A few years later, in 1757, the attempt of Damiens to assassinate Louis led to another outcry against the Society. It is the general and probable verdict that the Jesuits had no share in the outrage, though the fact that Damiens had a Jesuit confessor, and had previously been in the service of the Jesuits, still seems to many writers to justify a grave suspicion. The evidence is inconclusive, but the outrage led to a fresh discussion of the regicidal doctrines of the Society, and the secrecy and sinuousness of its procedure. By that time, as we shall see, the Marquis de Pombal was meditating the destruction of the Jesuits in Portugal, and was in correspondence with their enemies in France. These enemies were now reinforced by the brilliant and powerful body of deistic and atheistic writers who were known as "the philosophers," and a formidable mine was being prepared under the feet of the arrogant and unsuspecting Jesuits. The spark that fired this mine was a particularly disreputable action on the part of the Society. In 1753 the Superior-General of the Jesuits in the Antilles, Father Lavalette, was summoned to Paris to answer the charge of having engaged in commerce on a large scale. Lavalette was one of those men of commercial instinct whom the Society did not scruple to use in augmenting its wealth as long as they were successful. Although he had, in the name of the Society, vast estates in the West Indies and thousands of negro slaves (bought by himself, in disguise, in the public slave-market), and it was known that he had agents in Paris for the sale of his sugar and coffee, he came to Paris with a number of sworn testimonies from local French officers to the effect that the Jesuits had not engaged in "foreign commerce," and was acquitted. He returned to conduct his flourishing business on a larger scale than ever. He had spacious warehouses, and made a profit of about 280,000 francs a year; and he now--though acquitted on the understanding that he was not to engage in commerce--borrowed large sums of money, and increased the profit by a shrewd, and somewhat sharp, deal on the money-market. He overreached himself in these practices, and, as other disasters simultaneously overtook his business, some of his French creditors pressed for their money.