Normandy: Across the Bay to Mont-Saint-Michel

In 1909 Maurice Leblanc published a novel in which the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin discovers that the needle of chalk off Étretat is hollow, with the treasure of the kings of France inside. Leblanc gave it more than eighty meters. In 2012 an astronomer went and measured it. About fifty-five. Novelists.

It is still the best view on the coast. From the path along the top of the western cliff, the needle, the arch beside it and a second, wider arch further on come into view one at a time, white chalk going straight down into green water.

Afternoon in Honfleur, which is pretty in exactly the way a postcard is pretty. The reason to go is the church. After the Hundred Years' War the town's shipwrights built it out of wood, and it shows: look up inside and the roof is a boat turned upside down. The bell tower stands across the street, kept apart in case lightning set it alight. Evening is yours, on the harbor.

Off the beach at Arromanches there are concrete blocks the size of houses standing in the sea. They were built in Britain, towed across the Channel after the landings of June 1944 and sunk in a line to make a harbor where there was none. Some are still there.

A historian is with you all day. At Pointe du Hoc, American Rangers climbed a cliff of about thirty meters on the morning of 6 June to reach the German guns on top. You stand where they came over the edge.

The day ends above Omaha Beach at the Normandy American Cemetery: 9,389 graves in long white rows, and 1,557 names on the Walls of the Missing. An hour before the gates close, the flag is lowered. Stay for it.

Dinner in Bayeux tonight is together, and quieter than the others. That is as it should be.

The bishop who founded Mont-Saint-Michel was told to build it by the archangel Michael three times, and on the third visit, the story goes, the angel lost patience and pushed a finger into his head. A church in Avranches, just up the coast, keeps the skull said to be his, hole and all. Carbon dating puts it in the seventh or eighth century, and a recent study says the hole was surgery, and that he survived it.

Then shoes off. From the beach at Genêts a certified guide walks the group across the bay to the Mount, barefoot and in shorts, about seven kilometers and three and a half hours, the way pilgrims crossed in the Middle Ages. It is flat the whole way. It is also mud, ribbed sand that gives a little underfoot, and river channels where the water reaches your thighs. Halfway, the guide stops at a patch of quicksand and shows you, safely, what it does. You will be telling people about this one for years.

The tide here rises and falls around fourteen meters. By the time you have showered, it is coming back over the sand you walked on. Twenty-three people live on the Mount and millions visit, and tonight, after the day-trippers have gone, you are with the twenty-three. Dinner is lamb from the salt meadows around the bay, where the sheep graze on grass the sea covers.

Up to the abbey first thing, before the coaches, while the top of the Mount is still quiet. This is the church the bishop from day 4 was poked into building. Somewhere out on the sand below is the line you walked yesterday.

Then Cancale, and oysters from the market on the harbor, eaten looking out at the beds they grew in, which the low tide uncovers in long dark rows.

Saint-Malo is the good bit, and it is younger than it looks: in August 1944, two months after the beaches of day 3, 683 of the 865 buildings inside its walls were destroyed, and the town was rebuilt by 1960. Walk the walls, then out across the sand at low tide to the Grand Bé, the island where the writer Chateaubriand is buried, facing the sea. When the tide comes in, he is out of reach again.

Farewell dinner inside the walls. Day 4 will come up. It will have gotten deeper.

Last morning inside the walls of Saint-Malo, with the tide doing whatever it is doing, which you now have opinions about.

Six days ago this was a table of strangers in Rouen. Now there is a group chat named after a patch of quicksand, a camera roll that is mostly mud and one very famous abbey, and at least one pair of shoes that will never be entirely free of the bay. Hug everybody. The tide goes out again this afternoon without you, which feels rude.