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Updated: May 14, 2025
He persuaded me to leave no address; obliged to keep himself within touch of the Embassy, he directed letters to be sent to Avranches, where, he explained, he could procure them; for, as he thought it safe to disclose when a dozen miles of sea separated us from the possibility of curious listeners, the house to which we were bound stood about ten miles distant from that town, in a retired and somewhat desolate bit of country lining the seashore.
I shall go away for a few weeks, for no doubt a journey will set me up again. July 2d. I have come back, quite cured, and have had a most delightful trip into the bargain. I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day!
"You do not need to go through Avranches," the latter said. "Take the road by the coast through Granville to Coutances." "How far is it to Coutances?" "About twenty miles. At least, so I have heard, for I have never been there." After walking a few miles, they went down on to the seashore and lay down among some rocks until evening.
The great Palatine Earldom of Chester, a kingdom within the kingdom, was ruled before 1100 by Hugh the Wolf, of Avranches, who conquered for a time the north coast of Wales. In Anglesey he built a castle, and kennelled the hounds he loved so well in a church, to find them all mad the next morning.
The Brittany coast was a long, flat, green band; the rocks of Cancale were brown, but scarcely higher in point of elevation than the sand-hills; the Normandy forests and orchards were rippling lines that focussed into the spiral of the Avranches cathedral spires: floating between the two blues, hung the aerial shapes of the Chaunsey and the Channel Islands; and nearer, along the coast-line, were the fringing edges of the shore, broken with shoals and shallows earth's fingers, as it were, touching the sea playing, as Coleridge's Abyssinian maid fingered the dulcimer, that music that haunts the poet's ear.
It was denounced and refuted by Musæus, a judicious and learned professor of divinity at Jena; by Mansvelt, a young but promising professor of philosophy at Utrecht; by Cuyper of Rotterdam; by Wittichius of Leyden; by Pierre Poiret of Reinsburg; by Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray; by Huet, Bishop of Avranches; by John Howe, and Dr.
Jean would carry the parcel to his master, and deliver with it a message to the effect that a gentleman who had left Avranches that afternoon had sent the parcel by a messenger to the duke, inasmuch as he had reason to believe that the article contained therein was the property of the duke and that the duke would probably be glad to have it restored to him.
Against this it was most important to guard; as the Conqueror learned from the events of the first year of his reign, when the severe rule of Odo and William Fitzosbern had provoked Herefordshire. Ralph Guader, Roger Montgomery, and Hugh of Avranches filled the places of Edwin and Morcar and the brothers of Harold.
Thus, like Dinan, Tours and Pau, Avranches feels the weight of centralisation and the effects of rapid communication with the capital; and will in a few years be anything but a cheap place of residence.
I have seen the image of a rock called Mont Tombeline distinctly reflected from the heated air of the strand of Normandy near Avranches; and by such delusive appearances the thirsty soldiers of the French army in Egypt were greatly tantalised. It must evidently diminish as the refractive index increases.
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