by name to English readers as any
other in the History of Venice. We are, therefore, happy to see the
affair treated with minute consideration in the second volume of
"Sketches from Venetian History," in the _Family Library_; and so
interesting is the narrative, or rather the facts and conjectures, to
the lover of history, as well as to the unstudious playgoer, that we are
induced to quote nearly every line of the passage. The editor
observes:--)

Muratori indeed has scarcely exaggerated the obscurity in which this
incident is enveloped when he affirms that only one fact illuminates its
darkness; namely that several hundred French and Spaniards engaged in
the service of the Republic were arrested and put to death. The
researches of Comte Daru have brought to light some hitherto unknown
contemporary documents; but even the inexhaustible diligence of that
most laborious, accurate, and valuable writer has been baffled in the
hope of obtaining certainty as its reward; and he has been compelled to
content himself with the addition of one hypothesis more to those
already proposed in explanation of this mystery.

All that can be positively affirmed is that during the summer of 1617,
Jacques Pierre, a Norman by birth, whose youth had been spent in
piratical enterprises in the Levantine seas, from which he had acquired
no inconsiderable celebrity, fled from the service of the Spanish Duke
d'Ossuna, Viceroy of Naples; and, having offered himself at the Arsenal
of Venice, was engaged there in a subordinate office. Not many days
after his arrival in the _Lagune_, Pierre denounced to the Inquisitors
of State a conspiracy projected, as he said, by the Duke d'Ossuna, and
favoured by Don Alfonso della Cueva, Marquis de Bedemar, at that time
resident ambassador from Spain. The original minutes of Pierre's
disclosures, written in French, still exist among the correspondence of
M. Leon Bruslart, the contemporary ambassador from the court of France
to the Republic; and they were translated into Italian, with which
language Pierre was but imperfectly acquainted, by his friend Renault,
in order that they might be presented to the Inquisitors. In this plot,
Pierre avowed himself to be chief agent; his pretended abandonment of
the Duke d'Ossuna forming one part of the stratagem: and he added that
his commission enjoined him to seduce the Dutch troops employed in the
late war, who still remained in Venice and its neighbourhood; to fire
the c