It is the common habit of hills and mountains, as we all know, to turn disdainful as they grow skyward; they only too eagerly drop, one by one, the things by which man has marked the earth for his own.  To stand on a mountain top and to go down to your grave are alike, at least in this—­that you have left everything, except yourself, behind you.  But it is both the charm and the triumph of Mont St. Michael, that it carries so much of man’s handiwork up into the blue fields of the air; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills.  It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a masterpiece in stone.  The hill and the architectural beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud, “See what we can do, against your tempests and your futile tides—­when we try” ...  Rustic France along this coast still makes pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michael.  No marriage is rightly arranged which does not include a wedding-journey across the “greve”; no nuptial breakfast is aureoled with the true halo of romance which is eaten elsewhere than on these heights in mid-air.  The young come to drink deep of wonders; the old, to refresh the depleted fountains of memory; and the tourist, behold he is a plague of locusts let loose upon the defenseless hill!

It was impossible, after sojourning a certain time upon the hill, not to concede that there were two equally strong centers of attraction that drew the world hitherward.  One remained, indeed, gravely suspended between the doubt and the fear, as to which of these potential units had the greater pull, in point of actual attraction.  The impartial historian, given to a just weighing of evidence, would have been startled to find how invariably the scales tipped; how lightly an historical Mont, born of a miracle, crowned by the noblest buildings, a pious Mecca for saints and kings innumerable, shot up like feathers in lightness when overweighted by the modern realities of a perfectly appointed inn, the cooking and eating of an omelet of omelets, and the all-conquering charms of Madame Poulard.

The fog of doubt thickened as, day after day, the same scenes were enacted; when one beheld all sorts of conditions of men similarly affected; when, again and again, the potentiality in the human magnet was proved true.  Doubt turned to conviction, at the last, that the holy shrine of St. Michael had, in truth, been violated; that the Mont had been desecrated; that the latter exists now solely as a setting for a pearl of an inn; and that within the shrine—­it is Madame Poulard herself who fills the niche!...

Such a variety of brides as come up to the Mont!  You could have your choice, at the midday meal, of almost any nationality, age, or color.  The attempt among these bridal couples to maintain the distant air of a finished indifference only made their secret the more open.  The British phlegm, on such a journey, did not always serve as a convenient mask; the flattering, timid glance, the ripple of tender whispers, and the furtive touching of fingers beneath the table, made even these English couples a part of the great human marrying family; their superiority to their fellows would return, doubtless, when the honey had dried out of their moon.