carried north from Tan Hoa. Quyen was eventually killed and in 1874, long after the southern insurgency had been crushed, Tự Đức granted a monthly allowance in grain and cash to Định's widow Le Thi Thuong, who had returned to her native village in Quảng Ngãi, which at the time was still in independent Vietnamese territory. The ration of 20 francs and 60 litres of rice was substantial, because the monthly salary of a ninth-rank mandarin was only 18 francs and 48 litres of rice. Debate on Defiance of Huế The actions of Định in the wake of the Treaty of Saigon have long been a subject of conjecture. At the time, the French military accused Huế of surreptitiously supporting Định in contravention of the treaty, while Huế denied this, publicly claiming that Định's actions in resisting the French would be counterproductive in attempting to maintain Vietnamese sovereignty. After the signing of the Treaty of Saigon, the Huế court attempted to regain what it had lost militarily through diplomacy. Vietnamese negotiators sought a reversal of the territorial cession, which they regarded as the most humiliating clause of the treaty. In late 1863, the Vietnamese proposed extensive financial, economic, and political concessions in exchange for the return of the three provinces. Tự Đức sent Gian to France to seek an audience with Napoleon III. There Gian behaved in a helpless manner in an attempt to gain pity from the French monarch. Gian promised that Vietnam would pay large indemnities for the military conflicts, grant further commercial concessions and a protectorate over all six southern provinces. Napoleon initially agreed, but the decision was reversed after lobbying from French officers. Tự Đức continued to hope that Vietnamese compliance with the treaty would convince France to return the three southern provinces. In the words of Gian, Vietnam's full cooperation with the 1862 treaty was necessary to maintain the possibility of a territorial retrocession. The French officers in Saigon, the capital of Cochinchina, frequently accused the Nguyễn court of violating the treaty by quietly supporting continued resistance. In 1867, they took this as a pretext to seize the other three provinces in southern Vietnam: Vĩnh Long, Hà Tiên and An Giang. The court records of the Nguyễn dynasty in Huế, the Đại Nam thực lục (Veritable Records of the Great South) dispute the French claims, revealing that the court attempted to prevent illegal guerrilla activity