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Alpine sketches, comprised in a short tour through parts of Holland, Flanders, France, Savoy, Switzerland and Germany, during the summer of 1814 / by a member of the University of Oxford [d.i.: George Windham Bridges]
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PARIS.

of Paris, Montmartre , is in the suburbs,and afforded a position which might havebeen defended against a very superior army,but Buonaparte had so completely blindedthe good people of Paris , that when theallied forces were on the plains below thishill, they conceived them many leaguesdistant, and being told by the public jour-nals that the Russians , under the braveBlucher, were entirely destroyed, theyimagined them to be but a few stragglingCossacks , and actually went out to drivethem away. What must have been theirastonishment and consternation, when, as-cending Montmartre , they beheld nearly300,000 men covering the plains around!Their impetuosity, however, was not to berestrained, and many thousand lives werelost on the night previous to the capitula-tion, had it not been for which the wholecity would probably have been destroyedon the following day.

Throughout France at present, as mightbe expected, there is a feeling of mortifiedvanity in the people, and a melancholy ir-