Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/77

1866.] great fortunes made in trade. Not far from the place where the high-born lords of the Chateau de Montgomeri once reigned, a chocolate-merchant had bought broad lands, and built himself a princely mansion. I should have thought that the great proprietors would have crushed the small; but I was assured that the two systems went on very well side by side. But this is a matter for exact inquiry, not for casual remark. The population in France is stationary, or nearly so, while that of England increases rapidly; and this is an important element in the question, and itself raises questions of a difficult, perhaps of a disagreeable kind.

The cares of proprietorship must necessarily interfere with the lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as Americans are commonly believed to be. It would be a happy thing if the Irish peasant's lightness of heart, pleasant as it often is, could be interfered with in the same way. There is a certain gayety which springs from mere recklessness, and is sister to despair.

They are hard economical problems that we have to solve in this Old World, and terribly complicated by social and political entanglements; and there is no boundless West, with bread for all who want it, to assist us in the solution.

From Avranches you visit Mont St. Michel,—not without difficulty, for you have to drive along over sands which are never dry, and over which the tide—its advance can be seen even from the distant height of Avranches—rushes in with the speed of a race-horse. But you are well repaid. Mont St. Michel is one of the most astonishing and beautiful monuments of the Catholic and feudal age. Its fortifications, and the halls, church, and cloisters of the chivalrous and monastic fraternities of which it was the seat, rise like an efflorescence from the solitary cone of granite, surrounded at low tide by the vast flat of sand, at high tide by the sea. Gothic architecture, to which we are apt to attach the notion of a sort of infantine unconsciousness, here seems consciously to revel and disport itself in its power, and to exult in investing the sea-girt rock with the playful elegance of a Cellini vase. It is a real jeu d'esprit of mediæval art. The cloisters are a model of airy grace, enhanced by contrast with the massiveness of the fortress and the wildness of the scene. A strange life the monks must have led in their narrow boundaries. But they had the visits of the knights to relieve their dulness; and probably they were rude natures, not liable to the unhappiness which such seclusion would produce in men of cultivated sensibilities and active minds. Both monks and knights are gone long ago. But there are still six priests on the rock. I asked what they did. "Ils prient le bon Dieu."

In feudal times this sea-girt fortress was almost impregnable. Two ancient cannon lying at its gate show that the conqueror of Agincourt thundered against it in vain. Its weak point was want of water: it had none but the rain-water collected in a great cistern. In these days it could not hold out an hour against a single gun-boat.

It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a pleasant place,—a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending, little Hôtel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine view. While I was at Vire, the fête day of the Emperor was celebrated—with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the préfet's invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town, and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were dismally paraded about, and the