Napoleon had spent several days at the Tuileries, busy with grandiose schemes for the organization of a new _Grande Armée_, to replace that which he had sacrificed in Russia, and with financial and diplomatic problems of absorbing interest, before he found a moment in which to dictate to Clarke his orders for the King of Spain. The note was very short and full of reticences[364]: it left much unsaid that had to be supplied by the recipient’s intelligence. ‘The King must have received by now the 29th Bulletin, which would show him the state of affairs in the North; they were absorbing the Emperor’s care and attention. Things being as they were, he ought to move his head-quarters to Valladolid, holding Madrid only as the extreme point of occupation of his southern wing. He should turn his attention to the pacification of Biscay and Navarre while the English were inactive. Soult had been sent orders to come back to France--as the King had repeatedly requested; his Army of the South might be given over to Marshal Jourdan or to Gazan.’ If Joseph had owned no independent sources of information such a statement would have left him much in the dark, both as to the actual state of the Emperor’s resources, and as to his intentions with regard to Spain. The Emperor did not say that he had lost his army and must create another, nor did he intimate how far he intended to give up his Spanish venture. But the order to draw back to Valladolid and hold Madrid lightly, could only be interpreted as a warning that there would be no more reinforcements available for Spain, so that the area of occupation would have to be contracted. The recall of Soult was what Joseph had eagerly petitioned for in 1812, when he had come upon the curious letter in which the Marshal accused him before the Emperor of treason to the French cause[365]. But the Marshal was not brought home in disgrace; rather he was sent for in the hour of danger, as one who could be useful to the new _Grande Armée_. It must have been irritating to the King to know, from a passage in the already-cited letter of Colonel Desprez, that Napoleon had called the Duke of Dalmatia ‘the only military brain in the Peninsula’, that he stigmatized the King’s denunciations of him as _des pauvretés_ to which he attached no importance, and that he had added that half the generals in Spain had shared Soult’s suspicions. The Marshal left, in triumph rather than in disgrace, with a large staff and escort, and a long train of _fourgons_ carrying his Andalusian plunder, more especially his splendid gallery of Murillos robbed from Seville churches[366].