Mature Flâneur

Myths and Miracles of Mont St. Michel

The island of France’s guardian angel

Mont St. Michel. All photos by Tim Ward

Where does island end, and castle begin? From a distance, it is impossible to tell. Mont St. Michel looks as if some celestial, Romanesque barnacle engulfed the entire top of a mountain. It’s hard for the eye to make sense of it.

Mont St. Michel from a distance. Are those saffron-robed Buddhist MONKS on the water in front of it? No! That would be utterly ridiculous! They are sails from a local sailboat race.

Teresa, my wife and intrepid co-flâneur, found it simply maddening that none of her photos did justice to the castle she was seeing with her eyes. Mont Saint Michel is just too big, too soaring for a camera’s lens to capture; it’s too three-D for a two-D screen. Even if you could find just the right angle — you would not catch the 1300-year-old essence of the place.

WTF? The next day we really DID see Buddhist Monks at Mont St. Michel!

That silhouette of the cathedral spire upon a granite hill hooks into our collective imagination, as if Mont Saint Michel is the concrete embodiment of our etherial archetype of medieval romance.