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.
