His legs sinking from fatigue, Maurice seated himself at last on a bench. The town around him seemed to be living its daily life. Nurses were minding children under the beautiful trees, and petty cits were slowly taking their usual walk. Maurice scanned his papers again, and in doing so came upon an article he had not previously noticed in one of the most fiery of the Republican opposition journals. This threw a vivid light on the situation. At the council held at the camp of Châlons on August 17, so this newspaper asserted, the retreat of the army upon Paris had been decided on, and General Trochu's appointment as governor of the capital had been made solely with the view of preparing the Emperor's return. But the newspaper added that these decisions had been frustrated by the attitude which the Empress-Regent and the new ministry[13] had taken up. According to the Empress Eugénie a revolution was certain if the Emperor returned to Paris. 'He would not reach the Tuileries alive,' she was asserted to have said. And she obstinately insisted on a forward march, on MacMahon effecting a junction, despite every obstacle, with the army of Metz; in which views she was supported by the minister of war, General de Palikao, who had planned a victorious, lightning march for MacMahon, so that the latter might join hands with Bazaine. Gazing dreamily in front of him, with his paper lying on his knees, Maurice now fancied that he could understand everything: The two conflicting plans; MacMahon's hesitation to undertake this dangerous flank march with such indifferent troops; and the impatient, increasingly fretful orders which reached him from Paris, urging him into this madly rash adventure. Whilst picturing the tragical struggle, Maurice had a clear vision of the Emperor, deprived of his imperial authority which he had confided to the Empress-Regent, and divested of the supreme command of the army which he had entrusted to Marshal Bazaine, so that he had now become a mere nothing--a vague, undefined shadow of an Emperor, a nameless and cumbersome inutility, whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected, and who no longer had any place in the army since he had undertaken not to give it a single order.