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 city; to seize and massacre the nobles; to overthrow the existing government; and ultimately to transfer the state to the Spanish crown.  The sole immediate step taken by the Inquisitors in consequence of these revelations was the secret execution of Spinosa, a Neapolitan, whom Pierre described as an emissary of the Duke d’Ossuna; and whom he appears to have regarded with jealousy as a spy upon his own conduct.  For the rest, the magistrates contented themselves, as it, seems, by awaiting the maturity of the plot with silent vigilance.  Ten months elapsed during which Pierre communicated on the one hand with the Duke d’Ossuna, unsuspicious of his treachery, and on the other with the Inquisitors; till at the expiration of that term he was seized by an order of the X, while employed on his duties with the Fleet, and drowned without the grant of sufficient delay even for previous religious confession.  More, perhaps many more, than three hundred French and Spaniards engaged in various naval and military capacities were at the same time delivered to the executioner; and Renault, after undergoing numerous interrogatories, and being placed seven times on the cord, was hanged by one foot on a gibbet on the Piazzetta, which day after day presented similar exhibitions of horror.