Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press. One hundred years ago, Henry Adams said in the preface to his privately printed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres that he had written the book for nieces.
As many more may come as like, but one niece is enough for the uncle to talk to, and one niece is much more likely than two to listen. Tourists want as few dates as possible; what they want is poetry.
In his masterpiece memoir The Education of Henry Adams famously written in the third person in , not long after our guidebook we are given a young man of twenty as he sets off for the continent in He disapproved of France.
Paris rapidly became familiar. My own passion for travel was born almost an exact century after his, when at fifteen it was the transformative privilege of my life to go abroad with my best friend and her parents. Our journey begins with a three-hour delay, so before take-off we already know that whatever train we might be able to catch instead of our TGV from Paris, it will not allow us to approach the Mount at picturesque dusk as Adams did.
Of course we stop to ask for directions, but how there can be signs for both All Directions and Other Directions is the underlying mystery. But we laugh that off as, under the spotlight of a near-full moon, we cross the causeway to the Mount that lies a mile out to sea. Getting as close as we can to the entrance gate, we park—temporarily, between tides—to unload our luggage onto a sidewalk slick with seawater.
