But now at the conqueror’s bidding there was to be a National Assembly. A clause in the Capitulation of Paris stipulated for its election. Accordingly, throughout France, even in the departments occupied by the enemy, elections were held on the 8th of February. They resulted in the return to “Bismarck’s Parliament,” as Mme. Adam called the National Assembly which on the 12th of February met at Bordeaux, of about one hundred and eighty republicans—radicals and moderates being almost equal—of about four hundred and fifty monarchical conservatives, legitimists and Orleanists being about equal, and finally of thirty Buonapartists.[219] “The final result of the elections,” writes Mme. Adam,[220] “is heartrending. The majority is reactionary, nominated in order to make peace. Country gentlemen and _capitulards_ will vote it. It is the chamber Bismarck desired. He assisted at its nomination. He presided over the elections. In certain towns did not the Prussians themselves distribute the voting papers on behalf of the reactionary candidates? Bismarck is determined that the war shall end. Germany has had enough of it.... Coblentz has returned under another form. Only now it is at home and not abroad that Frenchmen have made a compact with the enemy. Old valiant France is dying, is dead.” Mme. Adam was now at Bruyères. Her husband had been nominated as candidate for a Paris constituency and for Les Alpes Maritimes. Contrary to his wife’s advice he had insisted on leaving his Paris election to look after itself while he went to Nice. He had started on the 2nd of February, leaving Juliette, as she pathetically puts it, _en tête-à-tête, avec la pensée de ma pauvre chère France vaincue, mutilée, broyée_.[221] A few days after her husband’s departure, to her grief and loneliness was suddenly added the most agonising apprehension. She read in the newspaper that her husband’s train carrying twenty thousand kilos of gunpowder had been blown up. Hastily gathering together a few valuables, which, considering the disordered state of the capital, she dare not leave in Paris, she was about to start for the south, when a friend arrived with the welcome news that her husband was alive though seriously injured. A few hours later, accompanied by her dear little friend Bibi, Rochfort’s eight-year-old son, who was staying with her at the time, Mme. Adam was in the train. The journey was terrible. Constantly she was confronted with Prussian soldiers, who insisted on seeing her papers. “_Ils me demandent d’un ton rude mon laissez-passer. Celui qui me le rend touche ma main. Je frissonne comme au contact d’une bête venimeuse_,”[222] she writes.