After carrying on a correspondence with Eroles for about two months, and arranging with him a plan for attacking some of the places which the French held on the left of the Llobregat, it was agreed that he should come over to the Spaniards and put the design in execution; and hoping both to render service to the cause in which he now embarked, and to conceal the fact of his own desertion, leaving Barcelona in the night, he led away with him from the ♦JAN. 17.♦ neighbourhood of that city two squadrons of cuirassiers, to whom he produced a forged order of the Marshal’s that they should follow him on a secret expedition. His intention was that Eroles should intercept them, and make them and himself prisoners: but the messenger, whom he had dispatched two days before to apprise the Baron of his movements, fell in with a party of hussars belonging to the Anglo-Sicilian army, who were scouring the road to Moncada, and was detained by them; and when Van Halen came to the place appointed, and found that the scheme had failed, nothing remained for him but to provide for his own safety by escaping as soon as he could. Thus his desertion became notorious, and all the plans which had been formed upon the supposition of keeping it secret were frustrated. ♦HIS SCHEME FOR RECOVERING CERTAIN PLACES.♦ But Van Halen’s disposition was turned to perilous intrigues and enterprises: he now conceived a design of recovering some strong places by stratagem; and Eroles remembering the _Rovirada_ by which Figueras had been surprised, and being himself of an adventurous spirit, entered readily into his views, and went with him to General Copons, whose head-quarters were then at Vich. Copons was not without difficulty induced to give his consent, and they then proceeded to Xerta, where Don Josef Sans, who commanded the force before Tortosa, had his head-quarters. This place was so strictly blockaded that it was certain no tidings of Van Halen’s desertion could have reached it; and to induce a belief in other quarters that he had left Catalonia, bills upon Madrid and other places at a distance had been taken up for him. He had possessed himself not only of Suchet’s cipher, but of the handwritings which it was necessary to counterfeit; and letters were now written as from the Marshal, informing General Robert the commander that the exigencies of the Emperor’s affairs compelled him to withdraw all his garrisons from that side of the Llobregat; that Colonel D’Eschalard of his staff was gone to Tarrasa, there to conclude the treaty for evacuating them; and that he must be prepared to depart with his equipage and field-artillery as soon as orders to that effect should reach him. It was added, that the Emperor had been pleased to honour him with the grand-cross of the Imperial Order of the Reunion, and upon this the Marshal offered him his congratulations. An unlucky peasant was found, who undertook, in the character of a