wellnigh exhausted.  When, on February 3rd, Napoleon entered Troyes, scarcely a single vivat was heard.  Even the old troops were cast down by defeat and hunger, 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 magazines of supplies:  they could not march in an undivided host through a hostile land where the scanty defenders themselves were nearly starving.  If, however, they decided to move at all, it was needful to allot the more dangerous task to a powerful force.  Above all, it was necessary to keep their main armies well in touch with one another