About 8 o’clock on the following morning, just as I was at breakfast, we heard a noise which sounded like heavy firing. It was only the horses in a neighbouring stable stamping on the wooden floor, probably out of temper that they also should have been put on short commons, as the drivers had only been able to give them half measures of oats. As a matter of fact there was a general scarcity. I heard subsequently that Hatzfeldt had been commissioned by the Chief to go to Brussels. Shortly afterwards the Chancellor called me to his bedside. He had received 500 cigars, and wished me to divide them among the wounded. I accordingly betook myself to the barracks, which had been transformed into a hospital, and to the bedrooms, barns and stables in the street behind our house. At first I only wished to divide my stock amongst the Prussians; but the Frenchmen who were sitting by cast such longing glances at them, and their German neighbours on the straw pleaded so warmly on their behalf--“We can’t let them look on while we are smoking, they too have shared everything with us”--that I regarded it as no robbery to give them some too. They all complained of hunger, and asked how long they were going to be kept there. Later on they were supplied with soup, bread and sausages, and some of those in the barns and stables were even treated to bouillon and chocolate by a Bavarian volunteer hospital attendant. The morning was cold, dull and rainy. The masses of Prussian and Würtemberg troops who marched through the town seemed however in the best of spirits. They sang to the music of their bands. In all probability the feelings of the prisoners who sat in the long line of carts that passed in the opposite direction at the same time were more in harmony with the disagreeable weather and the clouded sky. About 10 o’clock, as I waded in the drizzling rain through the deep mud of the market-place in fulfilment of my mission to the wounded, I met a long procession of conveyances coming from the Meuse bridge under the escort of the black death’s-head hussars. Most of them were covered coaches, the remainder being baggage and commissariat carts. They were followed by a number of saddle horses. In a closed coupé immediately behind the hussars sat the “Prisoner of Sedan,” the Emperor Napoleon, on his way to Wilhelmshöhe through Belgium. General Castelneau had a seat in his carriage. He was followed in an open waggonette by the infantry general, Adjutant-General von Boyen, who had been selected by the King as the Emperor’s travelling companion, and by Prince Lynar and some of the officers who had been present at Napoleon’s meeting with the Chancellor on the previous day. “Boyen is capitally suited for that mission,” said the Chief to us the night before; “he can be extremely rude in the most polite way.” The Minister was probably thinking of the possibility that some of the officers in the _entourage_ of the august prisoner might take liberties.