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Updated: May 15, 2025
Let this hill yield you a town in which to walk, with a street of many-storied houses; with other promenades along ramparts as broad as church aisles; with dungeons, cloisters, halls, guard-rooms, abbatial gateways, and a cathedral whose flying buttresses seemed to spring from mid-air and to end in a cloud such was the world into which we awoke on the heights of Mont St. Michel.
Flower gardens abound, and the general atmosphere is one of prosperity and cheerfulness. The historic interest of this now dead-alive little town centres around its lady abbesses, who for centuries held sovereign rule and state in their abbatial palace, at the present time the Hotel de Ville.
Basche went into the outward yard; there the catchpole meeting him fell on his marrow-bones, begged of him not to take it ill if he served him with a writ at the suit of the fat prior; and in a pathetic speech let him know that he was a public person, a servant to the monking tribe, apparitor to the abbatial mitre, ready to do as much for him, nay, for the least of his servants, whensoever he would employ and use him.
His abbatial face had something of the Dutch burgomaster in the placidity of its complexion and its flesh tones, and of the Breton peasant in the straight black hair and the vivacity of the brown eyes, which preserved, nevertheless, a priestly decorum. His gaiety, that of a man whose conscience was calm and pure, admitted a joke.
The duchess, a woman of extreme piety, the only daughter of a rich and deceased chief-justice, spare and erect, and the mother of four children, resembled Madame Latournelle, if the imagination can go so far as to adorn the notary's wife with the graces of a bearing that was truly abbatial.
Through the lancet windows of the abbatial gateways the yeomanry of the vassal villages are peering; it is the weary time of the Hundred Years' War, and all France is watching, through sentry windows, for the approach of her dread enemy.
All the assize judges, who in a long hearing generally had their places filled by proxies, were present. The courtroom, massive, obscure, upheld by heavy Roman pillars, had been rejuvenated. The wall, ogival, threw to cathedral height the arches of its vaulted ceiling, which were joined together, like the sides of an abbatial mitre, in a point.
In suppressing the title of Abbot of Saint Denis," they said further, "your Majesty, in reality, suppresses our abbey; and if our abbey is reduced to nothing, our basilica, where the Kings, your ancestors, lie, will be no more than a royal church, and will cease to be abbatial."
The abbey stood on one of the lower slopes, on a knoll overlooking rich water-meadows, formerly abbatial lands. 'The legend says that the abbey shall be roofed when a De Stanton is Abbot, and the McEvillys were originally De Stantons; they changed their name in the fifteenth century on account of a violation of sanctuary committed by them.
Two only, Elizabeth herself and one other, did not vote for her. The bishop thereupon restored her to her position as abbess, but to mark his displeasure with her he forbade her to use the abbatial staff for seven years. The remaining years of her rule were not satisfactory. The sisters took advantage of the scandal she had caused to act in an insubordinate way towards her.
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