It was a triumphant day for Fulk; but more triumphant still was the day when he and Geoffrey brought the new countess home to Angers. A large part of the barons and prelates who filled S. Julian’s minster on the wedding-day were Normans who in their inmost souls viewed with mingled rage and shame what they held to be the degradation of the Norman ducal house; a large part of the crowd who with their lips cheered the bridal procession as it passed through the streets of Le Mans were all the while cursing in their hearts the Angevin foe of Normandy.[618] But in Fulk’s own capital the rejoicings were universal and unalloyed. Many a brilliant match had been made by the house of Anjou, from that wedding with the heiress of Amboise which had been the beginning of its founder’s fortunes, down to Fulk’s own marriage, only seventeen years ago, with Aremburg of Maine; but never before had Black Angers welcomed such a bride as King Henry’s daughter. A writer of the next generation has left us a picture of Angers as it was in his days--days when the son of Geoffrey and Matilda was king of England and count of Anjou. In its main features that picture is almost as true a likeness now as it can have been seven hundred years ago, and by its help we can easily recall the scene of the bride’s homecoming. We can see the eager citizens swarming along the narrow, crooked streets that furrow the steep hill-side;--the clergy in their richest vestments assembling from every church in what is still, as it was then, emphatically a city of churches, and mustering probably on the very summit of the hill, in the open space before the cathedral--not the cathedral whose white twin spires now soar above all things around, the centre and the crown of Angers, but its Romanesque predecessor, crowned doubtless by a companion rather than a rival to the neighbouring dark tower of S. Aubin’s abbey, which now contrasts so vividly with the light pinnacles of S. Maurice. Thence, at a given signal, the procession streamed down with lighted tapers and waving banners to the northern gate of the city, and with psalms and hymns of rejoicing, half drowned in the shouting of the people and the clang of the bells overhead, led the new countess to her dwelling in the hall of Fulk the Black. It was Fulk who had made the first rude plans for the edifice of statesmanship which had now all but reached its last and loftiest stage. The unconscious praise of the Black Count was in every shout which beneath his palace-windows hailed in the person of his worthiest namesake and descendant the triumph of the house of Anjou.