“I have always foreseen it,” writes Mme. Adam. “From the day of surrender I had grieved over that shameful, cowardly peace. The France I idolize! Now she sees torn from her those provinces which our husbands and our sons might have preserved.... The days may pass and years be added unto them, but never, until the hour strikes for the deliverance of our brethren now handed over to Prussia, will the wound I receive to-day be healed.”[236] The Treaty signed by Thiers and Jules Favre at Versailles was ratified by the Bordeaux Assembly on the 1st of March. Henceforth there was no reason why the Parliament should not return northwards. “Just now,” wrote Adam to his wife,[237] “Thiers opened the question of the town in which the Assembly shall deliberate. He is resolved to leave Bordeaux immediately. This is foolish, unless he is prepared to return at once to Paris.” But the conservative majority of the Assembly was averse to carrying on their deliberations in the capital. Paris they regarded as the hot-bed of revolution, creating a new government and imposing it by telegraph[238] on the rest of France every fifteen years. For the first time in French history a great gulf had opened between Paris and the provinces. Bourges and Fontainebleau were both suggested as suitable meeting-places. But the choice finally fell on Versailles, whose monarchical associations harmonised so well with the hopes cherished by the party in majority at Bordeaux. Louis Blanc, one of the deputies for Paris, loudly protested against this decision. Thus to abandon Paris, he argued, would be to drive the metropolis to create a government of its own. Alas! _cette vieille barbe_ of 1848 proved only too true a prophet. This slight put upon Paris was partly responsible for the institution of the Commune and all the horrors of civil war which followed. For the Government to turn its back upon Paris was not a measure likely to placate the discontent with which the city was seething, or to soothe the nerves of the heroic town all unstrung by the horrors of the siege. The National Assembly held its last meeting at Bordeaux on the 11th of March. The Versailles session was to open on the 20th. By that time Paris was in open insurrection; and the President, who on leaving Bordeaux had with his ministers taken up his residence within the capital, deemed it expedient to decamp to Versailles. The declaration that the Commune _est le pouvoir unique, son autorité est absolu_ appeared in the _Officiel_ on the 26th.