weakness in modern days; Angouleme could not spread
down to the Charente, and shut in between its ramparts and the steep
sides of the crag, the old town is condemned to stagnation of the most
fatal kind.

The Government made an attempt about this very time to extend the town
towards Perigord, 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 Angouleme, 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 Angouleme, 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 Angouleme rivaling the upper town, the residence of the powers
that be, the lords spiritual and temporal of Angouleme; 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 was lost between
these two sections of the community all the world over, and in
Angouleme 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 Angouleme 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 intermar