Mont St Michel - Part 2

The Mont is a tourist trap even if you avoid the restaurant. I weave my way up the main street through the hundreds of browsers, passing shops selling pennants, toy armour and miniature reproductions of our favourite gargoyles. The visitors are dressed in colours that the medieval lords and abbots of this place could never have conceived of - lurid pink, lime green and electric blue.

All around there is hefty stone – cobbles, steps, house walls, retaining walls, capping stones and slabs – in places the natural rock of the Mont protrudes, anywhere that’s too steep to build on. And on tired legs - my angry octopus has now disappeared - it feels alarmingly steep… Eventually I arrive at the abbey entrance. Even then there is yet another flight of stairs to make it to the ticket desk. It goes on and on.

The shape of the castle, a sort of cap on the rock, creates a mind-boggling network of stairways, corridors and walkways: they lead to you never know where: a cubby hole, a view of a dungeon or a dingy, vaulted corridor, but then the enclosed barrel of rattling echoes opens up into an enormous hall, a vast gallery where the shuffling and shushing of footfalls and voices echoes from scores of surfaces.

The original 11th Century abbey on the Mont was romanesque, but following a siege in 1204 it was rebuilt in Gothic style, and it is this that we see mostly now (you can spot a few remaining rounded arches). Mont St Michel reached its pinnacle as a place of pilgrimage in the 300 years following this reconstruction before it went into gradual decline over the following centuries. After the French revolution it even became a prison, at least partly for recalcitrant monks. It was only after reconstruction and restoration as a national monument in the late 1800s, by historical architect Edouard Courroyer (see Review of Mere Poulard’s restaurant), that it became a place of pilgrimage once again – this time for tourists as well as religious travellers.

In 1906, when the young TE Lawrence and his friend visited, it was still being restored by Courroyer, but evidently there was plenty for the two young men to explore. Lawrence writes that he will reserve judgement on the place -

“It is distinctly fine in parts. I will not say what struck me the first time, but will reserve description till third or fourth visit.”

- though in fact he does go on too voice a few opinions -

“All the nave is being restored, and the roof is therefore off; a fact which rather disfigures the rest of the church. The piscinas are horrid; tall, thin, about 16 inches wide, and eleven feet high. They are very ugly and ill proportioned.”

It is clear from the photographs he took the following year that it was the gothic arches that he found most picturesque. And the heart of it all is the cloister, with its double run of slender arches and niches containing carved faces and flowers. He took three images, showing the shapes and complex patterns that he enjoyed capturing – with gothic arches sliding behind one another in a repreating pattern of vaults. (See more about the young TE Lawrence’s photography.)

After a while comparing angles and aligning arches, I wander outside to a viewpoint - and find myself on a windblown hilltop of fractious kids and flyaway hairdos. Gulls are squawking, riding the wind all around us, and etched in the mud hundreds of feet below are meandering lines of footprints in the mud flats.

For all its aged wonder, the overall impression of these ancient halls and galleries is a little bald. It’s an issue with visiting almost all medieval buildings, as all trace of life seems to have evaporated (Falaise, William the Conqueror’s Castle has an innovative approach). But where it’s fun to explore a ruined fort, processing through the halls of a monastery in a herd of tourists leaves the building bereft of its soul, somehow. There is so little decoration that it is hard to picture the sense of human interaction. Instead I find myself admiring vast fireplaces - spaces large enough to roast an ox on a spit - and their thundering stone hoods angling into the walls. And Lawrence was right. The ceilings are impressive. They are a complex of juxtaposed arches, some hefty and solid - the Knights’ Hall, and the refectory - others intersecting as delicately as spiders’ legs. The ceiling of the Promenoir des Moines feels almost humanoid, like some sinewy structure inside an artery.

Down in the Refectory I find a sort of pulpit, where presumably a monk would have read excerpts from the Bible to his brothers who were otherwise eating in silence. Among the shushes and echoes the patrol of soldiers reappears, snaking among the crowd of browsers again. A bang sounds – momentarily I wonder if we’re all supposed to dive for cover - but in the second instant we realise that a heavy church door has slammed shut in the wind.

On the way down I walk the city walls. Presumably Lawrence and Scroggs, their serious work done, would have enjoyed this too - treading the ancient stones with the same view as a soldier from 800 years before them - but it is a measure of how intellectually bold, or perhaps how precocious the young Lawrence was that as he departs the Mont with such strong opinion. In his letter he writes:

“The insides of the buildings on the Mont are lovely; the outside is decidedly badly proportioned, with its dumpy spire, and flat masses of unrelieved masonry. I was horrified with the exterior.”

