Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

Tourists want as few dates as possible what they want is poetry.” Thus his opening sentence, “The Archangel loved heights,” is a proclamation to infuse the winged warrior statue of Saint Michael, Satan’s conqueror, with a contemporary burst of daredevilry: “His place was where the danger was greatest therefore you find him here.” And in this spirit I too will willingly climb to the platform from whose edge “the eye plunges down, two hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean, as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a restless sea, which even we tourists can understand and feel without books or guides.” In such a place there can be no such thing as overwriting. He was writing for tourists like himself-and me-who prefer to journey in the belief that “o overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and the passion of every second-rate scholar. 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.” He ended the preface, “The uncle talks: -” “For convenience of travel in France,” he explained, “where hotels, in out-of-the-way places, are sometimes wanting in space as well as luxury, the nieces shall count as one only. 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.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams