The most extensive collection of religious buildings is the Convent and Hospital of the Hotel Dieu, in the Upper Town. There are some sixty cloistered nuns of this Order, founded in 1639 by Cardinal Richelieu's niece, the Duchess d'Aguillon. They care for the sick and infirm poor, their hospital accommodating over six hundred. The oldest structure dates from 1654, and much of the collection is over two centuries old. The most precious relics in their convent are the remains of two of the Jesuit martyrs who went out from Sillery, Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemont. There is a silver bust of the former, and his skull is carefully preserved. Jean de Brébeuf was a Norman of noble birth, who came out with Champlain, and he and Lalemont were sent on a mission beyond Ontario to the Huron country, establishing the mission town of St. Ignace, near Niagara River. They lived sixteen years with these Indians, learning their language, and gaining great influence over them. The Iroquois from New York attacked and captured the town in 1649, taking the missionaries captive and putting them to death with frightful tortures. Brébeuf, who frequently had celestial visions, always announced his belief that he would die a martyr for Christ. The story of his torture is one of the most horrible in the colonial wars. He was bound to a stake and scorched from head to foot; his lower lip was cut away, and a red-hot iron thrust down his throat. They hung a necklace of glowing coals around his neck, which the indomitable priest stood heroically; they poured boiling water over his head and face in mockery of baptism; cut strips of flesh from his limbs, eating them before his eyes, scalped him, cut open his breast and drank his blood, then filled his eyes with live coals, and after four hours of torture, finally killed him by tearing out his heart, which the Indian chief at once devoured. The writer recording this terrible ordeal says, "Thus died Jean de Brébeuf, the founder of the Huron mission, its truest hero, and its greatest martyr. He came of a noble race,--the same, it is said, from which sprang the English Earls of Arundel, but never had the mailed barons of his line confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused to flinch, and his death was the astonishment of his murderers." Gabriel Lalemont, his colleague, was a delicate young man, and was tortured seventeen hours, bearing the torments nobly, and though at times faltering, yet he would rally, and with uplifted hands offer his sufferings to heaven as a sacrifice. His bones are preserved in the Hotel Dieu. The burning of St. Ignace village dispersed the Hurons, but years afterwards a remnant was gathered by the Jesuit Fathers, and their descendants are at Lorette, up St. Charles River.