Châtellerault, which enjoys a high reputation for the article of cutlery, possesses nothing particular except a bridge, ornamented at each extremity with old towers, which present a most charmingly feudal and romantic appearance. As for its manufactory of arms, it is a large white mass, with a multitude of windows. Of Poitiers, having passed through it in a beating rain, and a night as dark as pitch, I can say nothing, except that it is paved in the most execrable manner possible.
At break of day, the coach was traversing a country wooded with trees of an apple green planted in a soil of the brightest red, and producing a very singular effect. The houses were covered with tiles ridged after the Italian fashion; these tiles, too, were staring red, a colour which appears very strange to eyes accustomed to the brown and sooty roofs of the houses of Paris. From a piece of eccentricity, of which I forget the motive, the builders of those parts commence at the roofs of the houses; the walls and foundations follow. They place the framework upon four strong beams, and the tilers perform their portion of the work before the masons.
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.
It is on leaving the Department of the Charente that the traveller meets with the first of the Landes, those monster patches of grey, violet, and bluish land, diversified with undulations of various depths. A kind of short and scanty moss, red-tinged heather, and some dwarf broom compose all the vegetation. The desolation is that of the Egyptian Thebaid, and every minute you expect to see a file of dromedaries and camels; it seems as if the spot had never been pressed by the foot of man.
After traversing the Landes, you enter a tolerably picturesque region. Here and there along the road are groups of houses, concealed like birds' nests in the thickets. These houses remind one of the pictures of Hobbema, with their large roofs, their walls over-run with wild vine, their well-grown wondering-eyed oxen and their poultry foraging on the dung-hills. All the houses, by the way, as well as the garden walls, are built of stone. On every side are to be seen the beginning of buildings afterwards abandoned out of pure caprice, and recommenced a few paces further on. The inhabitants almost resemble children when they get a birthday present of a "box of bricks," with which, by the aid of a certain number of square-cut pieces of wood, all sorts of edifices may be constructed. They unroof their houses, remove the stones, and with the very same ones build another edifice of a totally different character. On the road-side are blooming gardens, surrounded by fine trees with beautifully fresh foliage, and variegated with peas in blossom, daisies, and roses; the eye at the same time roaming over meadows, where the cows are almost hidden by the grass which reaches to their breasts. A cross path all redolent of hawthorn and eglantine, a group of trees, beneath which is seen an empty wagon, a country-girl or two, with their spreading caps like the turban of the Turkish Ulemas, and with their narrow yellow skirts, offer a thousand little unexpected details which charm the eye and diversify the route. By slightly glazing the scarlet tint of the roofs with a little bitumen, you might think yourself in Normandy. Flers and Cabat would here find pictures ready made to their hand. It is about this latitude that the "berets" begin to show themselves. They are all blue, and the elegance of their form is greatly superior to that of the hat.
Hereabouts, too, the first vehicles drawn by oxen are to be met with. These wagons have rather a Homeric and primitive appearance. The oxen are harnessed by the head to a common yoke covered with a small head-piece of sheepskin. They have a mild, grave, and resigned look, which is pre-eminently sculptural, and worthy of the Elginetic bas-reliefs.
Most of them wear a covering of white cloth, which serves as a protection against the flies and other insects. Nothing is more singular than to see these oxen, dressed en chemises, raise towards you their humid and lustrous muzzles and their large deep blue eyes, which the Greeks, who were certainly judges of beauty, thought sufficiently remarkable to furnish the sacramental epithet of Juno—Boopis Ere.
A marriage, which happened to be in course of celebration at an inn, afforded me an opportunity of seeing some of the natives of these parts assembled together; for in a distance of more than a hundred leagues I had not perceived ten persons. These said natives are excessively ugly, especially the women: there is no difference between the old and the young ones; a countrywoman of five and twenty is as haggard and wrinkled as one of sixty. The little girls wear caps quite as developed as those of their grandmothers, which makes them look like the Turkish boys in Decamp's sketches, with their enormous heads and slender bodies. In the stable of the inn I saw a huge black he-goat, with immense twisted horns and glaring yellow eyes. He had a hyper-diabolic appearance, and would, in the middle ages, have made a most worthy president at a witches' sabbath.
Evening was beginning to set in when we arrived at Cubzac. Formerly the Dordogne used to be traversed in a ferry-boat, but the breadth and rapidity of the stream rendered the passage dangerous, and the boat is, at present, replaced by a suspension bridge of the most daring construction. It is well known that I am no very great admirer of modern innovations, but this bridge is really a work worthy of Egypt or of Rome for its colossal dimensions and the grandeur of its appearance. Piers formed by a succession of arches, which gradually increase in height, lead to the suspended platform, beneath which vessels can pass in full sail, as they did between the legs of the Colossus of Rhodes. Tower-shaped buildings of cast iron, with openings to render them lighter, serve as supports to the iron chains, which are crossed with a most skilfully calculated symmetry of resistance, and which stand out against the background of the sky with the fineness and delicacy of a spider's web, thereby adding still more to the wonderful effect of the whole. Two obelisks of cast iron are placed at each end, as if before the peristyle of some Theban monument, and form a kind of ornament not at all out of place; for the gigantic architectural genius of the Pharaohs would not be ashamed to own the Bridge of Cubzac. It requires thirteen minutes, watch in hand, to cross it.
Two or three hours afterwards, the lamps of the Bridge of Bordeaux, another, although less striking wonder, were gleaming at a distance which my appetite could have wished considerably