The 230,000 men disarmed by the capitulation, mostly mobiles or men having finished their term of service, had been sent home in hot haste, as they would only have swelled the Parisian army. Already some mobiles, marines, and soldiers had laid the basis of a republican association with the National Guards. There remained to Vinoy only the division allowed him by the Prussians and 3,000 sergents-de-ville or gendarmes, in all 15,000 men, rather ill-conditioned. Lefio sent him a few thousand men picked up in the armies of the Loire and of the North, but they arrived slowly, almost without _cadres_, harassed, and disgusted at the service. At Vinoy's very first review they were on the point of mutinying. They left them straggling through Paris, abandoned, mixing with the Parisians, who succored them, the women bringing them soups and blankets to their huts, where they were freezing. In fact, on the 19th the Government had only about 25,000 men, without cohesion and discipline, two-thirds of them gained over to the faubourgs. How disarm 100,000 men with this mob? For, to carry off the cannon, it was necessary to disarm the National Guard. The Parisians were no longer novices in warfare. "Having taken our cannon," they said, "they will make our muskets useless." The coalition would listen to nothing. Hardly arrived, they urged M. Thiers to act, to lance the abscess at once. The financiers--no doubt the same who had precipitated the war to give fresh impulse to their jobbery[77]--said to him, "You will never be able to carry out financial operations if you don't make an end of these scoundrels."[78] All these declared the taking of the cannon would be mere child's play. They were indeed hardly watched, but because the National Guard knew them to be in a safe place. It would suffice to pull up a few paving stones to prevent their removal down the narrow steep streets of Montmartre. On the first alarm all Paris would hasten to the rescue. This had been seen on the 16th, when gendarmes presented themselves to take from the Place des Vosges the cannon promised by Vautrain. The National Guards arrived from all sides and unscrewed the pieces, and the shopkeepers of the Rue des Tournelles commenced unpaving the street.