ch a fool as to refuse. They were written in Paris to the _Daily
News_ during the siege. I was residing there when the war broke out;
after a short absence, I returned just before the capitulation of
Sedan--intending only to remain one night. The situation, however, was
so interesting that I stayed on from day to day, until I found the
German armies drawing their lines of investment round the city. Had I
supposed that I should have been their prisoner for nearly five months,
I confess I should have made an effort to escape, but I shared the
general illusion that--one way or the other--the siege would not last a
month.

Although I forwarded my letters by balloon, or sent them by messengers
who promised to "run the blockade," I had no notion, until the armistice
restored us to communications with the outer world, that one in twenty
had reached its destination. This mode of writing, as Dr. William
Russell wittily observed to me the other day at Versailles, was much
like smoking in the dark--and it must be my excuse for any inaccuracies
or repetitions.

Many of my letters have been lost _en route_--some of them, which
reached the _Daily News_ Office too late for insertion, are now
published for the first time. The reader will perceive that I pretend to
no technical knowledge of military matters; I have only sought to convey
a general notion of how the warlike operations round Paris appeared to a
civilian spectator, and to give a fair and impartial account of the
inner life of Paris, during its isolation from the rest of Europe. My
bias--if I had any--was in favour of the Parisians, and I should have
been heartily glad had they been successful in their resistance. There
is, however, no getting over facts, and I could not long close my eyes
to the most palpable fact--however I might wish it otherwise--that their
leaders were men of little energy and small resource, and that they
themselves seemed rather to depend for deliverance upon extraneous
succour, than upon their own exertions. The women and the children
undoubtedly suffered great hardships, which they bore with praiseworthy
resignation. The sailors, the soldiers of the line, and levies of
peasants which formed the Mobiles, fought with decent courage. But the
male population of Paris, although they boasted greatly of their
"sublimity," their "endurance," and their "valour," hardly appeared to
me to come up to their own estimation of themselves, while many of them
seem