An incident that occurred in the province of Lorraine, which was annexed by Richelieu in 1633, deserves special consideration. The impetuous and sensuous young Duke, Charles IV., chose the Jesuit Cheminot as his confessor in 1637, and a week later, although his first wife still lived, he married the Princess Béatrix de Cusance. Instead of retiring from the court, which was at once assailed from all parts of France for the bigamy, Cheminot wrote a casuistic memoir to prove that the marriage was valid, and clung to the duke for six years. The misconduct of an individual Jesuit is, as I have said, not matter for serious history, and, if it were true that Cheminot defied his own superiors, there would be no occasion to dwell on it. But the correspondence published by Crétineau-Joly shows plainly that the Jesuit authorities acquiesced in Cheminot's position for many years. We find Charles writing to General Vitelleschi in 1639, in friendly terms, to complain that some of the other Jesuits are hostile to his accommodating confessor. Three years later we find Charles declaring to Cheminot that he will not grant him permission to retire, as his General "presses" him to do; as if a Jesuit needed such permission. It was only in 1643, when the scandal was known to all Europe, that the Roman authorities excommunicated Cheminot. They had waited five years in the hope that they would not be compelled to sacrifice a place in a ducal court. Their fortunes in Belgium and Holland also were less romantic than they had been in earlier years. The settlement of Belgium as a Catholic province enabled them to spread over it with easy prosperity, and obtain a very large share in the education of the young. The Flemish fathers made a singular contribution to the literature of the Society, which has given its more sober admirers much embarrassment. In the year 1636, which they chose to regard as the centenary of the Society, they published a work, the _Imago Primi Sæculi_, in which they gave, by pen and pencil, a marvellous account of the first hundred years of the Society's life. Its progress and virtues were put on the highest scale of miraculous heroism; the Jesuits were represented as a troop of angels transferred to the planet earth in the crisis of its religious development. As, however, the modern apologist for the Jesuits represents the work as a "touching fiction" and "pious dithyramb," we need not give it serious attention. Undoubtedly it was imposed on Belgium and other countries at the time as veracious history.