Were not the indiscriminating system of spoliation pursued by the French armies recollected, the enormous collection of plunder abandoned at Vitoria would appear incredible. From the highest to the lowest, all were bearing off some valuables from the country they had overrun; and even the king himself had not proved an exception, for, rolled in the imperials of his own coach, some of the finest pictures from the royal galleries were discovered. To secure or facilitate their transport, they had been removed from their frames, and deposited in the royal carriage, no doubt, destined to add to the unrivalled collection, that by similar means had been abstracted from the Continent, and presented to the Louvre. Wellington, however, interrupted the Spanish paintings in their transit, and thus saved the trouble and formality of a restoration. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BATTLES OF THE PYRENEES. PART FIRST. 1813. Wellington was now in possession of the passes of the Pyrenees; and in the short space of two months had moved his victorious army across the kingdom of Spain, and changed his cantonments from the frontier of Portugal to a position in the Pyrenees, from which he looked down upon the southern provinces of France. Napoleon received intelligence of Lord Wellington’s success with feelings of undissembled anger and surprise. To recover the line of the Ebro was his instant determination, for he knew the dangerous effect the presence of a British army on the frontier of “beautiful France” must of necessity produce. Like the tidings of Marmont’s disaster at Salamanca, the news of Joseph’s defeat reached Napoleon at a crisis, when a lost battle was a calamity indeed. With him, every previous armistice had obtained concessions; and, had Vitoria terminated differently, battles, in no way decisive, might from a fortunate success in Spain, have produced results similar to those of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. With ominous rapidity, the intelligence reached every European court that Joseph had been driven from his throne, and Wellington overlooked the fields of France--and none could gainsay it--a conqueror. With what astonishment these tidings were received, those immediately round the person of Napoleon have since narrated. Nothing could be more humiliating--nothing, the time considered, more ruinous. His brother no longer prosecuted the war in Spain, but, defeated and shaken in confidence, had sought shelter in the plains of Gascony.