'On one of the last sad days before the commencement of the siege (Vinoy's or) Ducrot's army crossed Paris, and the 30,000 men which formed it marched down the Rue Lafayette, across the Place de l'Opéra, and down the Rue de la Paix towards the south-western heights, where they afterwards ran away on September 19th. I never saw a more depressing sight. I stood all day and through the evening in the rain, comparing these wretched, draggled, weary, dejected men, on the one hand, with the French troops I had seen at Nancy six weeks earlier, and, on the other, with the Prussian Fifth Army Corps I now knew so well. Troops, however, cannot be always judged by the eye alone, for the Bavarians, who fought admirably throughout the war, when I saw them on the march at the beginning of it looked so bad that I expected daily to see the whole 60,000 of their two strong corps eaten up by the single French corps which I knew was just in front of them. This French corps was commanded by de Failly, who had commanded three years earlier a mixed Papal and French force against Garibaldi at Mentone, near Monte Rotondo, and reported: "Les chasse-pôts ont fait merveille." 'The day before I left Paris I saw a sergeant of foot surrounded by a crowd of roughs. He was explaining to them that he was an Alsatian. "I come from down there. They have eaten my cow!" "Ah," cried the witty Paris crowd, "if they had only eaten _Leboeuf!_" The Marshal was looked upon in Paris as the cause of the war in virtue of his influence with the Empress. The investment of Paris was completed on September 15th, and on the 16th 'I parted from Louis Blanc, who was despondent, and to whom I was able to give no reassuring words, for I had seen the wonderful organization of the Germans. I left by the southern station for Geneva. Thousands of packing-cases encumbered the courts, the luggage abandoned by the women and children flying from Paris. At Villeneuve St. Georges the French marines were drawn up in skirmishing order, and the enemy's cavalry were in sight. Our train was the last but one which passed, but we could, if stopped, have left Paris two days later by the Rouen line, although on the 18th the trains by that last line were fired at. I wrote home that I could not help thinking of one of the plays of Aristophanes, in which a peasant wings his way to heaven on the back of a gigantic dung-beetle in order to remonstrate with God upon the evils which He has inflicted upon man by war, and finds that God is out, and that His place has been taken by a devil, who is pounding all the powers together in a mortar.