Deeply as the irreparable loss of such an army was felt by the French, yet were they destined to suffer still greater misfortunes at home. The dark power which threatened all Europe regarded neither distance nor limits. It seized on the French nation in their own country whilst their military youth were destroyed before Naples. The cold spring and wet summer of 1528 destroyed the growing corn[521], and a famine was thus produced throughout France, even more grievous, on account of its duration, than the period of scarcity in the time of Louis the XIth[522], for the failure of the harvest continued for five years in succession, during which all order of the seasons seemed to have ceased. A damp summer heat prevailed in autumn and winter, a frost of a single day only occasionally intervening. The summer, on the other hand, was cloudy, damp, and ungenial. The length of the days alone distinguished one month from another. It appears plainly from detached accounts how much the usual course of vegetation was disturbed. Scarcely had the fruit trees shed their leaves in the autumn when they began to bud again, and to bear fruitless blossoms. No returns rewarded the toil of the husbandman, and the longed-for harvest again and again deceived the hopes of the people. Thus, even during the first of these calamitous years, the distress became general, and the increasing indigence was no longer to be checked by human aid. Bands of beggars wandered over the country in lamentable procession. The bonds of civil order became more and more relaxed, and people soon had to fear not only robbery and plunder on the part of these unfortunate beings, but the contagion of a pestilence, the offspring of their distress, which followed in their train. This disease was a new production of the French soil, and when it spread generally throughout the country, was the more sensibly felt, as it especially carried off young and robust men; on which account it was designated by the very significant name of Trousse-Galant[523]. It consisted of a highly inflammatory fever, which destroyed its victims in a very short time, even within the space of a few hours; or, if they escaped with their lives, deprived them of their hair and nails, and from a long-continued disinclination for all animal food, left behind it, as sequelæ, a protracted debility and diseases which endangered the recovery of the sick, whose constitutions were already so much shaken. Hence it appears that this fever was combined with a great decomposition of the fluids, and a very morbid condition of the functions of the bowels, not to mention the effects produced by continued hunger, which contemporaries paint in the most dreadful colours.