in the street to know if they could drive us to Mont St. Michel. And as we had made up our minds not to go from Avranches at all, but from Pontorson, it was very annoying; because to have let the word "Pontorson" slip would have been to bring on a strong argument with any inhabitant of Avranches. We had to hold our tongues, and leave everybody under the impression that we were so ignorant and such dolts as not to be going at all.

Turning into a very pretty and wellkept botanic garden, you see that vast expanses of sand are beginning to be seen between the stems of the trees; and passing under those trees you find yourself on a lofty terrace looking down on the river, now winding from side to side of its sandy estuary. Beyond are the sands, away into the dim distance, bounded by the wild, low, wooded coast of Brittany, and the Rochers de Cancale; which latter run out into the sea like a ridge of broken glass bottles on a wall; and when you have cast your eye over the landscape, you are pretty sure to exclaim, "There it is."

"Ve

Fifteen miles away from you, out in the middle of the broad, grey expanse, there rises something which is like a vast ship stranded upright, with all her sails set, and her masts and rigging standing a pearl grey thing with dark brown shadows. This is Mont St. Michel -one has seen it at last!-the Mont St. Michel of the Bayeux tapestry. nerunt ad Montem Michaelis "Will one ever forget it again? I think not. Even Arthur Young, at the same time the best and the worst of travellers, was impressed by it twenty miles off, at Granville, in his way: "St. Michael's "rock rising out of the sea conically, "with a castle at the top, a most sin"gular and picturesque object;" very much so indeed. A pity he had not time to go nearer to it.

Avranches is so eclipsed by this Mont St. Michel, which is still fifteen miles off, that one does not remember much, except that it is a bright and beautiful town, and that there does not seem to be any church to it, save a miserable

little one in the corner of a square. What would happen if one went to church to one quarter the extent of the Coutances people, one cannot think. There is a colony of no less than three hundred of "my countrymen" here who have come here, as the negroes say, "for cheap," and amuse themselves after their kind, chiefly, I believe, in trout-fishing, and going to the club. One is not writing a guide-book-Murray has done. that; but no one should allow themselves to go to the Hôtel de France. This remark has only been wrung from us by the peine forte et dure.

Descending the zigzags which approach the town, on the other side from that on which we entered, a pleasant drive through a lower country well wooded with poplar, brought us to Pontorson. It is a very dirty little place, but the domestic architecture gets quainter as one nears Brittany, and this is the border town; the little river Cuesnon (flumen Cosnonis of the Bayeux tapestry) dividing the two provinces. This is the best place from which to make your pilgrimage to the Mountain of the Holy Archangel, as the priests in their sonorous language call it. Here we stayed with the Leroys, at the Hôtel des Postes, and we got to like these people very much. On the first evening we walked five kilomètres towards the bay, and, looking over the desolate fen (the river here being embanked as though in Lincolnshire), saw the great mountain of architecture soaring up within two miles of us, and saw also that we were going on the morrow to see one of the great things of our lives. How great, we little knew, nor will the reader, until he has been to see it.

The morning was wild and dim; the rains which were making in central France inundations almost as great as those of 1856, had ceased for an hour or two, as we started in a rickety little vehicle, drawn by a mad horse, and driven by Alphonse Leroy, the jolliest, the maddest French lad of eighteen (except his brother Louis) that I have met for many a year. For the first four miles we travelled over a horribly muddy

fen road, and expected every three minutes to be cast into the ditch. The farmers' long carts passed us in nearly a continuous train, carrying the blue mud from the low shore to the uplands for manure. These we had to pass, with one wheel in the ditch almost the whole way, Alphonse screeching and bellowing like mad. "Hey done! Hey duc! Ay peur !" Our horse would not go without driving, and then went as wild as you like. At length the mud mine was passed, and the road was in peace, getting sandy. At last we came to a tiny low auberge, "to the descent of postilions for Mont St. Michel," where Alphonse descended for a minute, and then we whirled down between two sand dunes with a sickening lurch, and sped away across the Great Sands themselves, eighteen miles of them all around us; and two miles to seaward, rising solitary four hundred and fifty feet out of them, nearly-if not quite-the most magnificent pile of Gothic architecture. in the world.

