mount were
bidding them welcome. They proceeded up the steep lane that winds upward
between houses that look as if piled almost one upon another, and which
date from three or four centuries back, low, square, and solid, and
having for the most part only one story, plunging their foundations into
the rock, and wedged, as it were, against each other, the better to
resist the force of hurricanes and tempests. Here and there trees of
thick foliage overshadow the narrow, winding ascent, which at intervals
through some unexpected opening shows a vast horizon over the waters of
the Channel, with its lovely islands, and the coast of France.
The procession reached in due time the threshold of the ancient abbey,
and, after a few words of warm and respectful welcome spoken to the
bishops by the reverend father prior, entered the church.
There is something unique in the beauty of this basilica which so nobly
crowns the summit of Mont Saint-Michel, and of which the four
extremities rest on four enormous arched vaults founded in the rock. It
possesses all the essential parts of a great cathedral—nave, aisles,
transepts, choir, and apse. The nave is Roman, the choir Gothic, and the
aisles _Moresque_ or Byzantine. Boldly cut in granite, the architecture
is as remarkable as the site.
The nave was formerly two hundred and forty feet in length, but
underwent an irreparable mutilation under the First Republic, when it
was shortened by the cutting away of four of its eight transverse
vaultings. It nevertheless remains singularly imposing—simple even to
severity, but relieved by its triforium and a gallery with deep arcades.
The collateral arches, which are somewhat narrow, have the horseshoe
form usual in Arabian architecture; the transepts, like the nave, are
Roman, but of more recent date; the choir, which is of the best period
of flamboyant Gothic, very delicately sculptured, has in the clerestory
a square window of remarkable richness; and in the apse, which is of
granite, delicate lines of tracery spring upwards with exquisite
lightness. On the keystone of its vaulted roof is the escutcheon of the
abbey. The choir is surrounded by bas-reliefs representing the four
evangelists, and a ship, symbolical of the church militant, tossing on
an angry sea which cannot overwhelm her, guided as she is by an unerring
pilot—_Fluctuat, non mergitur_.