These verses begin the “Roman du Mont-Saint-Michel,” and if the spelling is corrected, they still read almost as easily as Voltaire; more easily than Verlaine; and much like a nursery rhyme; but as tourists cannot stop to clear their path, or smooth away the pebbles, they must be lifted over the rough spots, even when roughness is beauty.  Translation is an evil, chiefly because every one who cares for mediaeval architecture cares for mediaeval French, and ought to care still more for mediaeval English.  The language of this “Roman” was the literary language of England.  William of Saint-Pair was a subject of Henry ii, King of England and Normandy; his verses, like those of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, are monuments of English literature.  To this day their ballad measure is better suited to English than to French; even the words and idioms are more English than French.  Any one who attacks them boldly will find that the “vers romieus” run along like a ballad, singing their own meaning, and troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is exact or not.  One’s translation is sure to be full of gross blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling.  If translate one must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that it matters not a straw whether we succeed.  Twelfth-century art was not precise; still less “precieuse,” like Moliere’s famous seventeenth-century prudes.

The verses of the young monk, William, who came from the little Norman village of Saint-Pair, near Granville, within sight of the Mount, were verses not meant to be brilliant.  Simple human beings like rhyme better than prose, though both may say the same thing, as they like a curved line better than a straight one, or a blue better than a grey; but, apart from the sensual appetite, they chose rhyme in creating their literature for the practical reason that they remembered it better than prose.  Men had to carry their libraries in their heads.

These lines of William, beginning his story, are valuable because for once they give a name and a date.  Abbot Robert of Torigny ruled at the Mount from 1154 to 1186.  We have got to travel again and again between Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres during these years, but for the moment we must hurry to get back to William the Conqueror and the “Chanson de Roland.”  William of Saint-Pair comes in here, out of place, only on account of a pretty description he gave of the annual pilgrimage to the Mount, which is commonly taken to be more or less like what he saw every year on the Archangel’s Day, and what had existed ever since the Normans became Christian in 912:—­

Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent. 
 Les meschines e les vallez
 Chascuns d’els dist verz ou sonnez. 
 Neis li viellart revunt chantant

De leece funt tuit semblant. 
 Qui plus ne seit si chante outree
 E Dex aie u Asusee. 
 Cil jugleor la u il vunt
 Tuit lor vieles traites unt
 Laiz et sonnez vunt vielant.