They were back in Dinard that night.

“Scroggs came back from Pontorson by train, but I rode, and thereby saved 3 francs 50 cent.”

Just a few days later, he returned to the Mont, with the Chaignon family.

“Off to Mont St. Michel tomorrow with the C's. I will ride. “

He doesn’t record any details of the visit, and lets just one thing slip in a letter to his mother: their concern for him as he cycled so far around the countryside.

“I alarmed all the family most terribly by going to the Mont without a hat: it was a cool cloudy day with a high wind, but they were excessively alarmed for my safety.”

The young Lawrence’s increasing capacity for physical endurance and his developing sense of adventure are the two main themes of this website and already he was beginning to display them in 1906. While not yet covering the sort of distances he would in each of the subsequent years (see more about his journeys in 1907, 08 and 09), the tendency was already showing itself as he turned 18. A few days after this he writes with a request.

“Have you any objection to my cycling to the Mont and back some moonlit night? I hear the views over the sands are sublime.”

For all the dumpy inadequacy of the abbey church tower, he was certainly enamoured of Mont St Michel. You can feel his excitement in a letter from 1907. In the summer holidays just before he went to university, he was back there again, this time with his father’s camera strapped to his bicycle. He had been in Dinan photographing the town and the Rance River and rode to Mont St Michel via St Malo:

“DEAR MOTHER

Here I am at last about to spend a night at the Mont. The dream or years is fulfilled. It is a perfect evening; the tide is high, and comes some 20 feet up the street. In addition the stars are out most beautifully, and the moon is, they say, just about to rise. The phosphorescence in the water interests me especially: I have only seen it once or twice before, and never so well as tonight. The whole sea, when oars are dipped into it, seems to blaze, for several feet around.”

Mont St Michel - Part 1

As you might expect, Mont St Michel featured prominently for the young TE Lawrence when he was in Brittany in the early 1900s. It was a famous monument, already a ‘sight’ for early visitors to the coastal resorts of Brittany which developed in the 1890s. If anything, the idea of tourists was likely to have put the young Lawrence off – but even during its restoration ‘the Mont’ was a draw and the abbey was right out of his favourite historical period, the 11th and 12th Centuries.

He visited at least twice in August 1906, first with his friend ‘Scroggs’, after their long cycle trip around Central Brittany, and again a few days later with the Chaignons, a family from Dinard with whom he was staying. His parents had known the Chaignons a dozen years before, when the Lawrences themselves were living in Dinard between 1891 and 1893. Later he asked his parents if they would mind him riding to Mont St Michel overnight. See more about the young TE Lawrence and his cycling.

Certainly the idea of these visits echo through his letters -

“I am quite right, and am fit to ride I00 miles per day for a month. We will probably visit the Mont in a few days.”

And when he returned to the region a year later - after a ride through Normandy with his father and a long solo trip down to the Loire - he came with his father’s camera and tripod strapped to his bicycle. He rode from Dinan (south of Dinard) and was thrilled to be able spend the spent the night here.

I will be arriving from the other direction, from the delightfully named Ducey les Chéris. I set off across the Sélune river and ride into the coastal flatlands, the ‘prés’ that are famous locally for their lamb. The morning is grey, threatening rain. The air is almost wet to the touch. Mont St Michel, however, is right there. I have been seeing it in the distance since yesterday afternoon, and now, as I approach on the lower ground, it slides left and right on the horizon. Even from five miles it is majestic.

I am steered onto a cycle path and accompany, briefly, a German cyclist, a woman probably 65 years old. She has cycled for hundreds of miles to get here, like so many of the pilgrims that still come. Then I am onto a shore-front road, which is fine except for the buses, which can barely squeeze past me… Eventually I arrive in a vast parking area neatly sectioned by hedges; so large that there’s still another kilometre to the reception… which sits in a long single storey building covered in slatted wood. I am lucky enough to be taken in hand, my bicycle permitted a spot in the store-room and I set off, with a gaggle of school-children, in one of the stream of navettes that run the mile-long causeway to the Mont itself.

As we progress, the land plays a slightly boggling trick. It makes me feel smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point where I wonder if I might disappear entirely. Ahead, the Mont rises and rises, dwarfing everything around, while at the same time the land around us seems to subside, to slide away into infinity. There is no horizon in the mist, just miles and miles and miles of mud-flats.

