It is about this spot that the long orgy of stone commences, which ends only at Bordeaux. The smallest hut, without doors or windows, is of stone; the walls of the gardens are formed of large blocks placed one above the other without mortar; along the road, by the side of the doors, you perceive enormous heaps of superb stone, with which it would be easy, at a trifling expense, to build new _Chenonceaux_ and Alhambras. The inhabitants, however, are contented with piling them in squares, and surmounting the whole with a cover of red or yellow tiles, the different forms of which compose a festoon of a tolerably graceful effect. The town of Angoulême, queerly perched on an extremely steep hill, at the foot of which the Charente turns two or three babbling mills, is built in the same manner. It has a kind of second-hand Italian look, which is increased still more by the thick masses of trees which crown its rugged eminences, and a tall parasol-shaped pine, like those of the Roman villas. An old tower, which, if my memory does not deceive me, is surmounted by a telegraph (many old towers have been saved by a telegraph), imparts a tone of severity to the general aspect of the town, and renders it a tolerably imposing object on the edge of the horizon. While toiling up the ascent, I remarked a house daubed externally with rude frescoes representing something like Bacchus, Neptune, or perhaps Napoleon. As the artist forgot to paint the name underneath, every supposition is admissible and capable of being defended. As yet, I confess that an excursion to Romainville or Pantin would have been quite as picturesque. Nothing can be more flat, more inane, more insipid, than these interminable strips of ground, similar to the little bands with which lithographers enclose all the Boulevards of Paris in one sheet of paper. Hedges of hawthorn and consumptive-looking elms, consumptive-looking elms and hedges of hawthorn, with, a little further on, a row of poplars, resembling a number of green feathers stuck in a flat soil, or perhaps a solitary willow, with its deformed trunk and powdered wig, compose the landscape; while, for figures, you have that of some _pionnier_, or _cantonnier_, as sunburnt as a Moor, leaning upon the handle of his long hammer as he looks at you pass by, or else some poor soldier rejoining his regiment, and sweating and staggering under his harness. Beyond Angoulême, however, the physiognomy of the soil changes, and you begin to feel that you are at a certain distance from the suburbs of the Capital.