o wonder.

_October 12th._

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer;
the Parisians of 1870 are as indifferent about truth as this unjust
Roman judge was. It is strange that their own want of veracity does not
lead them to doubt that of others; they are alike credulous and
mendacious. A man comes into a cafe, he relates every detail of an
action in which he says he was engaged the day before; the action has
never taken place, but every one believes him; one of the auditors then
perhaps says that he has passed the night in a fort, and that its guns
destroyed a battery which the enemy was erecting; the fort has never
fired a shot, but the first speaker goes off convinced that a battery
has been dismounted. For my part I have given up placing the least faith
in anything I hear or read. As for the newspapers they give currency to
the most incredible stories, and they affect not only to relate every
shot that has been fired, but the precise damage which it has done to
the enemy, and the number of men which it has killed, and wounded. They
have already slain and taken prisoner a far greater number of Prussians
than, on any fair calculation, there could have been in the besieging
army at the commencement of the siege. Since the commencement of the war
the Government, the journalists, the generals, and the gossips have been
engaged apparently in a contest to test the limits of human credulity.
Under the Republic the game is still merrily kept up, and although the
German armies are but a few miles off, we are daily treated to as many
falsehoods respecting what goes on at the front as when they were at
Sedan, or huddled together in those apocryphal quarries of Jaucourt. "I
saw it in a newspaper," or "I was told it by an eye-witness," is still
considered conclusive evidence of the truth of no matter what fact.
To-day, I nearly had a dispute with a stout party, who sat near me as I
was breakfasting in a cafe, because I ventured, in the mildest and most
hesitating manner, to question the fact that an army of 250,000 men was
at Rouen, and would in the course of this week attack the Prussians at
Versailles. "It is here, sir," he said indignantly pointing to his
newspaper; "a peasant worthy of belief has brought the news to the
Editor; are we to believe no one?" There were a dozen persons
breakfasting at the same time, and I was the only one who did not
implicitly believe in the existence of this army.