Baron Jerome Pichon’s elucidations of this story, as given by him in the
_Mélanges de la Société des Bibliophiles Français_, 1866, may be thus
summarised:--
The advocate referred to in the tale is James Disome, who Mézeray
declares was the _first_ to introduce Letters to the bar, though this,
to my mind, is a very hazardous assertion. Disome was twice married. His
first wife, Mary de Rueil, died Sept. 17, 1511, and was buried at the
Cordeliers church; he afterwards espoused Jane Lecoq, daughter of
John Lecoq, Counsellor of the Paris Parliament, who held the fiefs
of Goupillières, Corbeville and Les Porcherons, where he possessed a
handsome château, a view of which has been engraved by Israel Silvestre.
John Lecoq’s wife was Magdalen Bochart, who belonged like her husband to
an illustrious family of lawyers and judges. Their daughter Jane, who is
the heroine of the tale, must have been married to James Disome not very
long after the death of the latter’s first wife, for her intrigue with
Francis I. originated prior to his accession to the throne (1515). This
is proved by the tale, in which Disome is spoken of as being the young
prince’s advocate. Now none but the Procurors and Advocates-General were
counsel to the Crown, and Disome held neither of those offices. He was
undoubtedly advocate to Francis as Duke de Valois, and, from certain
allusions in the tale, it may be conjectured that he had been advocate
to Francis’s father, the Count of Angoulême.
When Francis ascended the throne his intrigue with Jane Disome was
already notorious, as is proved by this extract, under date 1515, from
the _Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris_: “About this time whilst the King
was in Paris, there was a priest called Mons. Cruche, a great buffoon,
who a 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).