the former could see
the whole of the performance without hearing a note, for the din there
was also infernal. Shortly after our arrival, the band struck up the
inevitable "Marseillaise," but the audience neither listened nor
applauded.

This was, after all, but the overture to the entertainment to which my
friend had invited me, and which consisted of a spectacular pantomime
representing an engagement between a regiment or a battalion of Zouaves
and Germans. As a matter of course, the latter had the worst of it; and,
at the termination, a couple of them were brought in and compelled to
sue for mercy on their knees. I am bound to say that the thing hung fire
altogether, and that, but for the remarkable selection of handsome legs
of the Zouaves, not even the hare-brained young fellows with which the
audience was largely besprinkled would have paid any attention.

In the whole of Paris there was no surer centre of information of the
state of affairs at the front than the Cafe de la Paix. It was the
principal resort of the Bonapartists. There were Pietri, the prefect of
police, Sampierro, Abatucci, and a score or two of others; all
cultivating excellent relations with the Chateau. There was also the
General Beaufort d'Hautpoul, to whom Bismarck subsequently, through the
pen of Dr. Moritz Busch, did the greatest injury a man can do to a
soldier, in accusing him of drunkenness when he came to settle some of
the military conditions of the armistice at Versailles. He was, as far
as I remember, one of the two superior French officers who estimated at
its true value the strategic genius of Von Moltke. The other was Colonel
Stoffel. But General d'Hautpoul was even better enabled to judge; he had
seen Moltke at work in Syria more than thirty years before. He was in
reality the Solomon Eagle of the campaign, before a single shot had been
fired. "I know our army, and I know Helmuth von Moltke," he said,
shaking his head despondingly. "If every one of our officers were his
equal in strategy, the chance would then only be equal. Moltke has the
gift of the great billiard-player; he knows beforehand the exact results
of a shock between two bodies at a certain angle. We are a doomed
nation."

As a matter of course, his friends were very wroth at what they called
"his unpatriotic language," and when the news of the engagement at
Saarbruck arrived they crowed over him; but he stuck to his text. "It is
simply a feint on Moltke's part, an