The Government made an attempt about this very time to extend the town towards Périgord, building a Prefecture, a Naval School, and barracks along the hillside, and opening up roads. But private enterprise had been beforehand elsewhere. For some time past the suburb of L’Houmeau had sprung up, a mushroom growth at the foot of the crag and along the river-side, where the direct road runs from Paris to Bordeaux. Everybody has heard of the great paper-mills of Angoulême, established perforce three hundred years ago on the Charente and its branch streams, where there was a sufficient fall of water. The largest State factory of marine ordnance in France was established at Ruelle, some six miles away. Carriers, wheelwrights, posthouses, and inns, every agency for public conveyance, every industry that lives by road or river, was crowded together in Lower Angoulême, to avoid the difficulty of the ascent of the hill. Naturally, too, tanneries, laundries, and all such waterside trades stood within reach of the Charente; and along the banks of the river lay the stores of brandy and great warehouses full of the water-borne raw material; all the carrying trade of the Charente, in short, had lined the quays with buildings. So the Faubourg of L’Houmeau grew into a busy and prosperous city, a second Angoulême rivaling the upper town, the residence of the powers that be, the lords spiritual and temporal of Angoulême; though L’Houmeau, with all its business and increasing greatness, was still a mere appendage of the city above. The _noblesse_ and officialdom dwelt on the crag, trade and wealth remained below. No love is lost between these two sections of the community all the world over, and in Angoulême it would have been hard to say which of the two camps detested the other the more cordially. Under the Empire the machinery worked fairly smoothly, but the Restoration wrought both sides to the highest pitch of exasperation. Nearly every house in the upper town of Angoulême is inhabited by noble, or at any rate by old burgher, families, who live independently on their incomes--a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still newcomers of yesterday.