Suchet, therefore, on withdrawing from Valencia, found plenty of occupation awaiting him in Aragon. Villacampa was once more chased into the wilds of the Sierra de Albaracin: and several columns were detached in pursuit of Mina. This time the young partisan was unfortunate--he was caught between one of Suchet’s detachments and a party sent out by the governor of Navarre, and taken prisoner on March 31, with some scores of his followers. His place, however, was taken ere long by his uncle Espoz y Mina, who rallied the remnant of the guerrilleros of North-Western Aragon, and continued the struggle with an energy as great, and a success far greater, than that of his nephew. Meanwhile, the months of February and March had been wasted, so far as the 3rd Corps was concerned, and it was not till April that Suchet was able to take in hand the enterprise which he himself had approved, and to which the Emperor had now given his consent--the siege of Lerida. A few weeks after his return to Saragossa he received from Paris two imperial letters denouncing his late campaign as presumptuous, objectless, and altogether deserving of high condemnation[334]. [334] Dated from Compiègne on April 9 and April 20. See _Correspondance_, xx. 284 and 299. While the Valencian expedition had been in progress Marshal Augereau had been trying his hand at the Catalan problems which Verdier and St. Cyr had found so puzzling. His luck had been bad--and his faults had been many--for of all the commanders-in-chief who successively endeavoured to subjugate the untameable principality he was decidedly the least capable. When Gerona fell, the main body of his army was let loose for operations in the open field. But Verdier’s divisions, on whom the burden of the siege work had fallen, were in much too dilapidated a condition for active service[335]. Leaving them to recover their strength and gather up their convalescents, in cantonments between Figueras and Gerona, Augereau moved southwards in January, at the head of the troops of Souham and Pino, whose two divisions still counted 12,000 bayonets with the eagles, though they left behind them 5,000 sick in the hospitals of Figueras and Perpignan. [335] In January, Verdier’s French and Westphalian divisions could only show 6,000 men in line and 7,000 in hospital. Muster roll of Jan. 15 in the _Archives Nationaux_.