War came, the Emperor being, by common report, most reluctant to consent to its declaration. He was its first victim. Five weeks after taking the field, he surrendered with nearly one hundred and ninety thousand men at Sédan. The corruption which through twenty years he had fostered, in all parts of the state where he expected to profit by it, had gangrened the army also, that branch which a military tyrant needs to have honestly administered. And now in his need the army failed him. He had been caught, as every one is caught who imagines that he can be wicked with impunity and still keep virtue for an ally when he needs her. From top to bottom his war department was rotten. Conscripts had, by bribe, evaded service; generals had sworn to false muster-rolls; ministers had connived with dishonest contractors. At Sédan, Napoleon paid the penalty of the corruption which he had erected into a system; at Sédan, moreover, he completed that cycle of parallels and imitations which he had made the business of his life. Just as Prussian Blücher paralyzed the last rally of the great Napoleon at Waterloo, so Prussian Moltke achieved the ignominy of Napoleon the Little at Sédan. Men forget, even when they do not forgive. Frenchmen, furious at the humiliation of Sédan, cursed Napoleon as the author of it. But after a quarter of a century, although they have not forgiven him, they have come to look on him as victim rather than as villain. Later writers have held him up to be pitied. They describe his long years of suffering from the stone; they paint him during that month of August, 1870, as a poor, abject creature of circumstances, driven to bay by an irresistible foe, buffeted, scorned, despised by his own officers and troops. They show him to us, speechless and in agony, lifted from his horse at Saarbrücken; or huddled into a third-class railway carriage with a crowd of common soldiers escaping from the oncoming Prussians; or sitting, as cheerless as a death’s-head, at a council of war; now lodged in mean quarters; now passing gloomily down regiments on their way to defeat, and never a voice to cry _Vive l’Empereur_; ever growing more and more haggard and nervous with worry, disaster, and endless cigarettes; continually pelted with telegrams from Empress Eugénie at Paris, “Do this--do that, or the Empire is lost;” until that final early morning interview with Bismarck in the weaver’s cottage at Donchéry. Latter-day Frenchmen, beholding such misery, have forgotten that Napoleon himself was chiefly responsible for it, and have ceased to execrate. In closing, let us read, from a letter Bismarck wrote to his wife the day after the surrender, a description of the meeting of Napoleon and his conqueror:--