ll arranged 19 months before began to
appear."

Again, at Laon I was assured that the French drove all before them, and
gained the heights. "Then," said I, "why did not they stay there?" "Oh,
then reappeared '_la petite trahison_,'" and so they go on, and well do
they deserve, and heartily do I wish, to have their pride and impudence
lowered. But when I see what war is, when I see the devastation this
comet bears in its sweeping tail, its dreadful impartiality involving
alike the innocent and the guilty, I should be very sorry if it depended
on me to pronounce sentence, or cry "havoc and let loose." ...

On the 14th we slept at Chateau Thierry--such an Inn, and such insolent
pigs of people! Spain was scarcely worse ... added to the filthiness of
the place, a diligence happened at the same time to pour forth its
contents in the shape of a crew of the most vulgar, dirty French
officers I ever saw. It was well we had no communication with them, for
by the conversation I overheard in the next room there would have been
little mutual satisfaction: "Oh! voici un regiment (alluding to us 5) de
ces Anglois dans la maison! ou vont-ils les Coquins?" "Moi je ne sais
pas, les vilains!" Luckily they all tumbled upstairs to bed very soon,
each with a cigar smoking and puffing from beneath the penthouse of
their huge moustachios, during their ascent, by the by, keeping the
Landlady in hot water lest they should break into her best bedroom, of
which she carefully kept the key, telling me at the same time she was
afraid of their insisting upon having clean sheets. By their appearance,
however, I did not conceive her to be in much danger of so unfair a
demand. We had the clean sheets, damp enough, but no matter--she
remembered them in the Bill most handsomely, and when I remonstrated
against some of her charges, for I must observe that we dined in a
wretched hole with our postillions, she checked me by saying, "Comment,
Monsieur, c'est trop! Cela ne se peut pas; comme tout ici est si
charmant." ... There was no reply to be made to such an appeal, so I
bowed, paid, and retired. Then the bridge was blown up, the streets
speckled with bullets. Near the bridge, which had been smartly
contested, the houses were actually riddled, yet here the Emperor stood
exposed as quiet and unconcerned amidst the balls as if (to use their
own expression) he had been "chez lui."

As we advanced the marks of war became stronger and stronger, every
village