Poor Paris!  You may well say we must be sorry for it, having so lately seen it in all its gay spring beauty—­and though no doubt the surface, which is all we saw of its inhabitants, is better than the groundwork, how much of good and great it contains!  How the best Frenchmen everywhere, and the best Parisians in particular, must grieve over the deep corruption which has done much to bring their country to its present dreary prospects.  I did not mean that any mediation or interference of other Powers would have prevented this war, but that there ought by this time to be a substitute found for all war.

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    SALTBURN, September 7, 1870

Don’t you find it bewildering to be hurried at express speed through such mighty pages of history?  And if bewildering and overpowering to us, who from the beginning of the war could see a probability of French disaster, what must it be to Paris, to all France, fed with falsehood as they have been till from one success to another they find their Emperor and an army of 80,000 men prisoners of war!  But what a people!  Who would have supposed by reading the accounts of Paris on Sunday, the excess of joy, the air de fete, the wild exultation, that an immense calamity, a bitter mortification had just befallen the country! that a gigantic German army was on its way to their gates!  I should like to know whether many of those who shouted “Vive l’Empereur” when he left Paris, who applauded the war and hooted down anybody who doubted its justice or attacked Imperialism, are now among the shouters of “Vive la Republique” and the new Democratic Ministry.  Let us hope not.  Let us hope a great many things from the downfall of a corrupt Court, and the call for heroism and self-sacrifice to a frivolous and depraved city—­frivolous and depraved, and yet containing so much of noble and good—­all the nobler and better, perhaps, from the constant struggle to remain so in that atmosphere.  Even if, as God grant, there is no siege, the serious thoughts which the prospect of it must give will perhaps not be lost on the Parisians.  I, like you, long that the King of Prussia may prove that he spoke in all sincerity when he said that he fought against the Emperor, not France, and be magnanimous in the conditions he may offer—­but what does that precisely mean?  John says he is right to seek for some guarantee against future French ambition.  Hitherto he has acted very like a gentleman, as John in the House of Lords declared him to be, and may still be your model sovereign.

    Lady Russell to Mr. Rollo Russell

    PEMBROKE LODGE, November 3, 1870