In the meantime the Jesuits of Paris sustained a painful check in their attack on the Jansenists. One of their number, Father Brisacier, published a pamphlet, _Le Jansenisme confondu_ (1651), in which, not only were the familiar invectives showered upon the Solitaries, but the moral character of the nuns of Port Royal was attacked. These were the nuns whom a hostile archbishop afterwards declared to be "as pure as angels and as proud as devils." The purity of their lives was notorious, and intense indignation was felt. The Archbishop of Paris formally condemned the pamphlet as "containing many lies and impostures," and Father Brisacier was removed--promoted to the rectorship of the college at Rouen--by his superiors. No Jesuit, of course, wrote without authorisation, and the many abominable pamphlets they issued at this time against the Puritans implicate the whole Parisian Province. We need not follow the course of the trial at Rome. After a two years' struggle Innocent X. issued his famous bull in which the five propositions were declared to be heretical, and to be contained in the work of Jansen. The Jesuits emitted a pyrotechnic discharge of oratory and pamphlets--one broadside of the time represented Bishop Jansen as a devil flying to the Protestants--but they had overreached themselves. No Jansenist (not even Jansen) had ever taught the five propositions, and there was not a man in France who wished to defend them. But the Jesuits had insisted on the pronouncement that the propositions were contained in Jansen, and this gave rise to a formidable controversy in which the prelates were at liberty to join. It may seem to the modern reader an appalling waste of energy and perversion of character that so powerful a body should spend their resources for twenty years in a war on such abstruse propositions, but from this point the struggle becomes frankly ridiculous. For nearly eighty years we shall find the Jesuits straining every device of craft and learning to ensure that every man in France shall agree that the Pope (who had never read Jansen's book) was right in declaring the five propositions to be contained in the _Augustinus_; and the controversy they sustain will draw on themselves the appalling scourge of Pascal's _Provincial Letters_ and on the papacy the defiant declaration of the Gallican Church. We are compelled to recognise a lamentable corporate ambition and perversion of character in their conduct.