While Napoleon was thus neutralizing the efforts of armies and generals by the renown of his name, two of his marshals were finally discredited. Enfeebled as Bluecher appeared to be, he was no sooner freed from the awe of Napoleon's proximity than he began to move. On the eighteenth he passed the Aisne, and Marmont, disobeying the explicit instructions of Napoleon to keep open a line of retreat toward Chalons, began to withdraw toward Fismes, where he effected a junction with Mortier. His intention was to keep Bluecher from Paris by false manoeuvers. Rheims and Epernay at once fell into hostile hands; there was no way left open toward Chalons except the long detour by Chateau-Thierry and Etoges; and Bluecher, it was found, was hurrying to effect a connection with Schwarzenberg. This was an assured checkmate. Meantime Augereau had displayed a similar incapacity. On the eighth he had begun a number of feeble, futile movements intended to prevent the allies from forming their Army of the South. But after a few aimless marches he returned to Lyons, and stood there in idleness until his opponents had completed their organization. On the twentieth the place was assaulted. The French general had twenty-one thousand five hundred men under his immediate command, six thousand eight hundred Catalonian veterans were on their way from Perpignan, and at Chambery were seven thousand more from the armies of Tuscany and Piedmont. The assailants had thirty-two thousand, mostly raw troops. With a stout heart in its commander, Lyons could have been held until the reinforcements arrived, when the army of the allies would probably have been annihilated. But there was no stout heart in any of the authorities; not a spade had been used to throw up fortifications; the siege-guns ready at Avignon had not been brought up. Augereau, at the very height of the battle, summoned the civil authorities to a consultation, and the unwarlike burghers assented without a murmur to his suggestion of evacuation. The great capital of eastern France was delivered as a prize to those who had not earned it. Had Suchet been substituted for Augereau some weeks earlier, the course of history might have been diverted. But although Napoleon had contemplated such a change, he shrank from disgracing an old servant, and again, as before Leipsic, displayed a kindly spirit destructive to his cause.