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. "From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archæology--it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archæologist; but these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of the Kings.