The style, once transplanted into this region, widely separated though it was from all its previous seats, seems to have seized powerfully upon the public mind, and to have become, within a century, the nucleus of a new form of architecture, of very great beauty and interest, uniting the domical construction of the East with the Romanesque and the Early Pointed architecture of the West. The entire district, some 200 miles in extent, adopted the dome as its acknowledged form of vaulting, nearly always supported it by the pointed arch, and also employed it as the section of the cupola itself. At Souillac we find a nave, apparently nearly as early as St. Front, covered by a series of pointed domes supported by massive transverse pointed arches, and terminated by a semi-domical apse, all carried out with scarcely an attempt at architectural detail. At the church of St. Stephen, at Perigueux, commonly called La Cité, we have an imperfect early nave of simple character, with one of its domes remaining, but to the east of it stands a later compartment, in which the same construction is carried out with very fine architecture, agreeing in character with our own Transitional style (Fig. 446). [Illustration: Fig. 446.--La Cité, Perigueux.] This brings us to the new development, for the _style_ now ceases to be Byzantine. It is very noble Gothic, united with domical construction. The sketches of this and St. Front serve to show the greatness of the change,--the one a rude transcript of St. Mark’s without its decorations,--the other a noble interior of the Transitional style, but with a pendentive dome; and it will be seen that this addition in no degree clashes with the style into which it is adopted. At Angoulême we find this development carried out fully (Fig. 447). We have a complete cruciform church, precisely in the style of the work last named, the bays of the nave almost exactly like it, but the crossing rising to a far greater height, with a sort of drum forming a clerestory over the arches, and imperfect pendentives bearing the dome aloft (Fig. 448). [Illustration: Fig. 447.--Plan, Angoulême.] [Illustration: Fig. 448.--Angoulême.] I may mention that this dome is not circular in plan, but that the middle of each side is flattened. A very parallel arrangement exists in a church far more to the north, on the banks of the Loire, and one in which we, as Englishmen, are specially interested, as being the burial-place of our earlier Plantagenets. I refer to the Abbey Church of Fontevrault (Fig. 449). [Illustration: Fig. 449.--Plan, Fontevrault.] This church has four domical bays to the nave almost identical with those at Angoulême. The church is now a prison, and in some obscure portion lie the beautiful effigies of King Henry II. of England and of Eleanor of Guienne, his queen; of Richard Cœur de Lion; and of Isabel of Angoulême, the queen of King John, and mother to the rebuilder of Westminster Abbey.