Roman Priests, who had promised her one hundred dollars, if she would
make an affidavit that Maria had not been in that nunnery at all; and
would also swear to any other matters which they dictated. Now there is
little room for doubt, that the affidavit to the truth of which she
finally swore was thus obtained; for she has not capacity to compose
such a narrative, nor has she been in a state of mind, for a number of
years past, to understand the details which have thus craftily been
imposed upon the public in her name. When she had no known inducement
to falsify the fact in August, 1835, before the Priests became alarmed,
then she constantly affirmed that her daughter had been a Nun; but
after Lartigue and his companions were assured that her daughter's
narrative would appear, then the mother was probably bribed, formally
to swear to a wilful falsehood; for it is most probable, that she
either did not see, or from intoxication could not comprehend, the
contents of the paper to which her signature is affixed. Her habitual
intemperance, her coarse impiety, her long-indulged hatred and cruelty
towards her daughter, and her flat self-contradictions, with her
repeated and public declarations, that she had been offered a large sum
of money by the Montreal Priests, thus to depreciate her daughter's
allegations, and to attest upon oath precisely the contrary to that
which she had previously declared, to persons whose sole object was to
ascertain the truth--all those things demonstrate that Mrs. Monk's
evidence is of no worth; and yet that is all the opposite evidence
which can be adduced.
6. _Testimony in favour of the book_.--Mr. Miller the son of Adam
Miller, a well known teacher at St. John's, who has known Maria Monk
from her childhood, and who is now a resident of New York, solemnly
attests, that in the month of August, 1833, he made inquiries of Mrs.
Monk respecting her daughter Maria, and that Mrs. Monk informed him
that Maria was then a _Nun!_ that she had taken the veil previous to
that conversation, and that she had been in the nunnery for a number of
years. Mr. Miller voluntarily attests to that fact. He was totally
ignorant of Maria Monk's being out of the Nunnery at Montreal, until he
saw her book, and finally by searching out her place of abode, renewed
the acquaintance with her which had existed between them from the
period when she attended his father's school in her childhood. See the
affidavit of William Miller.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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