he heavy cost of preparing the west wing for the reception of
the Emperor Charles V., induced Francis to consider a plan which
involved the replacement of the whole fabric by a palace in the new
Renaissance style, and the picturesque palace with its high crenelated
walls, its strong towers, high-pitched roofs, dormer windows, and tall
chimneys, its gilded emblazonry, its vanes, splendid with azure and
gold glittering in the sun, as painted in the Duke of Berry's _Book of
Hours_, was doomed. In 1546 Pierre Lescot, Seigneur de Clagny, was
appointed architect without salary, but given the office of almoner to
the king, and made lay abbot of Clermont. Pierre Lescot was an
admirable artist, who has left us some of the finest examples of early
French Renaissance architecture in Paris. But Francis lived only to
see the great scheme begun, most of Lescot's work being done under
Henry II.

From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in
the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular
poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a
platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce "funny enough to
make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche,
holding a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a
salamander."[107] The amours of the king with the daughter of a
councillor of the Parlement, named Lecoq, were only too plainly
satirised. But it is ill jesting with kings. A few nights later,
Monsieur Cruche was visited by eight disguised courtiers, who treated
him to a supper in a tavern at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la
Juiverie, and induced him to play the farce before them. When the
unhappy player came to the first scene, he was set upon by the king's
friends, stripped and beaten almost to death with thongs. They were
about to put him in a sack and throw him into the Seine, when poor
Cruche, crying piteously, discovered his priestly tonsure, and thus
escaped.

[Footnote 107: The salamander was figured on the royal arms of
Francis.]

After the defeat at Pavia, the king became morbidly pious. By trumpet
cry at the crossways of Paris, we learn from the _Journal_,
games--quoits, tennis, contreboulle--were prohibited on Sundays;
children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from
school; blasphemers[108] were to be severely punished. In 1527 a
notary was burned alive in the Place de Greve for a great blasphemy of
o