text:  The ancient city of Toulouse is of course not without its promenade although but poor taste has been evinced in its selection; for while on one side of the town soft well-trimmed lawns cool fountains and magnificent avenues of elm and plane trees are abandoned to nursery-maids and their charges the rendezvous of the fashionables of the pleasant capital of Languedoc is a parched and dusty _allee_ scantily sheltered by trees of recent growth extending from the canal to the open square formerly known as the Place d'Angouleme but since 1830 re-baptized by the name of the revolutionary patriarch General Lafayette