They are notoriously dangerous. The tide sweeps in alarmingly quickly – by reputation at the speed of cantering horse (it can move at 12 kilometres per hour apparently). The young Lawrence even teased his mother, a terrible worrier, about the tide as he planned his first visit, writing in one of his Sunday letters home -

“A flock of sheep disappeared in the sands round the Mont this spring and so I will not try to find them. Ta Ta. Love. Love. love. love. love. love. NED”

Lawrence and his friend ‘Scroggs’ were on their summer holidays just before their last year at school and were exploring the medieval castles and abbeys of Brittany. A couple of days after Lawrence’s 18th birthday, before Scroggs returned to England, they decided to head for the Mont. He mentions their plan in a letter otherwise full of talk of clambering around castles and his thoughts about his father’s new bicycle:

“Tomorrow Scroggs is going to Mont St. Michel, and I expect I will go with him. This afternoon we think of looking at St. Malo and possibly St. Servan.”

In the same letter, finished later, he signs off:

“I am off in ten minutes to the Mont. The weather here is cold and windy; only had about three hot days since I came here.”

It seems they covered the 30 miles there on their bicycles, Lawrence probably goading his friend to move faster, as he had the previous week... 

The weather on my visit is still much the same, so grey and glum that the spire of the abbey has disappeared in the mist. The school-children are herded off the navette and towards the entrance gates, crossing paths with an earlier set of schoolchildren who are loitering, waiting for their return trip. One of them kicks their small football, only to find it whipped off in the wind. It has rolled 200 yards by the time the poor lad finally catches it. Lets hope that the tide doesn’t choose this moment to come in…

The Mont itself soars above us. At ground level there are defensive walls, but behind them the stone body of the island is clustered with houses, clinging to the rock as tightly as mussels. Above them are small patches of greenery among the retaining walls and the vast vertical walls of the abbey. It is all topped with a forest of finials and towers.

It must have been just as exciting for the two young men to arrive a century ago, to pass through the main gate and wander the network of tiny alleys now with their restaurants and shops, to explore the miniature stairways, some barely more than shoulder width. However, the determined young Lawrence writes:

“We both decided to leave the omelettes and do a little serious work while there.”

Not so for me. Well, I will do some serious work in a moment, but first some tourist frippery. The omelettes he refers to were made – and still are – at the famed restaurant Mère Poulard, which has been entertaining politicians and celebrities for more than 130 years. Surely it must be worth a look.

See a review of Restaurant La Mère Poulard. And see the chefs at Mère Poulard preparing the famous omelettes.

Falaise - William the Conqueror's Castle

There is no evidence of the young TE Lawrence visiting Falaise castle, not in his letters nor in a photograph. Which, given its peculiarity – that William the Conqueror was born here – is odd. In fact it seems an impossibility that he did not visit. The castle falls right in his area of interest – architecture, particularly fortifications, until the end of the 12th Century - and it lies directly en route between Chambois and Coutances, where he and his father rode in 1907. Well I’m going to visit, anyway.

I make my way up through Falaise town centre, past more municipal works (more piled slabs and kerb-stones behind temporary metal fencing). There are still a few bullet holes in the churches and town buildings, a reminder of what Falaise went through in World War II (a moment in the Normandy campaign, the Falaise Gap, was named after it; it was a determined stand by German troops when surrounded by the Allied Army two months after the Normandy landings). Close to the castle entrance is a museum devoted to Civilian Life under Wartime Occupation.

The castle gates rear above me, two beautiful, curved towers with just a hint of a talus slope, a firmer footing, coming out to meet me. Inside, Falaise castle is really a park within curtain walls. A stretch of grass falls away to lower ground, above which the donjon and tower soar on an outcrop of rock (the ‘falaise’ of the town’s name, I assume). There is some high ground in the middle distance, but before the development of cannon the castle would have made a trusty redoubt. An arrow could never have reached them, nor a boulder flung from a trebuchet.

At the reception and shop I meet Samuel, the castle press representative and he talks about Falaise, peppering his description with interesting facts about medieval lore, life and well… castles. Falaise as we see it now was built after the birth here in 1028 of William the Conqueror. (He is ‘Conqueror’ only to the British; to the French he is mere William of Normandy - Guillaume de Normandie).

We stroll along the tapering shoulder of high ground towards the donjon (keep) and tower, which stand on the rock protrusion. They are built in Anglo-Norman style and like the castle at Chambois, the keep has echoes of the Tower of London. Before we enter the keep, however, we must negotiate a very curious modernist construction, a slab curtain and two stacks of pumice-grey concrete, like blocks of weights in some giant’s gym. It’s a huge leap of the imagination to think the construction is anything but out of place, but at least it is clear what is not original.

