We began in the Hall of the Guards, the abbey's fortified entrance. Here, in times past, the knights of Mont St. Michel would guard against attack or officials of the government would greet new prisoners and now a young lady checks your ticket. From the hall we climbed a hundred stairs more, along the Staircase of the Great Degree, the access way to the church of the abbey. On our left rose the great walls of the abbey's lodgings, on our right, the walls of the lower churches buried beneath the great church. On either side the walls rose so high that all that remained was a thin slice of blue sky above. Sometimes even that disappeared under the fortified bridges through which the monks traveled between church and bed. Finally we rose out of the depths to the Terrace of the West.
The terrace granted pilgrims a panoramic view of the bay and the seething town on the slopes below.
It was wide and flat and it was here the official tour began. With our small tour, numbering only in the low hundreds, we entered the abbey of Mont St. Michel.
Like most other Christian churches in Western Europe it was in the shape of a cross. The nave was done in Romanesque architecture with thick pillars supporting soaring barrel vaults. It was in three layers, the first the barrel vaults, the second, perhaps thirty feet above ground level was made of tiny arches and the third was stained glass windows. The choir, or head, of the church had been redone in a flamboyant gothic style with pointy arches inside and flying buttresses outside. At the top you could see the flame shaped carvings from which the flamboyant style took its name. The choir had been rebuilt when it had collapsed in the 15th century. The entire abbey, except for the exact middle, was supported on smaller churches built up on the island. The center was the only portion supported by rock. The abbey was vast, but virtually devoid of decoration.
In the center was a carving of St. Michel in his third aspect, the warrior angel, charged with fighting the forces of Lucifer wherever they may be found. Satan was expressed in the shape of a dragon, hence the gilded statue at the pinnacle of the church, of St. Michel slaying the dragon. Too bad, I like dragons.
From the abbey we were led to a piece of heaven on earth, the cloisters of the monks. The cloisters were square, as all cloisters are, with a double row of columns separating the walk from the open aired garden in the center. Here the monks came to meditate on the chapter of the bible they had read that day. There were 137 columns, 1 for the only god, 3 for the trinity, 7 for the perfect number. The columns were designed to set a pace for the monks as they wandered in contemplation. Each column on the inside row came down exactly in the middle of the arch made by the two columns on the outside row, one pace forward.
The arches between columns are covered in sculptures depicting plants that would normally be found in a cloister. 
Hidden among the stone plants are fiendish monsters to remind the monks that evil lurks everywhere. Unfortunately the sculptures often depicted evil as being extremely cute so I’m not sure it had the intended effect.Cloisters are supposed to be enclosed structures with no view of the outside world to distract from mediation but here a door opened out to a view of the bay, a least a couple hundred feet above sea level and over a hundred in a sheer drop. The monks had opened it as the beginning of a project to build a chapter house and run out of funds. Only recently had a pane been put in to protect people from the drop, perhaps the monks had kept in open to escape from meditation.
Most cloisters have a garden in the center. In the 1960’s it dawned on someone that this one did not, so they rectified the situation by adding one. But the monks weren’t stupid. Below the cloisters is the scriptorium where they copied books and a garden overhead means water below so now they are in the opening phase of removing the garden, after it wrecked the plaster of the scriptorium.
From the cloisters we moved into the refectory where the monks had eaten their meals. A vast silent room, except when filled to the brim with a tour, at which point it became impossible to hear anything for the never-ending echoes. Here the monks would eat bathed in light that swam in from cunningly concealed windows and filled the room.
Our tour guide next raced past the Salles des Hotes (because that was were the tour was supposed to end) and took us down a never ending flight of stairs and around the back of the central peak of the Mont, concealed behind a wall of thick bricks. Eventually we emerged into a small chapel were the only remaining fragment of medieval fresco on the Mont was hung. The chapel stood between the infirmary and the ossuary, the place of bones, to remind the monks that they were still mortal. The fresco depicted three dead people reminding their living selves that death always lurked. Cheerful thing to have in an infirmary.
From the chapel we went to the Room of the Giant Hamster Wheel.
The Room of the Hamster Wheel was actually the ancient ossuary where the bones of dead monks had been stored. But the French revolution has seen those destroyed and the authorities of the prison had transformed the room to a supply room. Here the supplies were hoisted up a long steep ramp on sleds pulled by prisoners running in the hamster wheel. Strangely enough the monks had used a similar system on the north side of the Mont, which the revolutionaries had destroyed, only to find they had no way of getting food.
From there we went to another chapel, this one acting as a support for the south transept of the church. It was in almost complete darkness because the prison had used it as a cistern and all the windows had been walled up to keep the water in.
Next came The Crypt of the Big Pillars and unlike the room of Giant Hamster Wheel, I am not making this name up. This crypt has stored no dead and served no religious functions. Instead it housed enormous pillars that supported the choir of the church. Each pillar was a gothic pillar, completely enclosing the Romanesque pillar that had existed previously. In a small corner of this crypt was a gilded golden statue of the Madonna and child atop a globe blue with silver stars. A sister church in Spain had given it to encourage the reconstruction effort. Nice place to store such a gift!
Finally the tour led us back to the Salle des Hotes and the Salle des Chevaliers, with a stop in the scriptorium. The scriptorium was an enormous room where the monks had copied manuscripts all day long. To give them consistent light the only windows were to the north and these were small round circles that looked out like portals from a vast ship. You could see the decay in the plaster from the garden overhead.
The Salle Des Hotes was the chamber where the nobility had been entertained and had once been richly decorated in the blue and stars of the French Crown, but was again destroyed during the French revolution. Finally the Salle des Chevaliers, where the knights would sleep, and the end of the tour.
Here everyone filled passively down the narrow stairs though the guide had invited everyone to stay and explore on their own. We were the only ones to stay. Now we discovered the Mont’s greatest secret. The tours come in waves and everyone, everyone, stays with their tour. In the troughs between the waves the Mont is completely deserted. Imagine all the rooms I have described, filled with a hundred, two hundred, people, then going back and finding them completely empty.
We were like two kids in a candy store. We ran from room to room with delight. We retraced the entire tour and saw everything with no distracting presence. Heather especially loved the cloisters and we spent a lot of time there.Eventually we found our way back to the abbey and discovered a staircase down to another chapel and here a community of monks and nuns were having mass. We stayed for the service and it seemed to place the whole structure into context. Though we might not necessarily agree with the message expounded in the mass, it was a very beautiful ceremony and it brought home who the monument should really belong too. It seemed strange that with this massive religious edifice all around us the monks and nuns should be shunted off to some deep grotto so as not to offend the eye or to interrupt the tour. They are the soul of the Mont and without them it is merely the dead remains of a once living body. We left feeling better for having seen the service and having participated in our own little way.
Finally we descended the innumerable steps of the exit
and emerged in an enormous gift shop near the entrance. It seems that humanity will never tire of buying tacky objects. Though what we would do with a tin of cookies shaped like the Mont, except eat them, escapes me.
We then circled the Mont to visit the tiny chapel at the rear.
It had been a long and beautiful day and as we biked back the 12 kilometers to our campground we were very happy.
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