r, while as many as 6,000 conscripts are said
to have deserted. The inhabitants refused to supply the necessaries of
life except upon requisition. "The army is perishing of famine,"
writes the Emperor at Troyes. Again at Nogent: "Twelve men have died
of hunger, though we have used fire and sword to get food on our way
here." And, now, into the space left undefended between the Marne and
the Aube, Bluecher began to thrust his triumphant columns, with no
barrier to check him until he neared the environs of Paris. Once more
the Prussian and Russian officers looked on the war as over, and
invited one another to dinner at the Palais-Royal in a week's
time.[403]

But it was on this confidence of the old hussar-general that Napoleon
counted. He knew his proneness to daring movements, and the strong
bias of Schwarzenberg towards delay: he also divined that they would
now separate their forces, Bluecher making straight for Paris, while
other columns would threaten the capital by way of Troyes and Sens.
That was why he fell back on Troyes, so as directly to oppose the
latter movement, "or so as to return and manoeuvre against Bluecher and
stay his march."[404] Another motive was his expectation of finding at
Nogent the 15,000 veterans whom he had ordered Soult to send
northwards. And doubtless the final reason was his determination to
use the sheltering curve of the Seine, which between Troyes and Nogent
flows within twenty miles of the high-road that Bluecher must use if he
struck at Paris. At many a crisis Napoleon had proved the efficacy of
a great river line. From Rivoli to Friedland his career abounds in
examples of riverine tactics. The war of 1813 was one prolonged
struggle for the line of the Elbe. He still continued the war because
he could not yet bring himself to sign away the Rhenish fortresses:
and he now hoped to regain that "natural boundary" by blows showered
on divided enemies from behind the arc of the Seine.

With wonderful prescience he had guessed at the general plan of the
allies. But he could scarcely have dared to hope that on that very day
(February 2nd) they were holding a council of war at Brienne, and
formally resolved that Bluecher should march north-west on Paris with
about 50,000 men, while the allied Grand Army of nearly three times
those numbers was to diverge south-west towards Bar-sur-Seine and Sens.
So unequal a partition of forces seemed to court disaster. It is true
that the allies had no m