The keep was built in 1123 by Henry I, 40 years after William the Conqueror died. The stone, some worked and some rubblestone, was carted from Caen. It would have looked very different in Henry’s day. The idea was that it was visible from afar, so it would have been brightly decorated. It was a status thing; pigment was very expensive – mineral lapiz could be used for blue, vegetable cochineal for red - but garish white, red, or royal purple would have been impressive in a world that was generally green and brown.

Inside, the walls of the keep are bare. But I have been handed an ipad with which you can dress the rooms as they would have appeared 900 years ago. I rather enjoy it. Richly-coloured wall-hangings flutter into view, with thrones and beds and hefty wooden furniture shimmering into place as I turn in each room - the chapel, the bedrooms and the Lord’s Hall. It gives a human sense where most medieval castles are shells, just floors, walls and fireplaces if you’re lucky. I am also amused to learn the derivation of our word ‘Exchequer’: apparently it comes somehow from the game of chess (échecs in French).

And then I spend half an hour exploring the outbuildings, the towers in the curtain wall where the poor sentries had to spend their days and nights on guard. Evidently bored people have been carving names and symbols into the walls here for centuries. I wonder which is the oldest and who left it there.

Before we part company, Samuel explains why there are so many fortifications in the region, in Normandy and beyond, in Brittany. Basically it was to protect the approaches to Paris, the seat of the Franks. By 900 the ‘Hommes du Nord’ – the Normans, originally Vikings, of course - were speaking French and had been settled in Normandy for a while, so in order to keep other invaders out the Franks concluded a treaty with them, encouraging them to defend the north coast and the territory along the River Seine. Farther south and inland in France there are fewer fortifications, but Normandy and the northern coastline is dotted with them. It is why, with his fascination for the medieval era, they made such a happy hunting ground for the young TE Lawrence.

Chambois Castle

My immediate impression on arriving at Chambois castle is a surge of hapless… well… I’m not sure, really. I’m lost for a single, summary word. A diminutive castle stands upright on a section of mown grass in the tiny town with which it shares its name, its cream-coloured walls shining in the late afternoon light. It is so perfectly formed and resplendent that I want to hug it.

Perhaps it’s a result of the long and hot day’s cycling – I’m dehydrated, slightly stressed, used up – and my critical faculty is off kilter. But it seems unnaturally attractive. Which is slightly ironic, given that it is completely unyielding. It is not much more than bare limestone walls, I can’t get inside and I certainly can’t get into position to recreate the photograph taken by the young TE Lawrence in 1907. Blimey, I think, I’m falling in love with four limestone walls.

There’s a mismatch in English and French over the word castle, which in schools we translated as château. For us, anything with even a hint of fortification is classed as a castle, and yet for the French the word château is really a post-renaissance palace, the sort of thing you find in the Loire, and much more like our grandest country houses. Their equivalent of our castle is more of a ‘chateau-fort’.

And Chambois is definitely a chateau-fort. So secure even now that I can barely see the interior and my videos and photos all turn out rambling, unfocussed and ill-directed – basically I push my hand in as far as it will go and snap away in hope – and end up with an over-exposed inspection of some random vegetation and an in-depth study of a single railing at a surreal angle.

I twist my head and peer in. There is nothing more than four bare walls in which I can see the holes for beams, a fireplace hovering twenty feet above the ground on the left and arched windows six foot deep, the Great Hall, I assume. The staircases are built into the corner towers. There are some decorative features, but in such a bald layout it is hard to picture life. The only noise I hear is wood-pigeons cooing, which presumably would have been there 850 years ago too – or possibly not, because they would have been lunch.

Chambois was built in the second half of the 12th Century by William de Mandeville, on the instruction of Henry II and it has similarities to the Tower of London, with its four corner towers. In fact the castle we see today is only the keep, the strong, defensive core, and any outlying walls have gone. It is a lovely looking building however: taller than it is wide, 80 or 90 feet of sheer limestone, its infill walls between the towers displaying decorative windows. Some sections of the walls are made of rough-hewn stone, but much of it is ashlar, still in beautiful condition nearly 900 years on. At ground level, tentative talar slopes reach out just a couple of feet. Some of the machicolations (apparently added in the 14th Century) are still there, giving a nice detail to the plain walls, their crenellations still riding above them.

I circle the castle and there is still no way in. On the rear of the building chips in the stonework make me wonder if they resulted from World War II, when the town became the site of the Battle of Chambois in August 1944, as the Allies, Poles and Canadians, fought to close the Falaise Gap, where a number of German troops were surrounded.

