However, we went, my father and I, from the Boulevards to the Folies-Bergere, which had been turned for the time into a public club, and there we listened awhile to Citizen Lermina, who, taking Thiers's mission and Bismarck's despatch as his text, protested against France concluding any peace or even any armistice so long as the Germans had not withdrawn across the frontier. There was still no little talk of that description. The old agitator Auguste Blanqui--long confined in one of the cages of Mont Saint-Michel, but now once more in Paris--never wearied of opposing peace in the discourses that he delivered at his own particular club, which, like the newspaper he inspired, was called "La Patrie en Danger." In other directions, for instance at the Club du Maine, the Extremists were already attacking the new Government for its delay in distributing cartridges to the National Guards, being, no doubt, already impatient to seize authority themselves.
Whilst other people were promenading or perorating, Trochu, in his room at the Louvre, was receiving telegram after telegram informing him that the Germans were now fast closing round the city. He himself, it appears, had no idea of preventing it; but at the urgent suggestion of his old friend and comrade General Ducrot, he had consented that an effort should be made to delay, at any rate, a complete investment. In an earlier chapter I had occasion to mention Ducrot in connexion with the warnings which Napoleon III received respecting the military preparations of Prussia. At this time, 1870, the general was fifty-three years old, and therefore still in his prime. As commander of a part of MacMahon's forces he had distinguished himself at the battle of Wörth, and when the Marshal was wounded at Sedan, it was he who, by right of seniority, at first assumed command of the army, being afterwards compelled, however, to relinquish the poet to Wimpfen, in accordance with an order from Palikao which Wimpfen produced. Included at the capitulation, among the prisoners taken by the Germans, Ducrot subsequently escaped--the Germans contending that he had broken his parole in doing so, though this does not appear to have been the case. Immediately afterwards he repaired to Paris to place himself at Trochu's disposal. At Wörth he had suggested certain tactics which might have benefited the French army; at Sedan he had wished to make a supreme effort to cut through the German lines; and now in Paris he proposed to Trochu a plan which if successful might, he thought, retard the investment and momentarily cut the German forces in halves.