Mont Saint-Michel of Normandie

From St. Malo we took to the lonely road, through villages of dilapidated elegance in brick and stone, and then beyond, to the flat, bleak featureless coast of Brittany, low tides leaving clay silt stretching toward a void of white sky, stern dark red houses facing the sea. But there was relief in the intensity of this habitat unspoiled by commerce.

And then Mont St. Michel loomed, a spectre of holy fortification, a medieval village cradled high in a bleary sky. The French Jerusalem lording over all. We parked at the far edge of green fields that border the immense stretch of silt, imagining Coeur de Leon conducting his brutal military games on a beach like this, of sea and sky. He came to mind since his father, Henry II of England, had made this pilgrimage three times, as had a long register of kings. It began to rain as we and many pilgrims approached the Mont. As we entered the Porte du Roi, barefoot travelers in the wet cold trooped in on either side of us. Distant little figures dotted the silt flats. The tide, which was low, can rise up to 15 meters, and as legend has it, at the speed of a galloping horse. Many the pilgrim has drowned. And many the legend has sprung from this environment at the mercy of sea and sky.

The abbey's cloister

But in fact, St. Michael's protection has been unerring: the Vikings somehow spared it in the second half of the 9th c., and in later centuries the English never could take Mt. St. Michel, though they surrounded it during the Hundred Years' War. They merely taxed the pilgrims who continued to travel to the Archangel whose reputation continued to intensify. The cult of the archangel gave Michael new powers--like Egyptian deities, he conducted souls to heaven, and weighed their virtues.

Michael conducting Christ to Heaven

Built over a millennium, Mt. St. Michel rises in a patchwork of hard, military stone to the Abbey, where beauty emerges from the stern history of power and majesty. Somehow it is the perfect setting for the Archangel. It had been a little church, constructed after visions of the Archangel himself, by the Bishop of Avranches in 708. Two centuries later the Normans installed their own clerics, the Benedictines, and eventually built one of the greatest Norman cathedrals and one of the most astounding architectural feats of all time, La Merveille, an abbey wrapped around a mountain, completed in 1228. The Benedictines there equipped three ships for the 1066 conquest, and participated in all Norman politics and warfare of the time.

Refectory

Today, aided by much restoration, La Merveille is at once formidable and delicate. Open to the sky are the delicate 13th c. cloisters, in perfect rhythm of arches and vaults, resting on top of the equally delicate refectory, with its narrow leaded windows, that rests on ever sturdier chambers below.

Guest hall for patrons

A more robust hall lies below for entertaining patrons and hangers on, and then the moving hall for the intellectual works of the monks, renowned since the 8th c.

Monks have been copying and producing manuscripts since the Benedictines arrived in 966, reaching a peak in the 11th c. With elegant handwriting and harmonious inks, the Mt. St. Michel monks developed signature innovations in their illuminated manuscripts in the decoration of the enlarged initial letter. But when France came in possession of Mt. St. Michel, this work was transferred to Parisian workshops and no longer took place in the monastery. In fact, Mt. St. Michel began to transition into its next role, as a prison, which explains why so much has had to be restored in the last few centuries.

Astronomer in Scientific Treatise, decorated "O"

We moved through these halls, surrounded by Japanese tour groups with their discrete, respectful elegance, absorbing a history of brutal power, intellectual dominance, and painful servitude, but always the glory of this indomitable and exalted part of France.

View from the cloister

Then we dined on galettes, overlooking the foggy silt--hauntingly beautiful, austere, hopeless of relief. We had crossed into Normandy for the glory of Mt. St. Michel and we would return to the smaller people of Bretagne, who cultivate their own gardens with such vigor.

Bretagne

There is the force of the wind that continuously blows, swelling and becoming an amazingly violent storm, where gusts and rain reveal the figures and stir the shape of things.  

There is the force of the cold wet night, filling the wild moors and shores with creatures.   

And when the mist comes, when the other forces vanish under the cover of silence, then you can meet what cannot be seen, what is beyond shapes.

Translated excerpts from     

Bretagne Terre sacrée     

 Gwenc'hlan Le Scouëzec

Dolmen, burial tomb, 5000-4000 BC

Bretagne, on France's Atlantic coast, is one of the six Celtic nations, a culture apart. The Celts arrived in the 5th c. BC and found megaliths, stone witnesses of ancient and powerful beliefs that remained sacred sites. The Celts' druidism is said to have survived hidden behind Christianity, some say preserved through the old medieval guild remnant, Compagnons du Devoir, that still has an office in Paris near the Eglise St. Gervais-et-St.-Protais. But the Celts could not survive Julius Caesar, for the Romans knew how to fight in organized array, whereas the Celts fought as individual heroes. Later, Christianity would come from Ireland, another Celtic link, yet continue to celebrate the old shrines with new symbols. 

Perros-Guirec

At dawn in Perros-Guirec birds chirp and gulls squall over the serene harbor. We arrived by smooth trains, under bright sun alternating with traveling cloudbursts. This idyllic land is at once France and Brittany, stone houses and lush micro climates, palms and pines and the blue puffs of the cyan tree, gentle waves of cool drift from the Atlantic, these shores of odd tongues. Our hostess Joelle took us down pathways that Napoleon had created for surveying the dangerous coast. She told us of her own love-hate relationship with the Breton tongue--punished in school for speaking it, she later longed to hear the accents of her grandmother, but her mother had been traumatized as well, and wouldn't speak it with her.  But another houseguest, Jean, had gone back to study in University and supplied us with the rough accents. Perros-Guirec is a community of solid old stone houses, with long sloping black Breton slate roofs, and of 19th c. castles of the nouveaux riches, under a capricious sun illumining tawny rock islands, turning the sea, for brief moments, aqua. I love this well-worn yet pristine France, smoothed and sanded by generations of formidable peasants, then by wealthy vacationers.

