The letters, posted as Labouchere described above, were written on tissue paper and addressed to Miss Henrietta Hodson. She, immediately on receipt of the manuscript, carried it to Fleet Street, where it was rightly considered copy of the very first order. Labouchere, as soon as the siege had really begun, tried in vain to induce General Trochu to allow him to accompany him on his rides to the ramparts of the city, pointing out that the newspaper correspondents were always allowed to accompany the Prussian staffs. Trochu would not hear of the scheme, and explained that he himself had been within an inch of being shot because he had had the impudence to say that he was the Governor of Paris. "From Trochu," writes Labouchere, on September 25, "I went to pay a few calls. I found every one engaged in measuring the distance from the Prussian batteries to his particular house. One friend I found seated in a cellar with a quantity of mattresses over it, to make it bomb-proof. He emerged from his subterraneous Patmos to talk to me, ordered his servant to pile on a few more mattresses, and then retreated. Anything so dull as existence here it is difficult to imagine. Before the day is out one gets sick and tired of the one single topic of conversation. We are like the people at Cremorne waiting for the fireworks to begin; and I really do believe that if this continues much longer, the {130} most cowardly will welcome the bombs as a relief from the oppressive _ennui_." A letter to his mother,[8] dated September 26, gives the following account of his life in Paris: "I wrote a day or two ago by balloon, but probably my letter is in the moon. A man is going to try and get through the lines with this, and a letter to the _Daily News_. We are all right here. The Prussians fire at the forts, but as yet they have not bombarded the town. Provisions are already very dear. It is rather dull--in fact a little bombarding would be a relief to our _ennui_. Everybody is swaggering about in uniform. I went round the inner barricades a day or two ago with the citizen Rochefort." A few days later he wrote to the _Daily News_: "The presence of the Prussians at the gates, and the sound of the cannon, have at last sobered this frivolous people. Frenchmen indeed cannot live without exaggeration, and for the last twenty-four hours they have taken to walking about as if they were guests at their own funerals. It is hardly in their line to play the _justum et tenacem_ of Horace. Always acting, they are now acting the part of Spartans. It is somewhat amusing to see the stern gloom on the face of patriots one meets, who were singing and shouting a few days ago--more particularly as it is by no means difficult to distinguish beneath this outward gloom a certain keen relish, founded upon the feeling that the part is being well played."