above the din: “Let the fire burn, holy Florence! I will build thee a better dwelling at Angers.” The relics were placed in a boat and rowed down the stream till they reached the limit of the lands of Saumur, at Trèves. Once the boundary had been further west, at Gennes; till Fulk, despite his terror of the “devil,” had taken courage to march against him, doubtless at a moment when Gelduin was unprepared for defence, for he at once asked a truce. It was granted, but not exactly as he desired; on the spot where Gelduin’s envoy met him Fulk planted a castle and called it mockingly “Treva,” _truce_. Opposite this alien fortress the boat which carried the relics of S. Florence now stuck fast in one of the sandbanks of treacherous Loire, and all the efforts of the rowers failed to move it. The saint--said the monks--was evidently determined not to be carried beyond his own territory. Fulk, who was superintending the voyage in person, began to rail at him as “an impious rustic who would not allow himself to be well treated”: but there was a grain of humour in the Black Count’s composition, and he was probably as much amused as angered at the saint’s obstinacy; at any rate he suffered the monks to push off in the opposite direction--which they did without difficulty--and deposit their charge in the church of S. Hilary, an old dependency of their house, till he should find them a suitable place for a new monastery.[353] Thus far Odo’s grand expedition had brought him nothing but the loss of the best stronghold he possessed on the Angevin border. There was apparently nothing to prevent Fulk from marching in triumph up the valley of the Vienne, where Chinon and Ile-Bouchard now held out alone for the count of Blois amid a ring of Angevin fortresses. His present object, however, was to relieve the Montboyau; and turning northward he laid siege to a castle of his own building which had somehow passed into the enemy’s hands, Montbazon[354] on the Indre, only three leagues distant from Tours. Odo, whose siege operations had proved a most disastrous failure,[355] at once broke up his camp and marched to the relief of Montbazon. To dislodge him from the siege of Montboyau was all that Fulk wanted; simulating flight, he retreated up the valley to Loches and thence retired gradually upon Amboise.[356] A month later Odo made an ineffectual attempt to regain Saumur. Some time afterwards he tried again, pitching his tents among the vineyards on the banks of the Thouet, hard by the rising walls of the new abbey of S. Florence; the monks acted as mediators between their former lord and their new patron, and peace was made, Odo definitely relinquishing Saumur, and Fulk agreeing to raze the Montboyau[357]--that is, to raze the keep on its summit; for the white chalky slopes of the mighty earthwork itself rise gleaming above the river to this day. The struggle between Fulk and Odo was virtually over. Once again, in the following year, the