Restaurants and hotels

Contents

How to get there

Introduction and history

Dangers

Visit, arrival, schedules

Visit of the abbey

Ramparts, museums and city

Mont Saint Michel-Visit of the abbey 

Normandy main page

Landing sites memorials 1

Landing sites memorials 2

Rouen

Bayeux

Honfleur

Cote Fleurie

Cabourg

Houlgate

Trouville

Deauville

Dieppe

Le Havre

Etretat

Fecamp

Pays d'Auge, Calvados, Camembert and Cider

Finally, for once, I would advise to take a guide and not try to visit on your own with a travel book or even my motes. There are 80 chapels, cells, towers and public chambers. The guides can be very interesting and teach you a lot of facts that might thrill you. They will make you understand the history of the Mont, and it will be difficult for anyone NOT to feel the choc when you will enter the vessel of the Grand Nave of the abbey, a nave that mounts like a prayer with its stone arches, flooded with light. Four bays of the Romanesque nave survive to face the chancel and the choir, built in the most marvellous flamboyant Gothic style. The transept and lantern date from restorations, performed in 1890, when the famous skyline of the neo-Romanesque belfry, with the neo-Gothic spire and golden statue of St. Michael was created. 
You enter now "LA MERVEILLE", like the entire abbey is named, an ensemble of six halls, built on three levels, looking as suspended between the sky and the sea, a balcony open on infinity. This early 13th century Gothic masterpiece was added to the north side of the church, constructed in only 16 years. It stands in ghostly tribute to the island's monks and the society that once revolved around them. The three levels are divided each into two rectangular rooms, reflecting the social strata of its day

Cloister

Visit the CLOISTER, open to the skies, where monks would meet and meditate, next to this the REFECTORY, stunning by its excess, looking more like a church, where narrow windows filter the sunlight on the northern side and make it a vast, fresh and obscure hall, where supplies were stored. These supplies arrived by sea and were hoisted in the Storeroom with a great wheel installed in the central bay. A pulpit reminds us of the holy words that must have been read here, in Latin, during meal times. The space

Scriptorium

here resumes very well all the spirituality of the Mont Saint Michel.
Beneath is the calefactory and SCRIPTORIUM, also named "Salle des Chevaliers", and located on the second floor of the Merveille. This hall is divided in four naves of different width by three rows of columns. Illuminated by large round bays, placed up high, equipped with two large fireplaces and two latrines, it was the common room of the monks. By hanging tapestries between columns, they could create small rooms where they copied and illuminated manuscripts (thus the name Scriptorium). It had also all necessities to face hard climate of the place (fireplaces against the cold, latrines, direct access to the Cloister). 
Just next is the "Salle des Hotes", (Guest Room), was a princely hall,

Guest room

decorated with paintings formerly reception rooms for the rich and powerful guests visiting the place. It's here that monks received important guests and their court. It had also stained-glass windows and tiles, missing today. What is noted from the entrance of the room are the delicacy and the spacing out of the columns, stressed out by many vertical lines (slender and long windows, colonnettes on buttresses) adding to the grandeur of the place. It was equipped with a fireplace of which the flue has disappeared, of two great hoods to prepare meal, latrines inside the northern wall buttresses and a small chapel in the southern wall, (Saint Madeleine Chapel).
On the lower floor, storage cellars and the Almonry, situated out of the enclosure of the monastery, 35 metres long, divided in two covered naves, of Romanesque architecture, which escaped the great fire of 1204. It's here that the monks provide food, clothes and sleeping facilities to the poor. Today, the Almonry, unfortunately, became the ticketing office and boutique of the abbey. 

Bibliography


Le Mont-Saint-Michel pierre à pierre by Marc Deceneux (Éditions Ouest France 1996), Millénaire monastique du Mont-Saint-Michel, by Michel Nortier( ed. Lethellieux Paris 1993),Le Mont-Saint-Michel,Histoire (Éditions du patrimoine), L'abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel (Les grands sites et monuments du monde at Gallimard, Le Mont-Saint-Michel-(Collection Itinéraires du patrimoine - Éditions du patrimoine ), Petit Glossaire pour la description des églises de Jean Cabanot (ed.Francis Lafargue)