Series 1 > Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, with his observations on public affairs and other memoranda, 1665-1676

38
JOURNAL OF JOHN LAUDER
Heir I most impart a drollery which happened a little
before in Poictiers. Some Flamans had come to the tonne and
taken up the quarters in a certain Innes.1 While they ware
supping, the servant that attended them chanced to let a
griveous and horrid fart. The landlady being in the roome and
enquiring give she thought not shame to do so, she franckly
replied, sont Flamans, madame, sont Flamans, ils n'entendent
pas; thinking that because they ware strangers that under¬
stood not the language, they understood not also when they
hard a fart.
0 brave consequence, I went one night to the Marche Vieux
and saw some puppy playes, as also rats whom they had learned
to play tricks on a tow.2
Just besyde that port that leads to Quatre Picket (de St.
Lazare) or Paris is erected a monument of stone, something
in the fashion of a pyramide. I enquiring what it meant, they
informed me the occasion of it was a man that lived about
3 or 4 years ago in the house just forganst it, who keiping a
Innes, and receaving strangers or others, used to cut their
throats and butcher them for their money; which trade he
drave a considerable tyme undiscovered. At lenth it coming to
light as they carried him to Paris to receave condigne punish¬
ment, they not watching him weill enough he killed himselfe
whence they did execution on his body, and erected that before
the door, ad ceternam rei memoriam. I think they sould have
razed his house also, yet their is folk dwelling in it presently.
1 went also and saw the palais wheir the Advocats used to
plead but it had fallen down by meer antiquity about 3
moneths before I came to Poictiers whence the session had
translated themselfes to the Jacobines, whom I went and saw
their. In the falling of the palais it was observable that no
harm redounded to any, and that a certain woman wt a child
in hir armes chancing to be their on day raising out of a
desk wheir she was sitting she was hardly weill gon when a
great jest3 fell (for it fell by degries) and brok the desk to
peices.
Their hinges bound upon the wall wt iron chaines the
relicts of a dead hideous crocodile, which, tho’ it be infinitly
* Joist.
Inn.
2 Rope.