It was within two days of the full moon and I was anxious about the tide, unnecessarily it seemed. Alphonse was not very certain himself, for he drove like Jehu the son of Nimshi. But now we were on the level sands, fairly face to face with Mont St. Michel; we had time to see it for about one minute, and then a storm, sweeping from the long promontory of Brittany, crept up and hid it from our view. An arch of nimbus caught the topmost pinnacle of the Cathedral, throwing a dark purple shadow across the mighty network of flying buttresses, and then the rain came down and hid it all from us, and, lashing up the sand in its fury, swept on to us, fighting bravely across the lonely sands, a mile from shore.

My companion was fortunately to the windward side of our little hooded carriage, and in some measure escaped. I, by holding up a rug, was able to face the fearful rain in some measure, and watch by degrees a great awful pyramidal mass begin to show itself, dim and grey, through the raging rain. We were within a quarter of a mile of it,

when we drove through the rain-curtain and saw it, almost overhead. Then there was a lurch of the carriage, and a mediæval gate before us opened through a ramparted wall: bare-legged fishwives, with red petticoats scarcely reaching to their knees, and shrimping nets over their shoulders, going on to their work; bare-legged fishermen in blue blouses, and children innumerable. Then there was a clattering scramble off the sands up a tide-washed causeway, and so we passed under a dark arch into the lower part of Clovelly! At least it was wonderfully like it.

Seeing the formidable row of carriages standing, and in the narrow street, I feared that we had come on rather a full day, and should be plagued by the chatter of tourists (of whom en passant, the English, let us say, from their natural stupidity and reticence, make far less noise than the French), but it was not so. These awful halls and corridors are so vast that fourteen fifteen carriages full of people can lose themselves in them without making themselves offensive to one another. And, moreover, the

Guiding" at Mont St. Michel is, like all things in France (except an insignificant few), done so well, that parties can hardly meet. You follow one route through the whole of this wonderful stone labyrinth. In an hour and a half, which seemed like half an hour, the only people we met face to face were two recalcitrant priests with some élèves, who had guided themselves, and were coming the wrong way in defiance of precedent.

A noble-looking Norman fisherman, bare-legged, came forward to guide us on the first part of our expedition. Passing under three dark gates in succession, we turn to the right, and getting on to the ramparts began to ascend from one tier of them to another, and gradually to approach that splendid collection of Gothic halls commonly called "La Merveille," and which, vast as it is, is but a small part of the great convent fortress. Our guide pointed out the endless machicoulis on the walls, and told us that

Mont St. Michel was "no longer a prison," convicts and soldiers being all removed, and the place under restoration by the Emperor. The villagers were fearfully poor in winter, he said, and judging from those we saw he certainly spoke the truth.

One came slowly towards us along one of the ramparts while he was with us. "Voilà une malheureuse," he said, and shook his head, and I watched her as she wearily and listlessly approached. She was a woman of from fifty to sixty, with a face which carried on it the expression of having been smitten many times by some invisible hand which had left no mark or scar, only a look: a look of one waiting in dull patience for another blow. She did not whine or beg, as far as I remember, and not even speak, but held out a basket of something to sell. Poor soul! they were nothing but the very commonest cockleshells, worth a few shillings a cartload. We gave her money, a great deal for her, but her hand only mechanically closed on it, and she never thanked us, -the guide did that for her, and we watched her go creeping away along the battlements, with her hand clasping the money, and I doubt not, the same worn, straightforward look in her face.

At length our guide led us into a court-yard, in one corner of which is a noble arch, with a steep flight of steps ascending under its dark span: going up these, you leave the sunshine and enter the dim and awful solitude of the fortress monastery. Here the fisherguide was dismissed, and we were taken in hand by a bright, clever youth of seventeen, who did his duty to perfection.

You come to a grille of vast strength, and, passing through it, enter the first chamber, a fine Gothic vestibule, "La Salle des Gardes," then you pass to the "Grande Salle des Officiers," and others which it would take half a volume to describe, and which in the main formed the hospice for the pilgrims; and so you pass on, mainly in dim twilight, for above an hour, from corridor to corridor, through hall after hall, until the mind gets confused as to their succession.

