ll of the people at headquarters except the King's immediate suite
were assigned quarters at Lagny; and while Forsyth and I, accompanied
by Sir Henry Havelock, of the British army, were driving thither, we
passed on the road the representative of the National Defense
Government, Jules Favre, in a carriage heading toward Meaux.
Preceded by a flag of truce and accompanied by a single, companion,
he was searching for Count Bismarck, in conformity, doubtless, with
the message the Chancellor had sent to Paris on the 17th by the
British secretary. A half-mile further on we met Bismarck. He too
was traveling toward Meaux, not in the best of humor either, it
appeared, for having missed finding the French envoy at the
rendezvous where they had agreed to meet, he stopped long enough to
say that the "air was full of lies, and that there were many persons
with the army bent on business that did not concern them."

The armies of the two Crown Princes were now at the outskirts of
Paris. They had come from Sedan mainly by two routes--the Crown
Prince of Saxony marching by the northern line, through Laon and
Soissons, and the Crown Prince of Prussia by the southern line,
keeping his right wing on the north bank of the Marne, while his left
and centre approached the French capital by roads between that river
and the Seine.

The march of these armies had been unobstructed by any resistance
worth mentioning, and as the routes of both columns lay through a
region teeming with everything necessary for their support, and rich
even in luxuries, it struck me that such campaigning was more a vast
picnic than like actual war. The country supplied at all points
bread, meat, and wine in abundance, and the neat villages, never more
than a mile or two apart, always furnished shelter; hence the
enormous trains required to feed and provide camp equipage for an
army operating in a sparsely settled country were dispensed with; in
truth, about the only impedimenta of the Germans was their wagons
carrying ammunition, pontoon-boats, and the field-telegraph.

On the morning of the 20th I started out accompanied by Forsyth and
Sir Henry Havelock, and took the road through Boissy St. George,
Boissy St. Martins and Noisy Le Grand to Brie. Almost every foot of
the way was strewn with fragments of glass from wine bottles, emptied
and then broken by the troops. There was, indeed, so much of this
that I refrain from making any estimate of the number of bo