Читать книгу The Island of Books - Dominique Fortier - Страница 8

The first sanctuary dedicated to Saint Michel was built in 708 in the rock at Mont Tombe, like the one at Monte Gargano, which inspired it. Before that, there was nothing, just a hole in the skull of a bishop charged with building it.

Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was built on the orders of the holy man with the hole in his head, heeding the instructions of an archangel, which in turn were on the advice of a bull – the reason for which, no doubt, they would later call the bulk of the abbey La Merveille, the Wonder.

The story goes as follows: Aubert, the wise and pious bishop of Avranches, was visited in a dream by the archangel Michael, who commanded him to build a sanctuary. Forgetful or distracted, and in any event not in enough of a rush, the holy man failed to obey immediately. The angel was indulgent and visited him a second time, then a third. The third time, to be sure he was heard, he rested his finger of fire on the temple of the sleeping man, burning a hole into the bone that can still be admired today, because Aubert’s skull and its hole rest in the Saint-Gervais d’Avranches Basilica.

So the bishop sent a few clerics to Monte Gargano in Italy, and they returned with a piece of Michael’s scarlet coat, as well as a piece of the altar where he appeared and where the print of his heavenly foot can still be seen. The effect of these precious relics was soon felt. A blind woman from the hamlet of Astériac, not far from Mont Saint-Michel, suddenly recovered her sight. It was said that she cried, ‘It is so beautiful to see!’ The hamlet changed its name and still bears the name of Beauvoir – beautiful to see.

So Aubert chose to erect the sanctuary on the little island of Mont Tombe, deserted since the two hermits had left a century before. A bull was brought in, a crude but powerful animal, and tied to a picket, and it was decreed that the abbey would be erected wherever the beast trod the grass with its ancient hoof. The bishop was still unsure of how big the sanctuary should be, but he received another sign: the dew during the night fell on the summit of the mountain, except for one place that remained dry. It was a circular shape and could accommodate around a hundred people. That is where Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was finally built.

Then the bishop found a local man, a good man, who, with the help of his twelve sons, laid the foundation for the sanctuary. It was a wasted effort: they couldn’t finish the job. They had to bring a newborn baby to split the rock with his immaculate foot for construction to begin – yet more proof, if any more was needed, that sometimes there is no greater strength than weakness.

This is where legend ends and history begins. But the history of the construction (more fitting to say constructions) of the buildings of Mont Saint-Michel has plenty of holes, conjecture and supposition. You can consult records for the most-documented structures, study the plans executed in different eras, annotate everything, even scrutinize the models on exhibit at the site, but you will never have an accurate idea of the order in which the work was done or what Mont Saint-Michel looked like at any point in time.

But some things seem almost certain: the construction of the church at the abbey began around 1017 and lasted some sixty years. Since the rock was too hard to cut into or to level, they built around it, and the mountain showed through in many spots. This no doubt explains in part how trying to get one’s bearings in the maze, real or on paper, that is Mont Saint-Michel, can make a person’s head swim: the fact that the abbey is built not on the summit of a mountain, but around it. (Where its heart should be, it is empty, or rather full of rock.) The fact remains that the interior in no way resembles what the exterior suggests, and that the plans do not offer much in the way of understanding either. In a way, the abbey is indescribable.

Today, no matter what models or representations you study, it is virtually impossible to find your way through the series of rooms, which are more or less square and superimposed; it is like playing a game of snakes and ladders, taking two steps forward and four steps back, or looking at one of those drawings by Escher in which, at the end of a series of stairs that seem to go up, you have inexplicably come back down to the starting point. This may be due to the fact that construction was spread over half a millennium – a decidedly piecemeal approach – under the direction of different builders, each of whom had different skills and means from those of his predecessor – Gothic resting upon Romanesque set on Carolingian anchored in rock. Not to mention the collapses and fires over the years, and that a room built in 1100 could be partially destroyed one hundred years later, restored, modified again fifty years later and then two centuries after that.

Since the buildings couldn’t sprawl across a large area, over the years construction continued upward. In the mid-twelfth century, the Abbot Robert de Torigni started work that changed the face of Mont Saint-Michel: he had two dungeons added, and a new, fairly modest residence that was meant for him, as well as a new, larger hostelry to receive the pilgrims who were flocking to the sanctuary. He also ordered two towers to be built flanking the church. The first housed a large number of the four hundred volumes that made up the library at the abbey, called at the time the City of Books. A considerable number of these works were lost when the tower collapsed about a decade after it was erected. The second fell in 1776.

In 1228, the construction of a three-storey double building was completed, with three dining rooms set one on top of the other (chaplaincy, guest house, refectory), intended for poor pilgrims, rich guests and monks, respectively. The rooms to the west were similarly organized: at the bottom, the cellar, meant for the needs of the body; in the middle, the scriptorium, dedicated to the work of the mind; and at the top, the cloister, a place of prayer and garden of the soul.

In the fifteenth century, the abbots were busy fortifying Mont Saint-Michel to defend it against the assault of the English, who had taken the entire province, including Tombelaine, the neighbouring island. Mont Saint-Michel was protected by a garrison of some two hundred men at arms sent by Charles VI. Cut off from revenue from sister abbeys across the channel, Mont Saint-Michel soon ran out of resources; that was no problem, however, as they melted the chalices and monstrances to mint the coins to pay the soldiers.

In 1421 or 1423, the choir of the church collapsed. It would take a century to rebuild it in pure flamboyant Gothic style. The room with the large pillars was erected first, ten columns like enormous roots that held the whole thing up, towering above, resting on a forest of exterior flying buttresses. For each shaft of light, a stone arch: two constructions, one mirroring the other.

In essence, Mont Saint-Michel does not house one abbey but rather ten, or even more, some of them now gone, phantom abbeys the building continues to bear the mark of, and other constructions modified over the centuries – all of it strung together and joined haphazardly. Gutted walls, collapsed vaults, ceilings burned, towers levelled, passages filled, stairs condemned, clock towers felled, rebuilt, crumbled in ruins; like a manuscript scribbled over ten times that bears the remnants of stories, traces of scratching and illegible characters, Mont Saint-Michel is an immense palimpsest set in rock.