I remember that on the second day after his arrival, as we were all dining together at my cousin's, after having explained to us his views, Nicolas Hague began telling us the miseries of the siege of Paris. He told us that during the whole of that long winter, every day, were seen before the bakers' shops and the butchers' stalls strings of old men half clothed, and poor women holding their children, discolored with the cold, close in their arms, waiting three or four hours in rain, snow, and wind, for a small piece of black bread, or of horse flesh; which often never came! Never had he heard any of these unhappy people expressing any desire to surrender; but superior officers and staff officers had shamelessly declared, from the earliest days of the siege, that Paris could not hold out! And these men, formerly so proud of their rank, their epaulettes, and their titles, who were solely charged to defend us, and to uphold the honor of the nation, discouraged by their language those who were trusting in them, and whose bread they had eaten for years passed in useless reviews and parades, in frivolous fetes at St. Cloud, at Compiegne, the Tuileries, and elsewhere. According to Nicolas Hague, all our disasters, from Sedan to the capitulation of Paris, were attributable to the disaffection of the staff officers, the committees, and those former Bonapartist place-holders, who knew well that if the Republic drove out the Prussians, nobody in the world would be able to destroy it; and as they did not care for the Republic, they acted accordingly.