We embarked there the same evening, having taken train at the St.Lazare station within two hours of the receipt of John Turner's warning.

The streets of Paris, as we drove through them, were singularly quiet, and men passing their friends on the pavement nodded in silence, without exchanging other greeting.

Hope seemed at last to have folded her wings and fled from the bright city.

Some indefinable knowledge of coming catastrophe hovered over all.
It was a quiet sunset that clothed sea and sky with a golden splendour as we steamed out of Fecamp harbour that evening.

I walked on the deck of the trim yacht with its captain until a late hour, and looked my last on the white cliffs and headlands of the doomed land about midnight--the hour at which the news was spreading over France, as black, swift and terrible as night itself, that hope was dead, that the whole army had been captured at Sedan, and the Emperor himself made prisoner.