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Updated: June 10, 2025
The perplexed savage, willing to amuse himself, and impelled, as Biard thinks, by the Devil, gave him scurrilous and unseemly phrases as the equivalent of things holy, which, studiously incorporated into the father's Indian catechism, produced on his pupils an effect the reverse of that intended. Biard's colleague, Masse, was equally zealous, and still less fortunate.
Biard, in the name of the "Province of France of the Order of Jesus," bought out the interest of the two merchants for thirty-eight hundred livres, thus constituting the Jesuits equal partners in business with their enemies.
At a distance in the woods they saw the signal smoke of Indians, whom Biard lost no time in visiting. Some of them were from a village on the shore, three leagues westward. They urged the French to go with them to their wigwams. The astute savages had learned already how to deal with a Jesuit. "Our great chief, Asticou, is there. He wishes for baptism. He is very sick. He will die unbaptized.
Their experience was disastrous in the extreme. Nearly half of their party died of "mal de la terre," or scurvy, and others were at the point of death. Pierre Biard, the Jesuit missionary, attributed the fatality of the disease to the mode of life of the people, of whom only eleven remained well.
But of late, thinking his kindness misplaced, he had changed it for an extreme coldness, preferring, in the words of Biard himself, "to think that the Jesuit had lied, rather than so many who accused him." Water ran low, provisions began to fail, and they eked out their meagre supply by butchering the horses taken at Port Royal.
Fifteen of the prisoners, including Saussaye and Massé, were turned adrift in an open boat; but fortunately, they managed to cross the bay and reach the coast of Nova Scotia, where they met with some trading vessels belonging to St. Malo. Father Biard and the others were taken to Virginia by Argall. Biard subsequently reached England, and was allowed to return home.
The master of the ship, a Puritan, in his abomination of priests, and above all of Jesuits, was at the same time urging his commander to set Biard ashore and leave him to the mercy of his countrymen.
He explains that these churchmen differ widely in form and doctrine from the English Calvinists, who, he says, are called Puritans; and he adds that they are superior in every respect to these, whom they detest as an execrable pest. Biard was sent to Dover and thence to Calais, returning, perhaps, to the tranquil honors of his chair of theology at Lyons.
Portrait busts of Henry II., 227, the vicious Henry III., 253, and of the feeble Charles IX., 252, are also to be noted. Pilon's pupil, Bart. With Pierre Biard the elder, who about 1600 executed the elaborate choir-screen of St. Étienne du Mont, the French renaissance sinks to a not inglorious end.
Father Biard begged Sieur de Biencourt to have the sufferer untied, alleging that if they had any fears about the said Merveille they might enclose him in one of the Carthusian beds, and that he would himself stay at the door to prevent his going out. Sieur de Biencourt granted this request."
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