"...Douay and his 1st Corps made their most noble stand at Verdun, on the road to Reims, holding off the advancing Prussians on August 10th despite soon being surrounded and captured. In doing so, they bought the weight of the French Army time to retreat and settle in at fortifications closer to Reims and Paris. Despite this heroic stand, another army had been lost, and a second Bavarian Army had crossed the Vosges now, heading not for Paris but on a southward path below the Meurthe towards Orleans. To Napoleon, now camped at Reims and well aware of clamor back in Paris due to the turned tide of the war, the strategy was clear - the Prussians meant to encircle Paris from south and east and besiege the city to force a more favorable end to the war. It was in these times that he received two visitors - Edward Stanley, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and the son of Britain's Prime Minister Lord Derby; and, to Napoleon's considerable shock, Leopold II of Belgium himself. The two presented themselves as neutral parties - Britain still in the midst of her splendid isolation but leery of the conflict over Luxembourg becoming a long war that would eventually pull in Austria, Russia, and Italy and thus threaten continental balances of powers, and Leopold as a neutral King of a small country seeking to earn favor with the hegemons on either side of him. Stanley was interested in negotiating a ceasefire and then a grand congress of European nations to sort out the matter, to avoid the bad blood that had ended the Second Unification War between Prussia and Austria. Leopold suggested Brussels as a site for such a meeting. Unbeknownst to Napoleon, Stanley had contacted Russia's Gorchakov earlier, and the Russians were aiming to persuade the Prussians to end the war with negotiations as well. Left out of the triumvir of diplomats seeking a speedy end to a war that was quickly spiraling out of control - the other European powers were stunned at Prussia having effectively scattered the French defenses in a matter of three months and had indeed suspected that the war would be long and end with a French victory - was Austria's Beust, known for his hostility towards Berlin, and seen as a man who would only potentially destabilize the situation.
The efforts to find a compromise were not in vain, for on August 14th, when the Prussian armies appeared near Chalons in an effort to circumvent Reims and cut off its supply lines, Napoleon sent out emissaries to meet them rather than soldiers. Two days later, with the Prussians have stopped their advance, Napoleon hosted a guest - Otto von Bismarck. The two men, whose "misunderstanding" at Biarritz had led to so many deaths, walked along the Marne together privately. One observer would later note that it was an ironic echo of Tilsit nearly exactly 60 years earlier - on that day, Napoleon I Bonaparte, the great man who had held that name, had walked along a river with the Russian Tsar, debating a treaty with the fate of Prussia in his hands. Now, it was his nephew, but a shadow of his legendary uncle, who walked along a river with Prussia on the verge of deciding the fate of France.
The war did not formally end with the Chalons Ceasefire, but the worst of the bloodshed did. The Bavarian Army had linked up with a corps from Friedrich Wilhelm's men and defeated a French garrison at Chaumont on the 16th, at the very hour Bismarck and Napoleon were agreeing to suspend the fighting and allow a Congress to be held to settle the matter. But the Franco-Prussian War was for all intents and purposes over, and with it, the era of French domination of the European continent..."
- The Reign of Napoleon III 1848-1874