but were commanded by an officer of intelligence and daring named Robert. Under pretext of waiting for the quarter-master, the men stopt, some of them on the drawbridge and some beyond it. The drawbridge was thus prevented from being raised. It rained; and some of them entered the guard-house, as it were to escape from the shower. “_A un signal donné_,” (says Foy) they leapt upon the arms of the guard, where they lay ranged at one side; and the two sentinels were immediately disarmed. The Spaniards could not extricate themselves from the hands of the French, who filled the guard-house. Those who made any resistance were beat with the butt-ends of muskets. By this time arrived the grenadiers who had been lying in ambuscade at the general’s house. They proceeded straight to a bastion of 15 guns, directed on the entrance to the ditch. The forty-seventh French battalion, quartered not far distant, followed close on the grenadiers. The rampart was covered with Frenchmen, before the Spanish garrison, shut up in their _casernes_, had even thought of putting themselves on their defence. Darmagnac announced to the Viceroy and the Council of Navarre that, as he would probably have some stay to make in Pamplona, he had been obliged for the security of his troops to introduce into the citadel a battalion which would do duty there in concert with the national garrison--“a slight change, he added, which, instead of altering the good understanding between, them, should only be regarded as a tie the more between two reciprocally faithful allies!” Ties of a similar character became established daily. Thouvenot, General of Brigade, had been sent to San Sebastian, with a commission to assemble in one dépôt the soldiers who arrived from France on their way to join their respective corps in Spain. “This dépôt (concludes Foy) becoming presently very numerous found itself in possession of the place, without the detachments of the Spanish regiments of the King and of Africa, who formed the garrison, perceiving it. It is thus that the French became masters of Figuera, Barcelona, Pamplona, and San Sebastian; and then their military operations in the Peninsula became placed on a reasonable basis! The mask was thrown off, the interested observers whom Spain had received as allies, for a time dissembled their projects, but they no longer sought to conceal the means which they adopted for their accomplishment.”--_Hist. Guerre. Pénins._ liv. iii. Yet these are the events which Thiers, in his _Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire_, has the coolness to describe, without one word of reprobation, censure, or comment, in the following words: “As soon as the French troops crossed the frontiers they were quartered at Saint Sebastian, Pampeluna, Rosas, Figueras, and Barcelona.” Of the character and deeds of Godoy, the chief actor in these transactions, the following brief but on the whole satisfactory sketch is given by Thiers:--