s were quite open to a severe fire of grape from eminences
commanding every inch of the plain. Whilst this work was going on at
Belleville, another Russian column performed a similar service at Mt.
Martre, which is nearer Paris--in fact, immediately above the
Barriers.... Thither our guide next conducted us, and pointed out the
particular spots where the assault and carnage were most desperate. A
number of Parties were walking about and all talking of the battle or
Bonaparte.... Till this day I had never heard him openly and honestly
avowed, but here I had several opportunities of incorporating myself in
groups in which his name was bandied about with every invective which
French hatred and fluency could invent. Their tongues, like Baron
Munchausen's horn, seemed to run with an accumulated rapidity from the
long embargo laid upon them. "Sacre gueux, bete, voleur," &c., were the
current coin in which they repaid his despotism, and I was happy to find
that his conduct in Spain was by all held in utter detestation and
considered as the ground work of his ruin.

I saw one party in such a state of bodily and mental agitation that I
ran up expecting to see a battle, but the multiplicity of hands, arms,
and legs which were rising, falling, wheeling, and kicking, were merely
energetic additions to the general subject.... The National guard were
not (with few exceptions) actually engaged. To the amount of 36,000 they
occupied the towns and barriers, by all accounts guessing, or, as one
intelligent conductor assured us, very certain that they would not be
called upon to fight much for the defence of Paris.... Indeed, from all
I have been able to learn, and from all I have been able to see, it
appears pretty clear that no serious defence was intended--a little
opposition was necessary for the look of the thing. And although Marmont
might have done more, I feel convinced that had he exerted himself to
the utmost, Paris must have perished.

The heights were defended in a very inadequate and unsoldierlike manner;
not a single work was thrown up before the guns, no entrenchments, no
bastions, and yet with three days' notice all this might have easily
been done. The barriers all round Paris were, and still are, hemmed
round with Palisades with loop holes, each of which might have been
demolished by half a dozen rounds from a 6-pounder; the French, indeed,
laugh at them and consider them as mere divertissements of Bonaparte's,
and feeb