From Antibes to Cannes we were at no time far from the coast. The latter is a small town on the strand, and the harbour is little more than a roadstead. As we approached Fréjus, the ruins of an ancient aqueduct were seen on the adjacent plain; and as this is a place of great antiquity, I could gladly have passed a few hours in it. But the _malle-poste_ stops for nothing, except at designated points; not even to eat. To supply the place of a breakfast, however, I ran into a shop and bought a famous _biscuit de Savoie_, fancying that one ought to get a cake of such a name good so near the frontiers of Savoy itself. At the first mouthful it crumbled into dust, and I discovered that the good woman of the shop had sold me her sign! Swallowing a little water at a fountain to wash away the _débris_, I ran ahead and examined an amphitheatre that is still standing in the skirts of the place. It is small, but far from being a total ruin, most of the seats being still to be traced quite distinctly. _Feste, Farina et Forche_,[2] seems to be a political maxim as old as Italy itself; for wherever any traces of ancient Rome are to be found, one usually meets with a theatre or an amphitheatre. These noble traces of a remote civilization, in a retired place like this, had far more interest for me than the personal adventures of Napoleon. At Fréjus we quitted the coast, for I was tied, for better for worse, to the letter-bags. Our road now lay across a hilly and far from inviting country to Draguinan. We had the cork and the olive for companions, the latter having suffered severely by the frosts of the previous winter. This was the commencement of the mountainous and retired region into which Napoleon plunged when he marched from Antibes, and in which he was lost to observers, for a few days, previously to his brilliant _coup de main_ at Grenoble. Hitherto I had seen little of the real rusticity of France, for everything around Paris and on the great roads leading to it is conventional and _maniérée_. Draguinan proved to be literally _une ville de province_, but we got a reasonably good dinner.