The French paid the indemnities for the siege very liberally—13,000,000 francs—as the money was to be provided for by Austria, whom they held responsible for all the consequences of the Russian occupation of Cattaro. On the strength of this generosity the Senate tried once more through Count Sorgo, a Ragusan resident in Paris, to get the other loan of 600,000 francs refunded, but without success. At last, on July 8, 1807, the Peace of Tilsit was signed, by which Russia gave up Cattaro to the French. Berthier, in a letter to General Marmont, who was now in command in Dalmatia, wrote: “Ragusa must certainly be united to Dalmatia; you must therefore continue to fortify it.” On August 13 Marmont stopped at Ragusa on his way to Cattaro, and received the Senators very affably; but in the course of conversation he said to one of them: “Vous allez être des nôtres.” On being asked for an explanation of these ominous words, he added “that in the present circumstances they could not remain free: the delegates having said that without merchant shipping the State could not exist, Marmont replied that by belonging to the great Emperor His Majesty would find means of compensating them. The next day the General told the delegates who had called on him that he was instructed to inform them of their future destiny, and that pending the arrival of those to whom the organisation of the new Government was entrusted, that of Ragusa might continue in its functions.”[540] The declaration seemed the death-knell of Ragusan independence, and Timoni describes the condition of the State in consequence of the French occupation: “Agriculture ruined, the merchant navy reduced to inaction, public finances dilapidated, private citizens crushed down by requisitions, the monasteries converted into barracks, the invasion of the Jews as army contractors, the establishment of a masonic lodge and a club, and on the top of all this the blindness of the people and the bourgeoisie who receive the French with open arms.” As Timoni observes, the French party was still strong among the middle and lower classes, who were tired of the oligarchic rule of the nobles.