ad been
closed. They stood at a dangerous angle to the batteries at Meudon. On
one of them was chalked "_fermee pour cause du bombardement._" Between
the last of the houses and the ramparts, and at a distance of not more
than 100 yards from the latter, were the newly-cut trenches which the
troops had constructed. Good gabions protected them in front, and there
was a plentiful supply of fascines lying all about. The doors of the
Porte were no longer to be seen, except in little bits on the roadway.
The drawbridge had succumbed bodily, and its place was supplied with
some planks. The posthouse was in ruins, and the stone walls on either
side between the gates and the parapet of the fortifications had been
crumbled into rubbish; the glacis from the Point du Jour to Auteuil had
been ploughed up in such a manner that not a yard of it was to be seen
without a shell hole. To say that the parapet had been riddled would not
be correct. It is smashed here and there, and at intervals everywhere,
but in no place between the two Gates I am referring to is the earthwork
inside the parapet laid bare, nor has a breach, properly so called, been
anywhere made. The doors and gate walls of both gates are smashed
through, but all along, despite serious disfigurement, the parapet is
strong still.

To come back to the Point du Jour--that is as much a ruin as the town of
St. Cloud. From the gate to the Railway Station there is not a single
habitable house; not three have roofs, and not one has its windows and
walls intact. Every lamppost has been scattered about the road in small
pieces, and a stranger who had not heard of the bombardment might be
pardoned for supposing that the streets had been macadamized with the
fragments of shells. Strange to say, the staircase leading from the
Booking Office of the Railway Station to the line over head is
uninjured, or nearly so, and by its means I was enabled to ascend and
walk through that Viaduct which I have been looking at from a distance
as shells have been battering it for the last six weeks. It is much
knocked about, and so is the bridge underneath it, which in a series of
arches spans the river, but both will be serviceable still after some
repair. Huge stones, displaced from their settings and broken into
small pieces, lie scattered on the bridge and its approaches. From the
Viaduct I could see an immense conflagration in the neighbourhood of the
Champ de Mars, and a combat between the troops a