little time before with several others had publicly performed
in certain entertainments and novelties' (_sic_) on scaffolds upon the
Place Maubert, there being in turn jest, sermon, morality and farce; and
in the morality appeared several lords taking their cloth of gold to the
tomb and carrying their lands upon their shoulders into the other world.
And in the farce came Monsieur Cruche with his companions, who had a
lantern by which all sorts of things were seen, and among others a hen
feeding under a salamander, (1) and this hen carried something on her
back which would suffice to kill ten men (_dix hommes, i.e._, Disome).

1 The salamander was Francis I.'s device.

The interpretation of this was that the King loved and enjoyed a
woman of Paris, who was the daughter of a counsellor of the Court of
Parliament, named Monsieur le Coq. And she was married to an advocate at
the bar of Parliament, a very skilful man, named Monsieur James Disome,
who was possessed of much property which the King confiscated. Soon
afterwards the King sent eight or ten of his principal gentlemen to sup
at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la Juiverie, and thither, under
the false pretence of making him play the said farce, was summoned
Messire Cruche, who came in the evening, by torch-light, and was
constrained to play the farce by the said gentlemen. But thereupon, at
the very beginning, he was stripped to his shirt, and wonderfully well
whipped with straps until he was in a state of the utmost wretchedness.
At the end there was a sack all ready to put him in, that he might be
thrown from the window, and then carried to the river; and this would
assuredly have come to pass had not the poor man cried out very loudly
and shown them the tonsure on his head. And all these things were done,
so it was owned, on the King's behalf."

It is probable that this intrigue between the King and Jane Disome
ceased soon after the former's accession; at all events Francis did not
evince much indulgence for the man whose wife he had seduced. Under date
April, 1518, the Journal dun Bourgeois de Paris mentions the arrest of
several advocates and others for daring to discuss the question of the
Pragmatic Sanction. Disome was implicated in the matter but appears to
have escaped for a time; however in September of that year we find him
detained at Orleans and subjected to the interrogatories of various
royal Commissioners. The affair was then adjourned ti