With the good Abbé Pigeon's book before me now, I can scarcely remember more than half of the different things of which he speaks. I remember that it was all wonderful beyond measure; but one or two points remain fixed in the mind, beyond, as I think, all power of time to efface. I will try to give the reader some faint impression of those which struck one most.

The dungeons are, on the whole, the most celebrated in Europe; and they remain very much as they were when they were built. I had a great curiosity to see these cachots of evil notoriety, and they came fully up to my expectations. You are passing through a dark tunnel-passage of some height, and of irregular flooring-very dark, but not so dark as to need candles-when you bethink you to look back. It is evident that you have advanced some way into the tunnel, for the last crosslight is some way behind: then you look before, and there is a sign of a faint, pale, ghostly light at the end of the passage; and arriving at that end you get into the region of this melancholy light, and find yourself in what might be called so truly, "the hall of the lost footsteps.

It is very lofty; rude, but not irregular in shape. From whence the light comes you hardly care to inquire, but that light is dim and faint, yellowbrown, and melancholy beyond belief. It must change of course, somewhat, this light, with the blessed changing sun outside; but when I saw it the sun was high, almost as high as it ever is, and the hideous melancholy of the place was profound. Where the light was a little brighter than elsewhere, at the upper end of the hall or cavern, there came down, appearing out of black darkness, a flight of stone steps, irregular in shape, size, and direction, from the upper regions, which were spanned by a broad round arch; and it is worthy of notice, that among all the beautiful and remarkable objects which I saw that year, that arch and those steps remain almost the most vivid of all. You are now in the highest atmosphere of the highest

romance. These are the famous dungeons of Mont St. Michel, at which the world has shuddered for many centuries. The things you have read of were actually done here where you stand. You find yourself speaking in a whisper about it even now, British Philistine as you are supposed to be. They used to bring the prisoners here blindfold, and unbind their eyes in this very spot in this, the most evil place I have ever seen; granite and iron, with a dim, dull hideous light over all, organic reproductive nature utterly banished, if that mattered in such an extremity. And then

This was their last look in most cases, at what may be called light at all. The cachots, where they were to spend the rest of their lives, open out of this hideous hall, and remain there to this day. I chose what seemed to me the darkest, and asked the guide if there was an oubliette. He answering, "Non, ils sont fermées, ils sont trop dangereuses," I went in, and requested my companion to shut me in, which she did.

A fancy has possessed me concerning that cachot since: an idle one perhaps, but about as true as most prison narratives, possibly. Here it is, right or

wrong.

"I stayed there for five-and-twenty years, like the man who had been there before me. The first impression was that of a deep black darkness, as though a band of black velvet had been tied tightly across my eyes, so tightly that all possible rays of light being excluded from without, that inner and mysterious light, which we see on the darkest night when we are ill, began to tease the retina, and to bring a light in one's eyes, uncertain and shapeless, threatening to bring forms with it, which one dreaded might be of the nightmare kind, and scare one to madness: a light which seemed to come from within one: the light which one had taken in from the blessed sunshine, trying to force its way to freedom, through the hideous velvet mask of darkness with which I was surrounded.

"For the first day, lying as I did, a ruined heap of lost hopes, lost schemes, lost ambitions, and of woes which would die by desuetude, and only be feebly galvanized by my reappearance; in the darkest corner of this hideous little dungeon, I thought that this light came only from my own brain. But on the second or third day, as far as I remember, I found out that it was a real light, a little dribble, so to speak, of the great sunshine which was flooding the sand-flat outside with blazing glory, and I got in time to love it; though there were four dark bars before it which I hated, more particularly the extreme right one, which had towards the upper part a bulge like the great brutal chest of the man who had done me this irreparable wrong.

"You ask me to remember how I passed my time in the darkness for twenty-five years. I cannot tell you. I cannot tell in what order came the phases through which my mind went, under this discipline of my brother

man.

