At daybreak I went to it.  The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it.  After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church.  Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns.

I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night.

When I had reached the summit, I said to the monk who accompanied me:  “Father, how happy you must be here!” And he replied:  “It is very windy, Monsieur;” and so we began to talk while watching the rising tide, which ran over the sand and covered it with a steel cuirass.

And then the monk told me stories, all the old stories belonging to the place, legends, nothing but legends.

One of them struck me forcibly.  The country people, those belonging to the Mornet, declare that at night one can hear talking going on in the sand, and then that one hears two goats bleat, one with a strong, the other with a weak voice.  Incredulous people declare that it is nothing but the cry of the sea birds, which occasionally resembles bleatings, and occasionally human lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that they have met an old shepherd, whose head, which is covered by his cloak, they can never see, wandering on the downs, between two tides, round the little town placed so far out of the world, and who is guiding and walking before them, a he-goat with a man’s face, and a she-goat with a woman’s face, and both of them with white hair; and talking incessantly, quarreling in a strange language, and then suddenly ceasing to talk in order to bleat with all their might.

“Do you believe it?” I asked the monk.  “I scarcely know,” he replied, and I continued:  “If there are other beings besides ourselves on this earth, how comes it that we have not known it for so long a time, or why have you not seen them?  How is it that I have not seen them?” He replied:  “Do we see the hundred thousandth part of what exists?  Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks down men, and blows down buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroys cliffs and casts great ships onto the breakers; the wind which kills, which whistles, which sighs, which roars—­have you ever seen it, and can you see it?  It exists for all that, however.”

I was silent before this simple reasoning.  That man was a philosopher, or perhaps a fool; I could not say which exactly, so I held my tongue.  What he had said, had often been in my own thoughts.