Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris

Diary of the Besieged Resident in
Paris, by

Henry Labouchère This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give
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Title: Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris
Author: Henry Labouchère
Release Date: September 13, 2006 [EBook #19263]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DIARY
OF
THE BESIEGED RESIDENT

IN PARIS.

DIARY
OF
THE BESIEGED RESIDENT
IN PARIS.

REPRINTED FROM "THE DAILY NEWS,"
WITH
SEVERAL NEW LETTERS AND PREFACE.

IN ONE VOLUME.

Second Edition, Revised.

LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT
MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1871.
The Right of Translation is Reserved.
LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS,
WHITEFRIARS.
+-------------------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's
note: In this book there are inconsistencies in| |accentation and
capitalisation; these have been left as in | |the original. This book
contains two chapters labeled XVII. |

+-------------------------------------------------------------+

PREFACE.
The publishers of these letters have requested me to write a preface. In
vain I have told them, that if prefaces have not gone out of date, the
sooner they do, the better it will be for the public; in vain I have
despairingly suggested that there must be something which would serve
their purpose, kept in type at their printers, commencing, "At the
request of--perhaps too partial--friends, I have been induced, against
my own judgment, to publish, &c., &c., &c.;" they say that they have
advertised the book with a preface, and a preface from me they must
and will have. Unfortunately I have, from my earliest childhood,
religiously skipped all introductions, prefaces, and other such
obstructions, so that I really do not precisely know how one ought to be
written; I can only, therefore, say that--
These letters are published for the very excellent reason that a
confiding publisher has offered me a sum of money for them, which I
was not such a fool as to refuse. They were written in Paris to the Daily
News during the siege. I was residing there when the war broke out;
after a short absence, I returned just before the capitulation of
Sedan--intending only to remain one night. The situation, however, was
so interesting that I stayed on from day to day, until I found the
German armies drawing their lines of investment round the city. Had I
supposed that I should have been their prisoner for nearly five months,
I confess I should have made an effort to escape, but I shared the
general illusion that--one way or the other--the siege would not last a
month.
Although I forwarded my letters by balloon, or sent them by
messengers who promised to "run the blockade," I had no notion, until
the armistice restored us to communications with the outer world, that
one in twenty had reached its destination. This mode of writing, as Dr.
William Russell wittily observed to me the other day at Versailles, was
much like smoking in the dark--and it must be my excuse for any

inaccuracies or repetitions.
Many of my letters have been lost en route--some of them, which
reached the Daily News Office too late for insertion, are now published
for the first time. The reader will perceive that I pretend to no technical
knowledge of military matters; I have only sought to convey a general
notion of how the warlike operations round Paris appeared to a civilian
spectator, and to give a fair and impartial account of the inner life of
Paris, during its isolation from the rest of Europe. My bias--if I had
any--was in favour of the Parisians, and I should have been heartily
glad had they been successful in their resistance. There is, however, no
getting over facts, and I could not long close my eyes to the most
palpable fact--however I might wish it otherwise--that their leaders
were men of little energy and small resource, and that they themselves
seemed rather to depend for deliverance upon extraneous succour, than
upon their own exertions. The women and the children undoubtedly
suffered great hardships, which they bore with praiseworthy resignation.
The sailors, the soldiers of the line, and levies of peasants which
formed the Mobiles, fought with decent courage. But the male
population of Paris, although they boasted greatly of their "sublimity,"
their "endurance," and their "valour," hardly appeared to me to come up
to their own estimation of themselves, while many of them seemed to
consider that heroism was a necessary consequence of the enunciation
of advanced political opinions. My object in writing was