Their condition was becoming pitiful in the extreme. All fresh meat and vegetables were exhausted; they had nothing now to subsist on but fish and salt meat. The few chickens that could be got each sold for a sum equivalent to an English pound. The French had seized all the water-mills along the banks of the river, so that the corn, of which the Spaniards yet possessed large stores, could not be ground, and they were forced to make a rough unwholesome bread of grain merely crushed or bruised. Fever, bred in the damp vaults in which most of the people lived, was carrying off hundreds every day; yet the emaciated survivors scarcely murmured, and the faintest suggestion of surrender was still sufficient to carry a man to the gibbet. Cheered by their brave untiring priests, they hoped against hope that relief would come. But the floods subsided, and there was no sign of the long-expected succour. On the morning of February 8th, twenty-two French guns opened fire on the convent. Within a few hours the outer walls were battered down; then Marshal Lannes in person ordered the place to be carried by assault. Five hundred men instantly sprang from the trenches. The Spaniards in the convent, mingled regulars and monks, made what resistance they could, but they were unnerved by the preceding cannonade, and before the furious rush of the French grenadiers they fled and left the convent to its fate. Within the walls the French found hundreds of wounded and sick, and in the courtyard there were some two hundred corpses, men, women, and children, piled up awaiting burial. Even the French were sick at heart when they saw on these pale cold faces the terrible signs of fasting and disease. They themselves had suffered in their trenches. Among them too men fell fast; and even in their ranks there were heard murmurs against the long waiting of this cruel siege. But though they had gained possession of the convent, their capture of the whole suburb was to be delayed for yet a few days. News was brought in to the French marshal, from his outlying positions, that a Spanish army was marching towards the city. The captain-general’s brother, Francisco Palafox, had succeeded in raising a small force of 4000 men, and was now but twenty miles away. The attack could not be pressed in this quarter until the exact strength of the new enemy was ascertained. Marshal Lannes himself, therefore, drew off with 12,000 men, and once more the hopes of the dwindling garrison within the walls flickered up into the semblance of a flame.