Of all parts of the Merveille, in summer, the most charming must always have been the cloisters.  Only the Abbey of the Mount was rich and splendid enough to build a cloister like this, all in granite, carved in forms as light as though it were wood; with columns arranged in a peculiar triangular order that excited the admiration of Viollet-le-Duc.  “One of the most curious and complete cloisters that we have in France,” he said; although in France there are many beautiful and curious cloisters.  For another reason it has value.  The architect meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he could command, the mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in religion, over the masculine, military energy of the great hall below.  The thirteenth century rarely let slip a chance to insist on this moral that love is law.  Saint Francis was preaching to the birds in 1215 at Assisi, and the architect built this cloister in 1226 at Mont-Saint-Michel.  Both sermons were saturated with the feeling of the time, and both are about equally worth noting, if one aspires to feel the art.

A conscientious student has yet to climb down the many steps, on the outside, and look up at the Merveille from below.  Few buildings in France are better worth the trouble.  The horizontal line at the roof measures two hundred and thirty-five feet.  The vertical line of the buttresses measures in round numbers one hundred feet.  To make walls of that height and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior walls.  This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines in a space of two hundred and thirty-five feet.  Between these lines the windows tell their story; the seven long windows of the refectory on one side; the seven rounded windows of the hall on the other.  Even the corner tower with the charter-house becomes as simple as the rest.  The sum of this impossible wall, and its exaggerated vertical lines, is strength and intelligence at rest.

The whole Mount still kept the grand style; it expressed the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe.  The priest and the soldier were both at home here, in 1215 as in 1115 or in 1058; the politician was not outside of it; the sinner was welcome; the poet was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy, almost an affection, that suggests a habit of verse in the Abbot as well as in the architect.  God reconciles all.  The world is an evident, obvious, sacred harmony.  Even the discord of war is a detail on which the Abbey refuses to insist.  Not till two centuries afterwards did the Mount take on the modern expression of war as a discord in God’s providence.  Then, in the early years of the fifteenth century, Abbot