Every consideration that the German royal family could show their former friend and gracious host was shown to Louis Napoleon.  This told against him with the French.  Was the man who had led them into such misfortunes to be honored and comforted while they were suffering the consequences of his selfishness, recklessness, negligence, and incapacity?

Thus eighty thousand men capitulated at Sedan, and were marched as prisoners into Germany; one hundred and seventy-five thousand French soldiers remained shut up in Metz, besides a few thousands more in Strasburg, Phalsbourg, Toul, and Belfort.  But the road was open to Paris, and thither the various German armies marched, leaving the Landwehr, which could not be ordered to serve beyond the limits of Germany, to hold Alsace and Lorraine, already considered a part of the Fatherland.  The Prussians did not reach Paris till September 19, two weeks after the surrender at Sedan,—­which seemed rather a lull in the military operations of a war in which so much had occurred during one short month.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SIEGE OF PARIS.

Though the surrender of the emperor and his army at Sedan took place on September 2, nothing whatever was known of it by the Parisian public until the evening of September 4, when a reporter arrived at the office of the “Gaulois” with a Belgian newspaper in his pocket.  The “Gaulois” dared not be the first sheet to publish the news of such a disaster; but despatches had already reached the Government, and by degrees rumors of what had happened crept through the streets of the capital.  No one knew any details of the calamity, but every one soon understood that something terrible had occurred.

The Legislative Assembly held a midnight session; but nothing was determined on until the morning, when the Empire was voted out, and a Republic voted in.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning.  Every Parisian was in the street, and, wonderful to say, all faces seemed to express satisfaction.  The loss of an army, the surrender of the emperor, the national disgrace, the prospect of a siege, the advance of the Prussians,—­were things apparently forgotten.  Paris was charmed to have got rid of so unlucky a ruler,—­the emperor for whom more than seven millions of Frenchmen had passed a vote of confidence a few months before.  He seemed to have no longer a single friend, or rather he had one: in the Assembly an elderly deputy stood up in his place and boldly said that he had taken an oath to be faithful to the Emperor Napoleon, and did not think himself absolved from it by his misfortunes.

[Illustration:  JULES SIMON.]

It was almost in a moment, almost without a breath of opposition, that on the morning of Sept. 5, 1870, the Empire was voted at an end, and a Republic put in its place.  The duty of governing was at once confided to seven men, called the Committee of Defence.  Of these, Arago, Cremieux, and Gamier-Pages had been members of the Provisional Government in 1848, while Leon Gambetta, Jules Favre, Jules Ferry, and Jules Simon afterwards distinguished themselves.  Rochefort, the insurrectionist, made but one step from prison to the council board, and was admitted among the new rulers.  But the two chief men in the Committee of Defence were Jules Favre and Gambetta.