The next day Mr. Labouchere sent his first letter to London, in his capacity of Paris correspondent to the _Daily News_. The mails continued to leave Paris regularly for another three days, but the chaos that prevailed in the post-office did not inspire the citizens who entrusted their correspondence to its tender care with overmuch confidence. "Everybody was in military uniform," writes Labouchere, "everybody was shrugging his shoulders, and everybody was in the condition of a London policeman, were he to see himself marched off to prison by a street sweeper. That the Prussians should have taken the Emperor prisoner and have vanquished the French armies, had of course astonished these French bureaucrats, but that they should have ventured to interfere with postmen had perfectly dumbfounded them." Having disposed of his letter as best he might, Labouchere passed through the courtyard to try his luck with a telegram. There he saw postmen seated on the boxes of carts, with no horses before them. It was their hour to carry out the letters, and thus mechanically they fulfilled their duty. It is in touches such as these that the writer makes the scenes of the winter months of '70 and '71 live before the eyes of his readers. Were the ridiculous episodes he relates visible to others besides himself, or were his journalistic abilities so acutely developed that nothing significant, however minute, could escape his eager scrutiny? It is not easy to say, but the fact remains that he gave the world at that time, in astonishingly amusing letters, vivid pictures of bureaucracy startled into ludicrous attitudes of unaccustomed enterprise, of gilt and tinsel patriotism ineffectually trying to replace the paper courage[3] of Imperial {123} France--of an irresponsible populace brought face to face with a catastrophe which they imagined to be impossible up till within the last ten days of the siege. The Parisians had undoubtedly a good excuse for the poor figure they were obliged to cut before Europe in the January of 1871. Events, which every one, except their ex-Emperor and his government, had predicted as inevitable, had followed one another with a disastrous rapidity, leaving them, after each one, _bouches béantes_, incapable of deciding whether the most appropriate gesture to express their attitude would be one of applause, of hisses, or of weeping. Only six months had elapsed since the afternoon of the Emperor's reception, at St. Cloud, of the members of the Senate, when M. Rouher had said, during the course of his address, in words that, to-day, sound as if they must have been meant to be ironical: "Your Majesty has occupied the last four years in perfecting the armament and organisation of the army," and since the King of Prussia and the Sovereigns of South Germany had ordered the mobilisation of their armies. Six months! But what a six months of bloodshed and fury, of humiliation and defeat.