still more the abbe's missionary
fervour; evading the watchfulness of the military, and regardless of the
terrible penalties imposed by the king, he crossed the frontier, and
began to preach the Catholic religion to the heathen, many of whom were
converted.

One day he was surprised by a party of soldiers in a little village in
which he had been living for three months, and in which nearly all the
inhabitants had abjured their false faith, and was brought before the
governor of Bankan, where instead of denying his faith, he nobly defended
Christianity and magnified the name of God. He was handed over to the
executioners to be subjected to torture, and suffered at their hands with
resignation everything that a human body can endure while yet retaining
life, till at length his patience exhausted their rage; and seeing him
become unconscious, they thought he was dead, and with mutilated hands,
his breast furrowed with wounds, his limbs half warn through by heavy
fetters, he was suspended by the wrists to a branch of a tree and
abandoned. A pariah passing by cut him down and succoured him, and
reports of his martyrdom having spread, the French ambassador demanded
justice with no uncertain voice, so that the King of Siam, rejoicing that
the executioners had stopped short in time, hastened to send back to M.
de Chaumont, the representative of Louis XIV, a mutilated though still
living man, instead of the corpse which had been demanded.

At the time when Louis XIV was meditating the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes he felt that the services of such a man would be invaluable to
him, so about 1632, Abbe Duchayla was recalled from India, and a year
later was sent to Mende, with the titles of Arch-priest of the Cevennes
and Inspector of Missions.

Soon the abbe, who had been so much persecuted, became a persecutor,
showing himself as insensible to the sufferings of others as he had been
inflexible under his own. His apprenticeship to torture stood him in
such good stead that he became an inventor, and not only did he enrich
the torture chamber by importing from India several scientifically
constructed machines, hitherto unknown in Europe, but he also designed
many others. People told with terror of reeds cut in the form of
whistles which the abbe pitilessly forced under the nails of malignants;
of iron pincers for tearing out their beards, eyelashes, and eyebrows; of
wicks steeped in oil and wound round the fingers of a vic