As for the newspapers they give currency to the most incredible stories, and they affect not only to relate every shot that has been fired, but the precise damage which it has done to the enemy, and the number of men which it has killed, and wounded.

They have already slain and taken prisoner a far greater number of Prussians than, on any fair calculation, there could have been in the besieging army at the commencement of the siege.

Since the commencement of the war the Government, the journalists, the generals, and the gossips have been engaged apparently in a contest to test the limits of human credulity.
Under the Republic the game is still merrily kept up, and although the German armies are but a few miles off, we are daily treated to as many falsehoods respecting what goes on at the front as when they were at Sedan, or huddled together in those apocryphal quarries of Jaucourt.

"I saw it in a newspaper," or "I was told it by an eye-witness," is still considered conclusive evidence of the truth of no matter what fact.
To-day, I nearly had a dispute with a stout party, who sat near me as I was breakfasting in a cafe, because I ventured, in the mildest and most hesitating manner, to question the fact that an army of 250,000 men was at Rouen, and would in the course of this week attack the Prussians at Versailles.

"It is here, sir," he said indignantly pointing to his newspaper; "a peasant worthy of belief has brought the news to the Editor; are we to believe no one ?" There were a dozen persons breakfasting at the same time, and I was the only one who did not implicitly believe in the existence of this army.