Then the deputies offered him a jewel-box of great value, as a bridal gift for one of his daughters; and to the bearers he made the following reply:-- "Gentlemen, if you believe that you owe me anything, you shall have the means of repaying me amply, by the care you will take of three hundred poor invalid soldiers, whom I shall leave in your city." Napoleon was now in the zenith of his power; his marriage with Maria Louisa--an espousal more politic than honourable--had been celebrated at the close of the year of Wagram; and in the year following, Holland, the Valais, and the Hanse Towns were annexed to France; territories which, with those of Rome, gave to the new empire an augmentation of nearly 5,000,000 of subjects. The war was now raging in the Peninsula, and there the feeble measures of Augereau in Catalonia made Napoleon resolve to supersede him. The Duke of Tarentum was named his successor, and, as such, he soon restored order among the Catalans. In their mountainous province, more than in any other part of Spain, military talent and energy were required; as the entire population--a brave, resolute, and hardy race--were in arms against the invaders. Augereau's losses in the desultory warfare maintained by the Guerillas were so severe that they more than counterbalanced his success in the sieges he undertook; and these losses were so indicative of mismanagement that they ensured his recal to France. He marched for the frontier laden with the plunder of Barcelona, and of all the officers who formed its escort, General Chabran was the only one--as the Catalan journals remarked--who did not pillage the house in which he had been quartered; but returned to the Patron de Caza the silver spoons he had used at table. At this time rapine was the order of the day in the French army; a hammer and a small saw invariably formed a portion of a soldier's accoutrements, that he might have tools at hand to break open every lock-fast place, when the work of pillage began. In Catalonia, Macdonald found himself at the head of 17,000 men; in the adjoining province of Aragon, Suchet led 16,000; and the Spanish corps of O'Donnel were the only regular troops opposed to them both. On Suchet laying siege to Tortosa, a fortified city on the left bank of the Ebro, Macdonald marched with 12,000 men to secure the entrance of a convoy of provisions into Barcelona; and this he achieved in triumph, defeating a vigorous attempt of the Spaniards to intercept it.