the province, was greatly diverted by the bloodless beheading of his counterfeit. Fléchier believes it was matter of deep regret to this hardened offender that he could not look on at his own execution, as he had done once before when similarly condemned by the parliament of Toulouse. "He had seen his execution himself from an adjacent window, and had found it very pleasant to be at his ease in a house whilst he was beheaded in the street; and to see himself die out of doors, when perfectly comfortable at his fire-side." Judging from the smallness of the sum (thirty livres) set down in the account of expenses of the Grands-Jours as paid the painter, the decapitated portraits were by no means masterpieces of art, nor probably was it deemed necessary to obtain a very exact resemblance of the contumacious originals. Although none ever ventured to cast a doubt on Fléchier's strict orthodoxy, he made himself remarkable by a spirit of tolerance unusual in that age, by discountenancing superstition, and by his enlightened disapproval of the abuses of the conventual system. A great doubter of modern miracles, he scrupled not, when a bishop, to protest in a letter to his flock, relating to some miraculous cross, against "those who put their confidence in wood and in lying prodigies." His natural good sense and kindness of heart made him oppose the compulsory profession of young women. In the _Mémoires_, he relates an anecdote of a young girl, at whose reception as a nun M. Chéron, the grand vicar of Bourges, was requested to assist. The vicar, having donned his sacerdotal robes, asked the novice, in the usual formula, what she demanded. "I demand the keys of the monastery, Sir, in order to leave it," was her firm reply, which astonished all present. The vicar could not believe his ears, till she repeated her words, adding, that she had chosen that opportunity to protest against her destiny, because there were abundant witnesses. "If the girls who are daily sacrificed had as much resolution," says Fléchier, "the convents would be less populous, but the sacrifices offered up in them would be more holy and voluntary." When invested with the episcopal purple, the worthy man acted up to these sound opinions. "I may be allowed," says M. Gonod in his appendix, "to cite, to his glory and to that of religion, his conduct with regard to a nun at Nismes, who had not, like her sister at Bourges, had the courage to demand the keys of the convent, and who subsequently yielded to another description of weakness. Fléchier, then bishop of Nismes, extended to her his paternal hand, and in this instance, as in many others, approved himself of the same merciful family as a Vincent de Paul and a Fénelon." This story is told by D'Alembert in his "Eulogiums read at the public sittings of the French Academy," p. 421. An unfortunate girl, whom unfeeling parents had forced into a convent, was unable to conceal the consequences