In consequence of hunger and the unnatural food eaten, the mortality among the civil inhabitants, the number of whom had dwindled down to 16,000, became very high; the number of deaths per week in the month of October was no less than 50–80, to which, according to Blech, must be added the deaths among the poor which were no longer reported. In the first part of November there were some 80–90 deaths per week. On November 29 General Rapp surrendered the city to the Russians and Prussians; but since the conditions of capitulation could not be agreed upon until January 1, 1814, there was an interval of about a month during which the French garrison, but not the civil population, was supplied with food; consequently the death-rate among the citizens remained high. Furthermore, the besiegers, among whom a virulent typhus had been raging since October, communicated the infection to the inhabitants, 107 of whom succumbed to it in the last week of November, 133 in the first week of December, and 138 in the following week. On December 1, permission was obtained to establish a market, and from that time on, the citizens could once more provide themselves with food in a regular way. The loss of human life inside the besieged stronghold was terrible; of the 35,900 troops in the garrison, 15,736 according to Friccius died in the lazarets; at the time of the capitulation only 16,532 men were left, and of these 1,482 were sick and had to be left in the city. According to Blech, a total of 5,592 civilians died, 1,142 of them in the last three months (October-December) of the year; the number of deaths in December alone was 473. Toward the end of the siege some ninety persons died of starvation.[335] 3. THE SIEGE OF TORGAU (1813)[336] On May 10, 1813, when Napoleon had appeared in Saxony, and the King, after considerable hesitation, had decided in his favour, the Saxon garrison of Torgau, at that time a place of 5,000 inhabitants, was replaced by a French army-corps. In the course of the summer large transports of sick soldiers from various lazarets arrived at Torgau, and on July 18 alone 3,000 sick men and 1,000 convalescents came from Dresden. Consequently the number of sick in the stronghold was very large even before the siege began; all public buildings had been converted into lazarets. But even these were not numerous or large enough to accommodate all the patients, who numbered some 6,000 in the month of September, so that the occupants of houses along entire streets were driven out of their homes, which were used for lazarets and barracks. ‘A virulent, putrid fever’ raged in all the lazarets, and at least one-third of the persons who contracted it died; the inhabitants and the Frenchmen quartered in the homes of citizens were at first spared by the disease.