The French government is trying to save the island nature of the wondrous abbey, but its efforts are controversial. How wondrous is La Merveille (The Wonder)?. Alexander Stille writes:

The abbey is one of the great living expressions of European medieval architecture. The builders’ genius was called forth by the extreme difficulties of constructing a massive complex on the narrow summit of a jagged piece of granite rock some 260 feet up above the sea. Had the abbey been built on flat ground, it would no doubt have been a large, horizontal complex of buildings with a church, courtyards, cloisters and so forth all on the same level. Instead, there was not enough room for a large church on the top of the mountain. But rather than build a small one, they built into the side of the mountain an ingenious, massive structure on three levels. The church—appropriately—sits atop the whole structure, opening onto a terrace with amazing views. But only about half of it sits solidly on rock; the other half, called the choir, is perched somewhat perilously on top of the two levels of buildings below.

The original building held up for about 400 years, from the time of William the Conqueror in the 1050s until about 1420, when its massive Norman pillars crashed down into the monks’ dormitory below, fortunately killing no one. And so, all that is left of the original church is three gorgeous sculpted Norman columns, whose graceful, sober simplicity and strength are the architectural equivalent of the army of 40,000 knights with which its patron, William the Conqueror, crossed the English Channel and conquered England. The choir was rebuilt in the late 1400s in a different style that the French call gothique flamboyant (flamboyant Gothic), with high, slender, delicately carved arches and tall bays of stained glass windows that flood the front of the church with light.

But the world is ever gnawing at the abbey’s heels:

That Mont-Saint-Michel has been transformed from a town into a kind of medieval stage set is demonstrated by one of ex-mayor Vannier’s latest commercial strokes of genius: a business that puts on mock Western weddings for Japanese tourists. The former mayor’s maitre d’hotel dons the garb of a priest and performs these ceremonies for couples dressed up in Western wedding garb; then they are photographed and filmed feeding each other cake in front of the medieval walls. The idea seemed too preposterous to be true. But there it was—a small office nestled underneath one of Vannier’s other businesses in town—Les Terrasses Poulard. No customers were around when I visited in late October—not wedding season—but there was a friendly Japanese office manager, a mannequin of a bride wearing a Western-style wedding dress and a flat-screen TV playing the video of a Japanese couple’s “wedding” at Mont-Saint-Michel. The couples are generally not Christian and they are married legally back in Japan, the young woman explained. Holding a wedding ceremony—or having the video of a wedding ceremony—in Mont-Saint-Michel holds real cachet back in Japan, she said. “Japanese have very short vacations, usually a week, and so they have enough time for two things, Paris and Mont-Saint-Michel.”

Can you imagine? Read the whole thing — it’s a lovely story.

(By the way, I’m out working on a project for much of today, and won’t be able to approve comments quickly. Thanks for your patience.)

[H/T: James C.]