After a short rest at Philippeville, Napoleon composed the customary bulletins concerning his campaign, and despatched them to the capital, together with a letter counseling Joseph to stand firm and keep the legislature in hand. If Grouchy had escaped, he wrote, he could already array fifty thousand men on the spot; with the means at hand, he could soon organize a hundred and fifty thousand; the troops in regimental depots, together with the national guard, would raise the number to three hundred thousand. These representations were based on a habit of mind, and not on genuine conviction. He believed Grouchy's force to have been annihilated, and though he paused at Laon as if to reorganize an army, he went through the form of consulting such officers as he could collect, and then, under their advice, pressed on to Paris. The officers urged that the army and the majority of the people were loyal, but that the aristocracy, the royalists, and the liberal deputies were utterly untrustworthy. "My real place is here," was the response. "I shall go to Paris, but you drive me to a foolish course." This was the voice of reason, but he obeyed the behest of inclination. Yet he halted at the threshold, and, entering the city on the night of June twenty-first, made no public announcement of his presence. On the contrary, he almost slunk into the silent halls of the Elysee, where a sleepy attendant or two received the unexpected guest without realizing what had happened. He must have felt that the moral effect of Waterloo had been his undoing; unlike any other of his defeats, it had not ruined him as general alone, nor as ruler alone: his prestige as both monarch and soldier was gone.