Bayonne. Meanwhile, the centre and right wing, under the command of Wellington, had forced a passage across the Upper Adour and threatened Bayonne on the other side. Leaving a garrison of 6,000 men in Bayonne, Soult took his stand at Orthez, with an army of about 40,000 men, on the summit of a formidable ridge. Wellington attacked this ridge on the 27th, with a force of nearly equal strength in three columns so disposed as to converge from points several miles distant from each other. The veterans of the French army, admirably handled, fought with tenacity, and all but succeeded in foiling the attack before Wellington could bring up his reserves. The conscripts, however, were not equally steady, and when Hill, advancing from the extreme right, pressed upon the French left, Soult's orderly retreat became a precipitate flight. The French loss greatly exceeded the British, and was soon afterwards swelled by wholesale desertions; the road to Bordeaux was thrown open, and the royalist reaction against Napoleon, stimulated by the depredation of the French troops, ripened into a general revolt. Meanwhile, Napoleon had lost Germany by the battle of Leipzig; early in 1814 the allied armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia had entered France, and a congress was being held at Châtillon-sur-Seine, to formulate, if possible, terms of peace. The city of Bordeaux was the first to declare itself openly in favour of the Bourbons. Wellington sent a large detachment to preserve order, with strict instructions to Beresford, who commanded it, to remain neutral, in the event of Louis XVIII. being proclaimed, pending the negotiations with Napoleon at Châtillon. But the excitement of the people could not be restrained, and the arrival of the Duke of Angoulême evoked a burst of royalist enthusiasm which anticipated by a few weeks only the abdication of Napoleon at Fontainebleau. The defection of Bordeaux forced Soult to fall back rapidly on a very formidable position in front of Toulouse. The British army followed in pursuit, encumbered with a great artillery and pontoon train. After a lively action at Tarbes, it arrived in front of Toulouse on March 27, to find the Garonne in flood, and the French army strongly entrenched around the town, with a prospect of being joined by 20,000 or 30,000 veterans, under Suchet, from Catalonia. [Pageheading: _THE BATTLE OF TOULOUSE._]