After the combat of Margalef Suchet summoned Lerida for a second time, and offered to allow the Governor to see the prisoners and guns which he had taken from O’Donnell. Garcia Conde very rightly answered that he relied on his own forces alone, and should fight to the end. Accordingly, the regular siege began. The trenches were opened opposite the north front of the town on April 29; several days of heavy rain hindered the completion of the first parallel, but on May 7 the breaching batteries were ready and the bombardment began. The front attacked--the Carmen and Magdalena bastions--was weak: it was not protected by any flanking fires, and had neither a ditch nor a covered way. It was bound to succumb before the very heavy fire directed against it, unless the defence should succeed in beating down the fire of the breaching batteries. The Spaniards did their best, bringing up every gun that could be mounted, and replacing each injured piece as it was disabled. But the end was obvious from the first: the walls were not strong enough to resist the attack. Meanwhile, Suchet made two successive assaults on a part of the defences very far distant from the main front of attack--the two isolated redoubts which stood on the south end of the extramural plateau, of which Fort Garden formed the main protection. He wished to gain a footing on this high ground, both because he could from thence molest the south front of the town, and because he wished to prevent the Spaniards from using the plateau as a place of refuge after the fall of the city, which he regarded as inevitable. The first attempt to take the works by escalade, on the night of April 23-24, was a disastrous failure: the Pilar was occupied for a moment, but the attack on San Fernando failed, and the dominating fire from it drove the stormers out of the smaller work, after they had held it for a few hours. The second escalade was more successful: it was carried out on the night of May 12-13, and ended in the storming of both works. Only a small part of their garrison succeeded in escaping into Fort Garden: the besieged lost 300 men, the successful assailants only 120. The greater part of the plateau was now in the hands of the French.