Let us return to France, or rather to the history of the establishment of the society in that kingdom. Already had the Jesuits, supported by the protection of the popes and by that of kings, succeeded, in spite of the opposition of the universities, to obtain very great advantages, to found several houses, to raise at length in Paris itself a college, which was looked upon by the others with envy. The establishment of this college had undergone several assaults at different periods: at first Stephen Pasquier, so well known for his satyrical talents, and several years after Anthony Arnauld, father of the doctor, had successively pronounced against the Jesuits those famous pleadings, in which a few truths are found joined to much declamation. The society, victorious in these pleadings, had obtained by patent the liberty of continuing its lessons; the university of Paris was obliged to put up with it, and thought itself still very happy in not being constrained to admit into its bosom those ambitious and factious men, who would soon have possessed themselves of the power: perhaps also they escaped this yoke, only because the Jesuits disdained to impose it on them: probably they thought themselves sufficiently strong to raise with success altar against altar; and their vanity, flattered with making a party by themselves, nourished from that time the hope which it has since but too well realized, of taking away from the universities the education of the most brilliant of the nobility of the kingdom. In the midst of this war of the universities and the parliaments against the Jesuits, the assassination of Henry IV. by John Chatel, a scholar of those fathers, was, as it were, the signal of a new storm again them, and made that thunder burst which had long rolled over their heads. The Jesuit Guignard, being convicted of having composed, in the time of the League, writings favourable to regicide, and of having kept them after the amnesty, perished by the last torture; and the parliaments which long since saw with an evil eye those usurpers, and who sought only a favourable occasion to get rid of them, banished them from the kingdom, as a “detestable and diabolical society, the corrupters of youth, and enemies of the king and of the state:” these were the words of the arrêt.