failure and bankruptcy of Father Vallette's enormous speculations
in the West Indies had filled France with bad debts and protested
obligations which the Society of Jesus repudiated, but which the
Parliament of Paris ordered them to pay. The excitement was intense all
over the Kingdom and the Colonies. On the part of the order it became a
fight for existence.

They were envied for their wealth, and feared for their ability and
their power. The secular clergy were for the most part against them. The
Parliament of Paris, in a violent decree, had declared the Jesuits to
have no legal standing in France. Voltaire and his followers, a growing
host, thundered at them from the one side. The Vatican, in a moment of
inconsistency and ingratitude, thundered at them from the other. They
were in the midst of fire, and still their ability and influence over
individual consciences, and especially over the female sex, prolonged
their power for fifteen years longer, when Louis XV., driven to the wall
by the Jansenists, issued his memorable decree declaring the Jesuits to
be rebels, traitors, and stirrers up of mischief. The King confiscated
their possessions, proscribed their persons, and banished them from the
kingdom as enemies of the State.

Padre Monti, an Italian newly arrived in the Colony, was a man very
different from the venerable Vimont and the Jogues and the Lallements,
who had preached the Evangel to the wild tribes of the forest, and
rejoiced when they won the crown of martyrdom for themselves.

Monti was a bold man in his way, and ready to dare any bold deed in the
interests of religion, which he could not dissociate from the interests
of his order. He stood up, erect and commanding, upon the platform
under the Holy Rood, while he addressed with fiery eloquence and Italian
gesticulation the crowd of people gathered round him.

The subject he chose was an exciting one. He enlarged upon the coming
of Antichrist and upon the new philosophy of the age, the growth of
Gallicanism in the Colony, with its schismatic progeny of Jansenists
and Honnetes Gens, to the discouragement of true religion and the
endangering of immortal souls.

His covert allusions and sharp innuendoes were perfectly understood by
his hearers, and signs of dissentient feeling were rife among the crowd.
Still, the people continued to listen, on the whole respectfully;
for, whatever might be the sentiment of Old France with respect to the
Jesuits, they