orders were to fight the Duke of Savoy wherever we met him; but
though he braved us in our view we did not care to engage him, but we
brought Saluzzo to surrender upon articles, which the duke could not
relieve without attacking our camp, which he did not care to do.

The next morning we had news of the surrender of Mantua to the
Imperial army. We heard of it first from the Duke of Savoy's cannon,
which he fired by way of rejoicing, and which seemed to make him
amends for the loss of Saluzzo.

As this was a mortification to the French, so it quite damped the
success of the campaign, for the Duke de Montmorency imagining that
the Imperial general would send immediate assistance to the Marquis
Spinola, who besieged Casale, they called frequent councils of war
what course to take, and at last resolved to halt in Piedmont. A few
days after their resolutions were changed again by the news of the
death of the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emanuel, who died, as some say,
agitated with the extremes of joy and grief.

This put our generals upon considering again whether they should march
to the relief of Casale, but the chimera of the Germans put them by,
and so they took up quarters in Piedmont. They took several small
places from the Duke of Savoy, making advantage of the consternation
the duke's subjects were in on the death of their prince, and spread
themselves from the seaside to the banks of the Po. But here an enemy
did that for them which the Savoyards could not, for the plague got
into their quarters and destroyed abundance of people, both of the
army and of the country.

I thought then it was time for me to be gone, for I had no manner of
courage for that risk; and I think verily I was more afraid of being
taken sick in a strange country than ever I was of being killed in
battle. Upon this resolution I procured a pass to go for Genoa, and
accordingly began my journey, but was arrested at Villa Franca by a
slow lingering fever, which held me about five days, and then turned
to a burning malignancy, and at last to the plague. My friend, the
captain, never left me night nor day; and though for four days more I
knew nobody, nor was capable of so much as thinking of myself, yet it
pleased God that the distemper gathered in my neck, swelled and broke.
During the swelling I was raging mad with the violence of pain, which
being so near my head swelled that also in proportion, that my eyes
were swelled up, and for the twenty-four