I hear from Willisch that certain apprehensions are entertained in Berlin, which are understood to originate in the _entourage_ of the Queen. Owing to the anxiety occasioned by the blowing-up of the citadel at Laon, objections are raised to the King entering Paris, where, it is apprehended, something might happen to him. Wrangel has telegraphed in this sense to the King, and it is stated that as a matter of fact his Majesty is now no longer inclined to go to Paris, and is disposed to await the further development of affairs at Rothschild’s place in Ferrières, which lies about half-way between Meaux and Paris. Prince Hohenlohe dines at our table, where the Chief also joins us after returning from dinner with the King. We learn that Reims will be the administrative centre of the French provinces occupied by our troops, with the exception of Alsace and Lorraine. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg is Governor-General, and will be at the head of the administration, and Hohenlohe will take a position under him. The Chief remarked to his cousin, who complained of not feeling well: “At your age” (Bohlen is now thirty-eight) “I was still as sound as a bell, and could take all sorts of liberties with myself. It was at St. Petersburg that my health first sprang a leak.” Somebody turned the conversation on Paris and the subject of the French and the Alsacians. The Chief gave his views on this matter very fully, addressing his remarks to me at the close, which I took to be a permission, or a hint, that I should either get his words or their purport into the newspapers. The Alsacians and the Germans of Lorraine, he declared, supply France with numbers of capable men, especially for the army, but they are not held of much account by the French, and seldom attain to high positions in the service of the State, while they are laughed at by the Parisians, who make caricatures and stories out of them, just as the Irish are laughed at in London. “Other French provincials are treated in the same way,” added the Minister, “if not quite so badly. To a certain extent, France is divided into two nations, the Parisians and the Provincials, and the latter are the voluntary helots of the former. The object to be aimed at now is the emancipation, the liberation of France from Parisian rule. When a provincial feels that he is capable of making a future for himself he comes to Paris, and is there adopted into, and becomes one of, the ruling caste. It is a question whether we should not oblige them to take back the Emperor as a punishment. That is still possible, as the peasants do not wish to be tyrannised from Paris. France is a nation of ciphers--a mere herd. The French are wealthy and elegant, but they have no individuality, no consciousness as individuals, but only as a mass. They are like thirty million obedient Kaffirs, each one of whom is in himself featureless and worthless, not fit to be compared with Russians and Italians, to say nothing of ourselves.