Out of a Book

The war swept past Mont-Saint-Michel last week, but some enraptured U.S. troops stopped to stare. A half century ago another U.S. visitor, Henry Adams, saw the same towering, church-crowned rock in the sea off Avranches, felt the same compulsion. Wrote he in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres:

"The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on its west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to climb. From the edge of the platform, the eye plunges down, two hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean, as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a restless sea. . . .

"Here is your first eleventh-century church! . . . Serious and simple to excess! is it not? Young people rarely enjoy it. They prefer the Gothic. ... No doubt they are right, since they are young: but men and women who have lived long and are tired, who want rest . . . feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel nothing else. The quiet strength of these curved lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the moderate proportions, even the modified lights, the absence of display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does. They come back to it to rest,, after a long circle of pilgrimage--the cradle of rest from which their ancestors started."

The troops shared Henry Adams' feeling. Said one: "This is the place to spend the war." Said another: "This place looks just like something out of the book. It will sure be something to tell the wife."

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