I should say, now, that in all probability before my memory went the Barmecide phase came first, when with my bread and water I gave great entertainments, and entertained my guests. I was a great diplomat at that time, and settled the map of Europe in an astonishing way. I was an orator, and denounced great statesmen: that was certainly in this time, before memory went, because my jailer once said, while bringing in my bread and water, not unkindly, Friend, you are noisy, and you use abuse of the most violent character towards our gentle and deeplyloved king, Louis Quinze.' I answered, Ask that Nero to hang me,' and he said, 'Chut.'

"The craving after any form of organic life was very bitter for a time; I cannot say for how long. A fossil in the granite would have been a friend; an Oldhamia radiata would have been to me some outward and visible sign of the God whom I had forgotten in my prosperity; and the priests' formulas had withered into deadness on my ears. I began to be alone: my imagination got

exhausted from want of feeding, and there were no Barmecide feasts now. I craved for something alive. The imagination of our forefathers,-carefully educated as they were by the priests into the habit of the non-observation of physical facts,-peopled these dungeons with toads and adders. My God, what would I have given for the companionship of a toad or an adder!

46

Memory has not entirely died with me: but it has only partially revived. I am only sixty now, and yet I seem to have lived for a perfectly indefinite. time. Camille Desmoulins came yesterday to take me out for a walk, and I took his arm and went down the sunny side of the street with him; a kind but wild lad. I had told him all this by degrees, and he asked me how I got on in the later times. I answered, 'It was a never-ending fight against darkness, which has left me what you see me to be now.'"

After this imaginary five-and-twenty years, I, like Eppie in the coal-hole, knocked to be let out again, and I was let out. My companion said that I was not in there above a minute, but it was quite long enough.

But the cachot in which I spent twenty-five years of a wasted life, was by no means the worst. Our bright young guide pointed out to Monsieur that here was another much darker, which indeed was true, though as far as he showed us no one of them was absolutely dark. These cachots, how ever, were mild mercy to the hideous arrangement, the position of which is pointed out, the too famous "Cage du Mont St. Michel." The gallery in which it was erected is some twelve or fourteen feet broad. Across this were placed two rows of wooden beams of great thickness, but only three inches apart; the space between the rows of beams being so narrow that the prisoner could walk forwards and backwards, without turning; that is to say, as it seems, that he could lie on his face or on his back, but could not turn his body. The hideous details of such a form of imprisonment must be left to the reader's imagination. The last person imprisoned

here was Teste Murray (Pigeon gives us but small information about such matters), a Dutch journalist who offended Louis Quatorze, and was illegally seized over the border. We are by degrees becoming less cruel, which is a good thing for all parties, particularly the political minority. The suppression of the Indian Mutiny itself was at all events done in a different way; and Louis Quinze himself, though he did practise vivisection after the French manner on Damiens, at least pulled down the cage of Mont St. Michel; a measure which may strike an idle tourist as being somewhat of the same value as household suffrage limited by a fifty years' residence for qualification. Let us hope that the world is getting less cruel. Indeed there is no doubt of it.

The Gothic halls, following one after another, will please and impress you. A little French antiquary, not a native of these parts, said to me, "I have seen everything from St. Mark's to Durham, and there is nothing like Mont St. Michel." Other travelled people of the highest intelligence and position have confirmed his opinion to me; my own remark was, that if you piled all the Medieval architecture of the Rhine, from Bonn to Bingen together, you could make but a poor imitation of Mont St. Michel after all. I ought to know these parts pretty well, and I think I can hold my own on that score. The subterranean church, for instance, on whose elephantine pillars stand the foundations of the "Oguvale' Cathedral, which at four hundred feet above the sea crowns this noble vegetation of building like a beautiful flower, is very remarkable and wonderful. You are on, or as I remember, a little above, the summit of the rock here. You find yourself among a group of gigantic pillars in a dark vault; almost all shade and but little light; a group of black granite, (really) Doric pillars, with a few little cross-lights sloping in; a thing you will find it difficult to beat on the Rhine at all events. This is the church of Notre Dame et de Saint Aubert Sous-terre. They are going to restore it, and the image of our Lady has