That glory, that legend had enveloped the childhood and youth of Pasteur, who, as he advanced in life, still preserved the same enthusiasm. His imagination pictured the Emperor, calm in the midst of battles, or reviewing his troops surrounded by an escort of field marshals, entering as a sovereign a capital not his own, then overwhelmed by numbers at Waterloo, and finally condemned to exile and inactivity, and dying in a long drawn agony. Glorious or lugubrious, those visions came back to him with poignant insistency in those days of September, 1870. What was Waterloo compared to Sedan! The departure for St. Helena had the grandeur of the end of an epic; it seemed almost enviable by the side of that last episode of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III, vanquished, spared by the death which he wooed, left Sedan by the Donchery road to enter the cottage where Bismarck was to inform him of the rendezvous given by the King of Prussia. The Emperor had now but a shadow of power, having made the Empress Regent before he left Paris; it was therefore not the sword of France, but his own, that he was about to surrender. But he thought he might hope that the King of Prussia would show clemency to the French army and people, having many times declared that he made war on the Emperor and not on France. “Can it be credited,” said Bismarck, speaking afterwards of that interview, “that he actually believed in our generosity!” The chancellor added, speaking of that somewhat protracted _tête-à-tête_, “I felt as I used to in my youth, when my partner in a cotillon was a girl to whom I did not quite know what to say, and whom nobody would fetch away for a turn!” Napoleon III and the King of Prussia met in the Château of Bellevue, in the neighbourhood of Sedan, opposite a peninsula henceforth known by the sad name of “Camp of Misery.” The Emperor looked for the last time upon his 83,000 soldiers, disarmed, starving, waiting in the mud for the Prussian escort which was to convey them as prisoners far beyond the Rhine. Wilhelm did not even pronounce the word peace. Jules Favre, taking possession on September 6 of the department of Foreign Affairs, recalled to the diplomatic agents the fall of the Empire and the words of the King of Prussia; then in an unaccustomed outburst of eloquence exclaimed: “Does the King of Prussia wish to continue an impious struggle which will be as fatal to him as to us? Does he wish to give to the world in the nineteenth century the cruel spectacle of two nations destroying each other and forgetful of human feelings, of reason and of science, heaping up ruin and death? Let him then assume the responsibility before the world and before posterity!” And then followed the celebrated phrase with which he has been violently and iniquitously reproached, and which expressed the unanimous sentiment of France: “We will not concede one inch of our territory nor a stone of our fortifications.”