Bismarck refused the interview Jules Favre asked of him (September 10), under the pretext that the new Government was irregular. The enemy was coming nearer and nearer to Paris. The French city was resolved to resist; thousands upon thousands of oxen were being corralled in the Bois de Boulogne; poor people from the suburbs were coming to take refuge in the city. On the Place de la Concorde, the statue which represents the city of Strasburg was covered with flowers and flags, and seemed to incarnate the idea of the _Patrie_ itself. Articles and letters came to Arbois in that early September, bringing an echo of the sorrows of Paris. Pasteur was then reading the works of General Foy, wherein he found thoughts in accordance with his own, occasionally copying out such passages as the following: “Right and Might struggle for the world; Right, which constitutes and preserves Society; Might, which overcomes nations and bleeds them to death.” General Foy fought for France during twenty-five years, and, writing in 1820, recalled with a patriotic shudder the horrors of foreign invasions. Long after peace was signed, by a chance meeting in a street in Paris, General Foy found himself face to face with Wellington. The sight was so odious to him that he spoke of this meeting in the _Chambre_ with an accent of sorrowful humiliation which breathed the sadness of Waterloo over the whole assembly. Pasteur could well understand the long continued vibration of that suffering chord, he, who never afterwards could speak without a thrill of sorrow of that war which Germany, in defiance of humanity, was inexcusably pursuing. It was the fourth time in less than a hundred years that a Prussian invasion overflowed into France. But instead of 42,000 Prussians, scattered in 1792 over the sacred soil of the _Patrie_--Pasteur pronounced the word with the faith and tenderness of a true son of France--there were now 518,000 men to fight 285,000 French.