Six days after the surrender of Figueras the news that the obstacle to advance had been at last removed reached Paris, on August 25, and on the same evening Berthier wrote, by his master’s orders, to bid Suchet move forward: ‘Everything leads us to believe that Valencia is in a state of panic, and that, when Murviedro has been taken and a battle in the open field has been won, that city will surrender. If you judge otherwise, and think that you must wait to bring up your siege artillery for the attack on the place, or that you must wait for a better season [i. e. early autumn] to commence the operation, I must inform you that, in every case, it is the imperative order of the Emperor that your head-quarters are to be on Valencian territory on or about September 15th, and as far forward towards the city as possible.’ The orders were feasible, and (as we shall see) were duly executed: but Napoleon had committed his usual mistake of undervaluing the tenacity of the Spanish enemy, whom he so deeply despised. Suchet set his troops in motion on September 15th; he took Murviedro--but only after a desperate siege of two months--he beat the army of Valencia in a very decisive pitched battle, but the city by no means fulfilled the Emperor’s prophecy by a prompt surrender. Fighting round its walls went on for five weeks after Murviedro fell: and it was not till troops had been brought to aid Suchet from very remote provinces, that he at last compelled the capitulation of Valencia after the New Year of 1812 had passed. Before the city yielded Wellington was on the move, far away on the Portuguese frontier, and it was not many days after Suchet’s aide-de-camp brought the glorious news of the capitulation of Valencia, that Marmont’s aide-de-camp followed, with the wholly unexpected and unwelcome tidings that the British had stormed Ciudad Rodrigo, and that the hold of the French army on Leon and Castile had been shaken. The one piece of information was the complement and consequence of the other.