When Trochu issued a decree incorporating all National Guards, under forty-five years of age, in the marching battalions for duty outside the city, one of these Guards, on being asked how old he was, replied, "six-and-forty." "How is that?" he was asked. "A few weeks ago, you told everybody that you were only thirty-six." "Quite true," rejoined the other, "but what with rampart-duty, demonstrating at the Hotel-de-Ville, short rations, and the cold weather, I feel quite ten years older than I formerly did." When horseflesh became more or less our daily provender, many Parisian _bourgeois_ found their health failing. "What is the matter, my dearest?" Madame du Bois du Pont inquired of her husband, when he had collapsed one evening after dinner. "Oh! it is nothing, _mon amie_" he replied; "I dare say I shall soon feel well again, but I used to think myself a better horseman!" Directly our supply of gas began to fail, the wags insinuated that Henri Rochefort was jubilant, and if you inquired the reason thereof, you were told that owing to the scarcity of gas everybody would be obliged to buy hundreds of "_Lanternes_." We had, of course, plenty of sensations in those days, but if you wished to cap every one of them you merely had to walk into a cafe and ask the waiter for--a railway time-table. Once before I referred to the caricatures of the period, notably to those libelling the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, the latter being currently personified as Messalina--or even as something worse, and this, of course, without the faintest shadow of justification. But the caricaturists were not merely concerned with the fallen dynasty. One of the principal cartoonists of the _Charivari_ at that moment was "Cham," otherwise the Vicomte Amedee de Noe, an old friend of my family's. It was he, by the way, who before the war insisted on my going to a fencing-school, saying: "Look here, if you mean to live in France and be a journalist, you must know how to hold a sword. Come with me to Ruze's. I taught your uncle Frank and his friend Gustave Dore how to fence many years ago, and now I am going to have you taught." Well, in one of his cartoons issued during the siege, Cham (disgusted, like most Frenchmen, at the seeming indifference of Great Britain to the plight in which France found herself) summed up the situation, as he conceived it, by depicting the British Lion licking the boots of Bismarck, who was disguised as Davy Crockett. When my father remonstrated with Cham on the subject, reminding him of his own connexion with England, the indignant caricaturist replied: "Don't speak of it. I have renounced England and all her works." He, like other Frenchmen of the time, contended that we had placed ourselves under great obligations to France at the period of the Crimean War.