He was arrested by the news that the Seine valley, as far as Montereau, was in the hands of the Austro-Russians; that Oudinot and Victor had been driven back to Nangis; in short, that Paris was seriously menaced. It was long asserted that in the three actions just recorded the French far outnumbered their opponents, and that Napoleon's generalship was consequently inferior to his high average. The sufficient answer to this is in the facts now universally accepted. At Champaubert there were four thousand eight hundred and fifty French against four thousand seven hundred Russians; at Montmirail there were twenty-two thousand seven hundred Russians and Prussians against twelve thousand eight hundred French; and in the third engagement, near Etoges, Bluecher had twenty-one thousand five hundred to ten thousand three hundred. It is therefore natural to compare these three victories with those at Montenotte, Millesimo, and Dego. But they were far greater. At forty-four Napoleon displayed exactly the same boldness, steadfastness, and skill which he had displayed in youth; but in addition he overcame the stolid enmity of winter, of variable weather, of roads almost impassable, of swampy fields that were almost impassable by reason of overflowing ditches and half-frozen morasses. He overcame, too, the resisting power created by his own example; for here were the choicest soldiers of the Continent, commanded by men inured for eighteen years to the hardships, the shifts, the rapidity of warfare as he himself had taught the art. Momentarily Napoleon seems to have wondered whether allied and co-allied Europe had learned nothing in half a generation, and whether an army twice and a half larger than his own, under veteran generals, was to withdraw again behind the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder, perhaps the Vistula. It is hard to believe that he dreamed such dreams as we read the prosaic, scientific, hard common sense of his military correspondence between January twenty-sixth and February fourteenth. Yet there is certainly an appearance of self-deception and vacillation in his political and diplomatic plans, due apparently to the intoxication of success, as when he spoke of the Vistula to Marmont after Champaubert.