And now to try to recreate the photograph taken by the young TE Lawrence in 1907…

TE Lawrence’s Photograph of Chambois Castle
The young TE Lawrence doesn’t write anywhere in his letters about visiting Chambois, but we know he was there because of the photograph he took of its castle. Interestingly, this is what we often find: in the last week of his trips he often didn’t write letters because was on his way home (and he says he doesn’t really like writing them anyway). Perhaps he thought he would arrive back before any letter he sent. On this occasion, his father was about to join the rest of the family in Jersey, and so there was no need to write – his father he could tell them all about the second half of the trip, from Evreux. The result for us, of course, is a certain gap in the record.

Similarly, on this trip, there was the castle at nearby Falaise, which he neither photographed nor writes anything about, and yet it is impossible to think of him not visiting William the Conqueror’s birthplace. The town is even en route to Coutances where they were headed.

But back to Chambois, and my attempt to recreate the image taken by the young TE Lawrence in 1907… with all the usual attendant dangers, of lion cages and falling into rivers… Unfortunately the chance of recreating this one is nil. I find the angle he chose, but in order to contain the whole building, I must to back up – and I bump into a garden wall, eight foot of it. There’s no way to get into position. As discussed before, the young Lawrence was not averse to breaking a few rules (even part of a church pew on one notable occasion remembered by his friend, CFC Beeson), so I could take this as a challenge… and just find a way to get the job done…? But the wall is impenetrable - in fact you can see it even in his image - and the only gate is locked. Ho, hum…

TE Lawrence's Photography at Château Gaillard

“The Chateau Gaillard was so magnificent, and the postcards so abominable, that I stopped there an extra day, & did nothing but photograph, from 6.0 a.m. to 7 p.m. I took ten altogether, and if all are successful, I shall have a wonderful series. I shall have to start a book. Some of them were very difficult to take, and the whole day was very hard.”

Not so for me. I can snap away on a mobile phone. I just have to avoid the crowds, which are here in droves. I wonder if there was a single visitor on the day that TE Lawrence came. Here is a shot he took of the castle from the bank of the River Seine. This image was loaned by the Society of Antiquaries, who own a number of photographs taken by the young TE Lawrence.

See more about the young TE Lawrence and his photography. And see more about the Society of Antiquaries.

It’s an interesting observation of TE Lawrence’s that ‘the postcards were so abominable’. Creating a record of the castles and abbeys he visited was part of stimulus for his taking images. The 18-year old Lawrence wrote his letter above during his summer holidays between school and university (he was due to start studying History at Jesus College in Oxford that September or October). While he was later to use all the information and images he collected in his university thesis, at this stage he was visiting these castles purely out of personal interest. And already he was interested in publishing and writing.   

He was probably also quite excited to be travelling with a camera which, along with the tripod and photographic plates, had to be strapped to his bicycle. The gear belonged to his father, who had taught him photography and was accompanying him. So far on his 1907 trip Lawrence had (probably) taken an image of the Roman amphitheatre in Lillebonne, one of Cathedral in Beauvais and one of Gisors castle (from outside the walls as it was locked up). Chateau Gaillard was really his first chance really to get to grips with a castle he knew he was going to love. 

The image below was was taken from the bank of the Seine River, possibly at the hotel where he and his father were staying. He writes of the hotel as though he is suggesting that the rest of the family takes a holiday there one summer: 

“The hotel is cheap and very pleasant. The Seine runs near the back door & the bathing is excellent, from a little wooded island in the centre of the river. … Also the scenery all along the river is exceedingly fine. Long strings of barges pulled by a steam-tug pass the hotel occasionally, and the whole place is over-shadowed by the hills with the ruin of the Chateau.”

Wherever it was taken, I was here to recreate it. I triangulated and tried this position and that. And found myself in the middle of a car park, flat ground that looked as though it might easily have been filled in since TE Lawrence visited a century ago. Hmmm. This was getting to be a bit of a theme. Each photograph I tried to take turned out to be impossible - at Gisors because I needed to fight my way into a lion cage, now because the water had been taken over by a car park.

So, next best thing, I looked for water. I blagged my way into a campsite - and then tracked the waterfront for the most likely spot, disturbing campers in their caravans and tent pitches, each neatly sectioned off between hedges.

As chance had it, the best angle turned out to be in an empty pitch, so I strode to the shore side. But then I was stuck. With all the waterfront foliage, there was no way I could get a clear view. So I clambered out along the trunk of a fallen tree and, placing my foot on some springy branches, leant as far out over the water as I could, in order to see around a bush. And there, arm outstretched, precariously balanced, finger cramped reaching for the ‘take’ button, hoping not to fall in or drop my phone, I snapped this.