Avranches: The Manuscripts of Mont-Saint-Michel and the Skull of Saint Aubert

Required Activities

• In the Scriptorial, work through the display of the abbey's library — more than 200 medieval volumes — and find the copies in which the Mont's monks were reading translations of Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero and Plato

• In the basilica of Saint-Gervais, find the treasury in the room south of the bell-tower porch — assembled there between 1913 and 1933 by the archpriest Prospère Cornille — and pick out its chief piece, the reliquary holding the skull of Saint Aubert, the bishop who founded the first sanctuary on Mont-Saint-Michel

• In the jardin des plantes on the hill west of the town, stand at the orientation table and pick out the course of the Sée, the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel and the Breton coast beyond it — the view Maupassant used in Le Horla — then find the old well of the abbaye de Moutons and the Romanesque doorway of the chapel of Saint-Georges de Bouillé, both re-erected among the garden's rare trees

• In the square Thomas-Becket, find the slab set at the entrance on the spot of the north doorway of the lost cathedral of Saint-André, where Henry II came in 1172 to do penance for Becket's murder — nothing else of that cathedral stands where it was built

• Stand on the place Patton at the monument to the US Third Army, raised on a mound of earth brought over from several American states, and find the separate memorial to the breakthrough of 31 July 1944 that opened the road into Brittany