Besides, all the chief cities of the district were now in the hands of more or less regular troops; Dunette was marching from Metz with four thousand men; Broussier, from Strasburg with five thousand; Verdun could furnish two thousand, and several other fortresses a like number. Souham was at Nogent with his division, Allix at Auxerre with his; the army at the Emperor's disposal could easily be reckoned at seventy thousand. Assisted by the partizan bands which now hung in a passion of hatred on the skirts of the invaders, and by the national uprising now fairly under way, could not the Emperor-general hope for another successful stand? He well knew that the fear of what had happened was the specter of his enemy's council-board; they would, he reckoned, be rendered over-cautious, and give him at least a fortnight in which to manoeuver before the fall of Paris could be expected. Counting the men about Vitry and the garrison reinforcements at only sixty thousand, the combined armies of Suchet, Soult, and Augereau at the same number, that of Marmont at fourteen thousand, and the men in the various depots at sixteen thousand, he would have a total of a hundred and fifty thousand, from which he could easily spare fifty thousand to cut off every line of retreat from his foe, and still have left a hundred thousand wherewith to meet their concentrated force on a basis of something like equality. From the purely strategic point of view, the march of the allies to Paris was sheer madness unless they could count on the exhaustion of the population right, left, and behind. If the national uprising could be organized, they would be cut off from all reinforcement and entrapped. Already their numbers had been reduced to a hundred and ten thousand men. Napoleon with a hundred thousand, and the nation to support him, had a fair chance of annihilating them.