Accordingly Castaños and Tilly, representing the Spaniards, and Chabert and Marescot, on behalf of Dupont, signed preliminaries, by which it was agreed that the surrounded divisions should formally lay down their arms and become prisoners of war, while Vedel’s men should not be considered to have capitulated, nor make any act of surrender. Both bodies of men should leave Andalusia by sea, and be taken to Rochefort on Spanish vessels. ‘The Spanish army,’ so ran the curiously worded seventh article of the capitulation, ‘guarantees them against all hostile aggression during their passage.’ The other clauses contain nothing striking, save some rather liberal permissions to the French officers to take away their baggage--each general was to be allowed two wheeled vehicles, each field officer or staff officer one--without its being examined. This article caught the eye of Napoleon, and has been noted by many subsequent critics, who have maintained that Dupont and his colleagues, gorged with the plunder of Cordova, surrendered before they needed, in order to preserve their booty intact. That they yielded before it was inevitable we do not believe: but far more anxiety than was becoming seems to have been shown regarding the baggage. This anxiety finds easy explanation if the Spanish official statement, that more than £40,000 in hard cash, and a great quantity of jewellery and silver plate was afterwards found in the _fourgons_ of the staff and the superior officers, be accepted as correct[159]. [159] It will be found in the _Gazeta de Madrid_ of October 9, 1808. It is stated that 60,000 dollars in silver and 136,000 dollars in gold, besides much plate and jewellery, were found in the _fourgons_ of Dupont and his staff. The fifteenth clause of the capitulation had contents of still more doubtful propriety: it was to the effect that as many pieces of church plate had been stolen at the sack of Cordova, Dupont undertook to make a search for them and restore them to the sanctuaries to which they belonged, if they could be found in existence. The confession was so scandalous, that we share Napoleon’s wonder that such a clause could ever have been passed by the two French negotiators; if they were aware that the charge of theft was true (as it no doubt was), shame should have prevented them from putting it on paper: if they thought it false, they were permitting a gratuitous insult to the French army to be inserted in the capitulation.