On the path to paradise

It's not the oldest abbey I've ever visited.

But it's the most breathtaking.

In my first minutes on Mont Saint Michel, all I could think of was how many millions of feet had walked up its narrow streets.

There's a sheen to the cobblestones, worn smooth over thousands of years. The stone steps are uneven across their length where merchants and pilgrims, high priests and monks, tourists and their guides, have climbed up and down its 300-foot height.

Click here for an overview of the mountain, which rises out of tidal flats about half a mile off the French coast. It stands at the mouth of a river near Avranches, the scene of a World War II breakthrough led by Gen. George S. Patton right after D-Day.

At a restaurant on the street you see above, in 2004, I ate one of the town's signature omelets. It had been whipped so long and so vigorously that it seemed to be more soufflé than omelet. It lopped over the edges of a dinner plate and stood about two inches high. It was all air and eggs and cream and butter.

The estuarial flats that surround the island can be killers. The tide comes in much faster than a man can run. They built a causeway in the late 19th century. Now tour buses park just a few steps from the entrance to the town, at the base of the mountain.

Mont Saint Michel survived the downfall of the Romans in the 5th century and was a Romano-Breton stronghold in the 6th and 7th centuries until the Franks sacked it.

The first monastery came along in the 8th century. It's a gory story. Legend has it that the Archangel Michael appeared to the bishop of Avranches in 708 and instructed him to build a church on the island. The bishop ignored the instruction until the archangel burned a hole in the bishop's skull with his finger.

Ouch.

In 1067, a year after the Battle of Hastings, the monastery of Mont Saint Michel gave its support (becoming rich in the process) to William the Conqueror in his claim to the throne of England. Pilgrimage, which is just a religious word for tourism, made the island and its monastery even richer.

And the crush of visitors began to wear down its cobblestones and steps.

Today, 41 people live on the island. But more than three million tourists visit Mont Saint Michel each year. Most, if not all of them, climb to the abbey along narrow streets that for a thousand years were called "paths to paradise."

From its heights, the 360-degree view of the English Channel, the impressive but deadly tidal flats and the Normandy coastline is, to say the least, spectacular.

Mont Saint Michel is inevitably teeming with tourists during the daytime. But at night, after the buses head back across the causeway and the day-trippers leave, the island is transformed back into a small, intimate village that is far more satisfying to the soul. The streets are quiet. Lights can be seen shimmering far away on the coast and on ships in the Channel. The sky twinkles with the light of thousands of stars.

I ran across an old postcard of the island at twilight the other day. In the picture, the sun is setting behind the island and streaks of purple, orange and charcoal streak the sky. It reminded me that Mont Saint Michel is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.