Thus the allies continued to advance upon Paris, while the shattered divisions of Mortier and Marmont, hard pressed by the cavalry, lost a rear-guard of 1500 men near Ferté Gauchère. At Crecy they parted into two bodies, one retreating on Meaux, the other on Lagny. They were still pursued and harassed; and at length, the soldiers becoming desperate, could hardly be kept together, while the artillerymen cut the traces of their guns, and mounted their draught-horses, to effect their escape. It is computed that the French divisions, between Fère-Champenoise and Lagny, lost 8000 men, and eighty guns, besides immense quantities of baggage and ammunition. Indeed, surrounded as they were by overpowering numbers, it required no little skill in the generals, as well as bravery and devotion in the soldiers, to keep the army from dissolving entirely. The allies, gaining advantages at every step, moved on with such expedition, that when, on the 27th March, they took up their headquarters at Collomiers, they had marched upwards of seventy miles in three days. An effort was made, by about 10,000 men of the national guards, to stop a column of the army of Silesia, but it totally failed; General Horne galloping into the very centre of the French mass of infantry, and making prisoner the general who commanded them with his own hand. When Blucher approached Meaux, the garrison (a part of Mortier's army) retreated, blowing up a large powder magazine. This was on the 28th of March, and on the evening of the same day, the vanguard of the Silesian army pushed on as far as Claye, from whence, not without a sharp action, they dislodged a part of the divisions of Marmont and Mortier. These maréchals now retreated under the walls of Paris, their discouraged and broken forces forming the only regular troops, excepting those of the garrison, which could be reckoned on for the defence of the capital. The allied armies moved onward, on the same grand point, leaving, however, Generals Wrede and Sacken, with a corps d'armée of 30,000 men, upon the line of the Marne, to oppose any attempt which might be made for annoying the rear of the army, and thus relieving the metropolis. Deducing this covering army, the rest of the allied forces moved in columns along the three grand routes of Meaux, Lagny, and Soissons, thus threatening Paris along all its north-eastern quarter. The military sovereigns and their victorious armies were now in sight of that metropolis, whose ruler and his soldiers had so often and so long lorded it in theirs; of that Paris, which, unsatisfied with her high rank among the cities of Europe, had fomented constant war until all should be subjugated to her empire; of that proud city, who boasted herself the first in arms and in science, the mistress and example of the civilized world, the depositary of all that is wonderful in the fine arts, and the dictatress as well of taste as of law to continental Europe. [Sidenote: PARIS.]