This expedition was disastrous in itself and fatal to the poet. An invading army is necessarily abhorred by all; and while it inflicts, also suffers the utmost horrors of war. The French general wisely acted on the defensive, and, having laid the country waste, left famine and disease to win the game. The emperor, unsuccessful in his attempts upon Marseilles and Arles, was obliged to retreat through a country roused to exasperation by the ills it had endured. His army, in consequence, was exposed to a thousand disasters, while the very peasants, hanging on its rear, or lying in ambush, cut off the stragglers, and disputed the passage of every defile. On one occasion, at Muy near Frejus, the imperialists were held in check by a party of fifty rustics, who, armed with muskets, had thrown themselves into a tower, and harassed them on their passage. The emperor ordered Garcilaso to attack and carry it with his battalion. Eager in his obedience, Garcilaso led the way to scale the tower. The peasants observing that he wore a gaily embroidered dress over his armour, fancied that it was the emperor himself, and marked him out for destruction. He was the first to mount the ladder; a block of stone rolled from the battlements, struck him on the head and beat him to the ground. He was carried to Nice; but no care could avail to save him: he lingered for twenty days, and then died, November, 1536, at the age only of thirty-three. He showed, we are told, no less the spirit of a Christian in his death, than of a soldier in the hour of peril. His death was universally lamented; and the emperor displayed his sense of the loss he had sustained, by causing all the peasants who survived the taking of the tower, twenty-eight in number, to be hanged. Such a token of respect would scarcely soothe the ghost of the gentle poet; but it was in accordance with the spirit of the times. The body was interred at first in the church of Saint Dominique at Nice; but two years afterwards was removed to the tomb of his ancestors in a chapel of the church of San Pedro Martyr de Toledo.