What a contradiction is the Mont! A place of infinite beauty emerging from a vast mudflat. A place of holy pilgrimage where dogs defecate in the street. It is an Alice’s wonderland with tiny medieval streets that are filled to capacity. Turrets poke from crenellated walls and the chefs in the cafes beat out a rhythm in their copper mixing bowls. Even the resident cats, in Alice fashion, are pure white or pure black with nothing in between.
The Mont, so the story goes, is the result of a dream, or rather: three dreams. Aubert, the bishop of Avranches, dreamt one night that the archangel Michel appeared to him and commanded him to build a sanctuary on the Mont that arose from the nearby bay. Aubert awoke and shrugged off the command as a dream. Night fell again and again Aubert was visited in his dreams by the archangel. Aubert awoke once more and still shrugged off the visitations as a dream. The third night Michel appeared yet again, the time angered by Aubert’s unbelief. At a word from Michel the archangel’s hands burst into flames and to press home his point he laid a burning finger to the bishops head and repeated his command. Aubert awoke in a sweat, terrified by the vividness of the dream. As he wiped away the perspiration of terror his hands touched his head and he found there a hole burned through his skull. Aubert denied the archangels commands no more.
Our long ride in to this, the most current phase of Aubert’s dream, began in Courtils. We left our tent and our gear behind and followed the coast road. Le Mont rose above all the surrounding fields, sometimes shadowed by clouds, sometimes centered in a ray of shinning light. As we drew near we noticed something out of place. It seemed as though the golden figure of the archangel, crowning the mount, was desperately trying to out-fly a net cast to ensnare him. The whole steeple was shrouded in sinister scaffolding as the cathedral was being restored.
Over us flew French fighter jets, their roar echoing across the flatlands mimicking the American jets we had seen the day before. In the Hundred Years War, for a time, Le Mont St. Michel had been the only northern outpost of the French, surrounded by hundreds of miles of terrain captured by the English. The monument thus became a mighty military symbol, as well as a religious one, to the French. The fighters seemed to signal the fact that the military aspect of the Mont was not necessarily at an end.
Finally we reached the causeway that led out to the monument and advanced along it.
We had come when the tide was out and the Mont seemed to rise from an ugly sea of mud. All around were parked tour buses and motorhomes and cars. Hundreds of school kids and geriatric tourists flooded over the monument while we biked near to the gates, fitting easily, after a confused search, into an area restricted to those who worked on the monument. No signs guided us in so we followed the mass of people, who clogged the gates and the streets like so much blood in a congested artery.
The main street that curved up the Mont was purely medieval, with the walls of the buildings on each side no more than a double shoulder width apart. The upper floors overhung the streets and soon we were plunged into darkness.
Thankfully the seemingly endless stairs climbing the Mont acted as a sieve, filtering out most of the crowd, who never made it past the tactless tourist shops and tacky museums declaring “Dungeons, Prisons, Tides and a Periscope.”
By the time we reached the top, where the abbey began, the crowds had thinned to a mere throng and we could almost breath normally again. But almost half of those who made it this far were accompanied by their pet dogs and the upper reaches were full of yapping, drooling, snarling animals. So much for holy ground.
Fortunately for us the Mont is a rabbit’s warren of side passages and secret stairs leading to secret gardens. We escaped through a path running just behind the roofs of the first few buildings and found a deserted garden overlooking the gates that guard the Mont, near a place called the Gabriel tower. Here we ate our lunch in peace, disturbed only by a black kitten seeking refuge from what was, on this day at least, a dog’s world.
Once we finished we descend via the Chemin Des Ramparts, the road of the ramparts.
Few people bothered with that road and we became amused, it must be said, as we peered through the few spaces between buildings at the people packed cheek by jowl in the street below.
I don’t like to denigrate the bus tours that ferry people about Europe. Everyone must travel in their own way. But something seems wrong to me about the tours that grant only an hour to explore a monument that takes a hour just to climb.
Eventually we were forced to descend from our perch on the walls and find our way into the alcoves where the phones were, so that so that we could let family know that we still breathed. My water bottle burst as I spoke on the phone, drawing disgusted stares from passing tours that must have concluded that I couldn’t hold out for the bathrooms a few meters away.
I greatly enjoyed the phone calls home, not just to speak to family, but for the chance to watch an elderly oriental man in wooden shoes who was having the most agreeable time photographing himself as I talked. Why anyone would be so happy to have a picture of themselves in front of the automated teller at Mont St. Michel, or in front of a blank brick wall, or standing alone in a crowd of people, is beyond me, but he seemed so happy doing it that you couldn’t help but be delighted for him.
We left the monument to eat our dinner in its shadow and to watch the tour buses go by. Heather cannot help but throw food to disabled animals and scraps of bread to the one legged bird soon became an overhanging umbrella of seagulls. But any negatives eating outside might have brought were soon dispelled by the busloads of younger tourists that began divesting themselves of their clothing after a walk through the mud flats.
Finally we left for the day, not forgetting, of course, the dog that peed on me as we left the main gates. As we got home and settled into our sleeping bags in preparation for tomorrows climb and tour of the inside, the bells rang out once more, a hundred and eight times. They seem to do this at every sunrise, noon and sunset. At least we have a wakeup call for tomorrow.
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