Eglise St. Jacques, 12th c.

Our walk around the Sentier de Douane--duty collector's path---took us to the quaint and nubbly Eglise St. Jacques, a stop on the pilgrimage road to Compostella. It is topped by an oriental tower of rough stone, its portals a mix of Romanesque and Gothic, the little top heavy figures long since worn away. Built in the 12th c., expanded in the 16th, its aisles are of roughest Romanesque stone with a ceiling of polished wood like Noah's inverted arc. Behind a vagrant who huddled before the altar was a rustic but elaborate retable of startled saints, the sole decor. On departing, we read the sign at the door, which wished us courage, peace and joy for the continual invention of life

5-4th millennium menhir, before 13th c. church

The following morning was drenched in fog and birdsong behind the blanket of moisture. In the afternoon we traveled from dolmen to menhir to church, the sacred places preserved through millennia. The dolmen--covered alleyways for burial-- of the 4th millennium BC, one near the sea, stood among tender grasses at two separate places in splendid solitude. Perhaps nearby mounds of earth concealed adjacent dolmen.

The menhirs, stone shrines, were near churches that had been built within their aura around the 12th century. The most celebrated is the Christianized menhir, carved with primitive symbols of the crucifixion, while the slow work of water had carved the back into the appearance of a pleated cloak. The churches are in the bluntly charming Beaumanoir style of the region, fortified and sliced with meurtrier for shooting attackers, topped with heavy stone cupolas and spires.

19th c. chateau

Shrine of St. Guirec

Then we took a long walk in the normally stiff wind over granite boulders and the white sand of Grand Ile, where the sea turns turquoise then green as the brilliant sun emerges, coloring distant boulders. A 19th c chateau nestled into a rock island near Ploumanach, surrounded by wave-tossed piles of granite, like the ruins of a world tumbled into the sea. It is evidently owned by a famous German comic who tends to snub his neighbors, but entertains artists for prolonged stays on the rocky ile surrounded by tempestuous winds.
 

Corsairs celebrating on Tortuga

We drove to the picturesque fortified coastal city--once an island-- of St. Malo, famous for its adventurous and merciless corsairs. Named for a saint of the 6th c. who had evangelised nearby Aleth, St. Malo declared itself an independant republic in the 17th c.: "Ni Francais, ni Breton, Malouin suis." (The later corsairs would conquer the Malvinas in Argentina, hence the name Malvinas.) Those hardy pirates received certification from France's king to become corsairs, and continuing their paths of destruction, inflicted heavy losses on English, Dutch and Spanish fleets. 

From the western ramparts, St. Malo

Besides the famous corsairs, notably Robert Surcouf (who was also a notorious slave trader) St. Malo celebrates her sons Jacques Cartier, who discovered Canada, and the writer Chateaubriand. Expanded over the centuries by filling in the surrounding sea, St. Malo is no longer an island, but almost one. Occupied by the Germans, in 1944 St. Malo was bombed till she burned. Today the streets are stern and gray--all rebuilt--and closely spaced. They are cold. It is the ramparts that are magnificent for an evening stroll. They survive from their origins in the 12th c.

After a drive along the coast of Brittany to Mont St. Michel (see next blog) we returned to the heart of Brittany, Rennes.

We stayed in the adjacent village of Betton, with Jacques' sister and brother-in-law, along a canal made for Napoleon's boats to circumvent les Anglais, that pours through lush green fields. Fishermen cast lines where delicate ducks scurry along the limpid surface.

Parliament of Bretagne

Later we parked in Rennes, administrative capital of Bretagne, in a parking lot named for the fields of tournaments--Les Lices. Bretagne became France's property when Anne of Bretagne (1477-1514) married two French kings. It was not her choice, of course--she'd been raised to govern the Duchy of Bretagne, her father lacking male heirs. But she found herself, the wealthiest woman in her world, reluctantly gifting France with her homeland. The beautiful Chateau d'Amboise in the Loire Valley bears memories of her many years spent there--where her first husband Charles VIII died from hitting his head on a lintel, and she then married his brother Louis XII, constrained by treaty.

Medieval San Sebastian

We embarked on the medieval city of split timber houses decorated in wood carvings from the 16th c. through the old city gates Porte de Mordelaise. Nearby, the great cathedral St. Vincent has an interior so magnificently furnished it looks Teutonic, murals of ponderous beautiful men who are the saints of Bretagne, the ceiling arching with perfect Renaissance splendour, folded into decorative faults. Its exterior is like St. Sulpice, but more decorative.

Porte de Mordelaise

St. Vincent

We walked along streets of large, colorful cobblestones lined with half-timbered medieval houses that now sell tajines and kebobs, and perused an old gothic flamboyant church with its Breton ceiling of wood, which has become a tourist center. Many of the old wood tinder boxes had burnt in 1720 and been rebuilt with stone classicism and arcades. We passed through majestic squares, of the Renaissance Hotel de Ville, its niche empty of statues that had depicted Bretagne kneeling at the feet of le roi de France--that didn't last long--facing the opera, round and decorative. The magnificent square of the Breton parliament, burnt also during demonstrations against Prime Minister Balladur--now restored. The cross streets of pedestrian cobblestones bordered with a light stone classicism now sell international clothing brands.

 It is a charming city, filled with the lyrically goth students of the university, contentedly reminiscent of its past, stubbornly, Breton.