"My pea-jacket is torn and threadbare, my trousers are frayed at the bottom, and of many colours--like Joseph's coat. As for my linen, I will only say that the washer-women have struck work, as they have no fuel. I believe my shirt was once white, but I am not sure. I invested a few weeks ago in a pair of cheap boots. They are my torment. They have split in various places, and I wear a pair of gaiters--purple, like those of a respectable ecclesiastic--to cover the rents. I bought them on the Boulevard, and at the same stall I bought a bright blue handkerchief which was going cheap; this I wear round my neck. My upper man resembles that of a dog-stealer, my lower man that of a bishop. My buttons are turning my hair grey. When I had more than one change of raiment these appendages remained in their places, now they drop off as though I were a moulting fowl. I have to pin myself together elaborately, and whenever I want to get anything out of my pocket, I have cautiously to unpin myself, with the dread of falling to pieces before my eyes." In another place Labouchere describes his head-dress, which was quite eccentric enough to fit in with the rest of his travesty: "I have bought myself a sugar-loaf hat of the first Republic, and am consequently regarded with deference. 'The style is the man,' said Buffon; had he lived here now he would rather have said, 'The hat is the man.' An English doctor who goes about in a regulation chimney-pot has {134} already been arrested twenty-seven times. I, thanks to my revolutionary hat, have not been arrested once. I have only to glance from under its brim at any one for him to quail." The extracts which Labouchere copied from the newspapers for the benefit of his London readers are extremely amusing, and give, as no other method of narration could have done, a good idea of the spirit which the leaders of the people thought fit to try and promulgate amongst the Parisians. One morning, for instance, he learned that "Moltke is dead, that the Crown Prince is dying of a fever, that Bismarck is anxious to negotiate but is prevented by the obstinacy of the King, that three hundred Prussians from the Polish provinces have come over to our side, that the Bavarian and Würtemberg troops are in a state of incipient rebellion. From the fact that the Prussian outposts have withdrawn to a greater distance from the forts, it is probable that they despair of success, and in a few days will raise the siege. Most of the newspapers make merry over the faults in grammar in a letter which has been discovered from the Empress to the Emperor, although I doubt whether there is one Frenchman in the world who could write Spanish as well as the Empress does French." The New Year's address to the Prussians, published in the _Gaulois_, is a masterpiece of journalistic invective, and the relish with which the besieged resident copied it for the benefit of his London readers may well be imagined: