may have been the work of
Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its
original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose
to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a
garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy
walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And
whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that
Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now
from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood
before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming
down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire
of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of
the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and
hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of
Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the
king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.

No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts
which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward
through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it
advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey
escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced
here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the
country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road
mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of
cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly
that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out
in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very
solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse,
its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit
resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar
much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early
Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were
practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church,
which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and
the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to
express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.