In these modern days men live fast and forget fast; yet, since it was barely twenty-six years ago, numbers among us must still vividly remember the lurid autumn of 1870. Eastern and Northern France had been deluged with French and German blood. During the month of fighting from the 2nd of August to the 1st of September the regular armies of France had suffered defeat on defeat, and were now blockaded in Metz or were tramping from the catastrophe of Sedan to captivity in Germany. The Empire in France had fallen like a house of cards; Napoleon the Third was a prisoner of war in Cassel; the Empress and the ill-fated Prince Imperial were forlorn exiles in England. To the Empire had succeeded, at not even a day's notice--for in France a revolution is ever a summary operation--the Government of National Defence with the watchword of "War to the bitter end" rather than cede a foot of territory or one stone of a fortress. The Germans made no delay. The blood-tint had scarcely faded out of the waters of the Meuse, the unburied dead of Sedan yet festered in the sun-heat, and the blackened ruins of Bazeilles still smoked and stank, when their heads of columns set forth on the march to Paris. The troops were full of ardour; but in the Royal headquarters there was not a little disquietude. The old King made a long stay in the old cathedral city of Rheims, while men all over Europe were asking each other whether the catastrophe of Sedan had not virtually ended the war and were hoping for the white dove of peace to alight on the blood-stained land. But that happy consummation was not yet to be. When King Wilhelm crossed the frontier he had proclaimed that he warred not with the French nation but with its ruler. That ruler was now his prisoner; but Wilhelm had for adversary now the French nation, because it had taken up the quarrel which might have gone with the _Déchéance_ and in effect had made it its own. In the absence of overtures there was no alternative but to march on Paris. But Bismarck, although he carried a blithe front, was far from comfortable. He would fain have had peace--always on his own terms; but the question with him was with whom could he negotiate, capable, in the existing confusion, of furnishing adequate guarantees for the fulfilment of conditions? That requisite he could not discern in the self-constituted body which styled itself the Government of National Defence, but of which he spoke as "the gentlemen of the pavement." He had all the monarchical dislike and distrust of a republic, and before the German army had invested Paris he already had begun to ponder as to the possibility of reinstating the dethroned dynasty. Possibly indeed, he had already felt the pulse of Marshal Bazaine on this subject.