The eagerness of the Prussians and the Austrians to grant an armistice was at first due to the belief that Caulaincourt's request was a confession of exhaustion; the Czar's assent to reopening the congress on the eighteenth was wrung from him by the military operations between the fourteenth and that date. Convinced that Paris was menaced, Napoleon left Marmont to hold Bluecher, and starting for La Ferte-sous-Jouarre on the fifteenth, covered fifty miles with his army in a marvelous march of thirty-six hours, arriving on the evening of the sixteenth with his men comparatively fresh. Next morning the French began to advance, and the Austrians to withdraw toward the Seine. Victor was to seize Montereau that same day and hold the bridge. Compelled to drive an Austrian corps out of Valjouan, the marshal did not reach his goal until six or seven in the evening, and finding it beset by the Crown Prince of Wuertemberg with fourteen thousand Germans, he merely drove in the outposts and then halted for the night. His ardor was far from intense, and though, like Macdonald at Chateau-Thierry, he might feel that he had done all that could be demanded, yet he lost the opportunity of annihilating a considerable portion of the enemy's force. Simultaneously Macdonald had now advanced until he stood before Bray, while Oudinot on the left was before Provins. Thus far Napoleon's advance had been a front movement to cover Paris, but that same day, the seventeenth, he drove Wittgenstein from Nangis, and then expected by a rush over the bridge at Montereau to prevent Schwarzenberg from extending his flank to Fontainebleau, a move which would surround the French right. As a matter of fact, strange riders speaking curious outlandish tongues, Cossack scouts in other words, had appeared for the first time that very day in Nemours and Fontainebleau, terrifying the inhabitants. It seems highly probable that if Napoleon's force could have made a quick push from Montereau early on the eighteenth, it would have cut off a considerable portion of Schwarzenberg's left. In any case the Emperor was deeply incensed by what he considered Victor's slackness, and degraded him. The humbled marshal confessed his fault, displaying profound contrition, and was speedily restored to partial favor, being intrusted with the command, under Ney, of a portion of the young guard.