The notorious Madame de Montespan--"the illustrious penitent," though the former description answers better--stopped here, in a house adjoining the Church of St. John, to-day a _maison de retrait_, on her way to visit her sister, the abbess, at Fontevrault. From Saumur to Angers the Loire passes an almost continuous series of historical guide-posts, some in ruins, but many more as proudly environed as ever. At Treves-Cunault is a dignified Romanesque church which would add to the fame of a more popular and better known town. It is not a grand structure, but it is perfect of its kind, with its crenelated façade and its sturdy arcaded towers curiously placed midway on the north wall. Here one first becomes acquainted with _menhirs_ and _dolmens_, examples of which are to be found in the neighbourhood, not so remarkable as those of Brittany, but still of the same family. The Ponts de Cé follow next, still in the midst of vine-land, and finally appear the twin spires of Angers's unique Cathedral of St. Maurice. Here one realizes, if not before, that he is in Anjou; no more is the atmosphere transparent as in Touraine, but something of the grime of the commercial struggle for life is over all. Here the Maine joins the Loire, at a little village called La Pointe: "the Charenton of Angers," it was called by a Paris-loving boulevardier who once wandered afield. Much has been written, and much might yet be written, about the famous Ponts de Cé, which span the Loire and its branches for a distance considerably over three kilometres. This ancient bridge or bridges (which, with that at Blois, were at one time, the only bridges across the Loire below Orleans) formerly consisted of 109 arches, but the reconstruction of the mid-nineteenth century reduced these to a bare score. [Illustration: _The Ponts de Cé_] As a vantage-point in warfare the Ponts de Cé were ever in contention, the Gauls, the Romans, the Franks, the Normans, and the English successively taking possession and defending them against their opponents. The Ponts de Cé is a weirdly strange and historic town which has lost none of its importance in a later day, though the famous _ponts_ are now remade, and their antique arches replaced by more solid, if less picturesque piers and piling. They span the shallow flow of the Loire water for three-quarters of a league and produce a homogeneous effect of antiquity, coupled with the city's three churches and its château overlooking the fortified isle in mid-river, which looks as though it had not changed since the days when Marie de Medici looked upon it, as recalled by the great Rubens painting in the Louvre. Since the beginning of the history of these parts, battles almost without number have taken place here, as was natural on a spot so strategically important.