Mont St-Michel, as I think I’ve told you before, is a tidal island of the coast of France. It was about a two-and-a-half hour drive from where we stayed last night, but well worth the trip.
As you can see in the picture above, the abbey is situated on the top of this huge piece of rock. The original rock was apparently shaped something like a pyramid, and because the monks who designed the abbey believed that the closer you are to Heaven, the closer you are to God, instead of leveling off the top of the pyramid, the abbey is actually balanced on the top of the rock, with the town and everything else constructed around and under it to support it. As you can kind-of see in the picture, to get to the top we had to climb a steep route that spiraled around the mountain until we reached the abbey on top. The view from the abbey (which overlooks the path to the top, the seaside, and the causeway which divides Brittany and Normandy) was stunning, and yielded some of my only clear pictures on this very gray day.
Luckily, right when we arrived there was a tour starting (in English, no less), so we quickly joined that.
Our tour guide was an older lady with a French accent. Though she struggled with her English, she was so careful and articulate with her words (even if it took her a minute or two to think of the right ones) that the things she said were very poetic. We wandered through the different sections of the abbey, including the cloister, the refectory, two chapels, and the original abbey, which is actually beneath the now-visible abbey. She talked about the different sections that had been built and rebuilt, and by who and when. We went downstairs and upstairs, and through lots of locked doors. She kept saying, “The architecture, the dates, I can tell you these things, but these things are not interesting. But imagine, just imagine…” and she would point out where things had been and what they might have looked like.
She summed up the tour very well at the end, when in her beautiful broken English, she winked at us and leaned in, before remarking, “If you find books, you can read about the building, the ideas, the people, the architects, but to be under, like before, to stand in the original church, built so long ago, there is no words.”
And she was right.
For more pictures of Mont St-Michel, click here.
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