The principal staircase led to a second hall, which received a dim light from a square flat window let into the roof. The doors of the Minister’s two rooms opened off this hall. Neither of them was more than ten paces by seven. One of these, the window of which opened on the garden, served at the same time as study and bed-chamber, and was very scantily furnished. The other chamber, which was somewhat better furnished, although not at all luxuriously, served, in addition to the salon on the ground floor, for the reception of visitors. During the negotiations for the capitulation of Paris it was put at the disposal of Jules Favre for his meditations and correspondence. Count Bismarck-Bohlen had a room to the left of the Chancellor’s, which also opened on the park and garden, Abeken having the opposite room looking on the street. Bölsing had a small chamber near the back-stairs, while I was lodged on the second floor over Bohlen’s room. The park behind the house, though not large, was very pretty, and there during the bright autumn nights the tall figure and white cap of the Chancellor was frequently to be seen passing from the shade into the moonlight as he slowly strolled about. What was the sleepless man pondering over? What ideas were revolving through the mind of that solitary wanderer? What plans were forming or ripening in his brain during those still midnight hours? It will be seen that the whole Field Foreign Office was not quartered at Madame Jesse’s. Lothar Bucher had a handsome apartment in the Avenue de Paris, Keudell and the decipherers were lodged in a house somewhat higher up than ours in the Rue de Provence, and Count Hatzfeldt lived in the last house on the opposite side of the way. There was some talk on several occasions of providing the Chancellor with more roomy and better furnished lodgings, but the matter went no further, possibly because he himself felt no great desire for such a change, and perhaps also because he liked the quiet which prevailed in the comparatively retired Rue de Provence.