“Therefore,” he says, “I employed the leisure of my solitude in answering it; and owing to the length of time during which I had been diverted from the exercise of my profession, I laboured with such ardour that in six weeks I finished the work.” This Defence of the Catholic Faith was a book of 250 pages, full of theological learning, and written with moderation, tact, and practical good sense. The Bishop here preached again those doctrines of toleration, of conversion by reasoning, not by force, with which he had met the Huguenots of his diocese ten years before. It was the book of a statesman as much as of a theologian. He marshalled an army of arguments to prove the ministers in the wrong; enjoined on the schismatics loyalty and obedience to the laws; but for the King he advised gentleness and patience; the object to be sought by all being national unity and peace. The book was printed at Poitiers, and published within three months of its beginning. It was greatly admired, and added much to its author’s reputation; but also, as he notes rather sadly, “it burdened me with envy.” His enemies saw that they had not silenced the Bishop of Luçon by banishing him to his diocese. There, during these months of enforced residence, he seems to have worked with all the freshness and “ardour” consequent on absence and change of thoughts. He writes in August to the Nuncio: “I am here in my diocese, where I try to make known by all my actions that I have and shall have no other passion than doing all I can for the glory of God.” A word of personal complaint in his letters is rare. He was surrounded by his friends, living in a pleasant and healthy little château where the people loved him. Sébastien Bouthillier was now Dean of Luçon and his constant companion. He had his books, collected in the days when he, La Rocheposay, Saint-Cyran and the rest found their diversion in study; and if all these things were not the passion of his life, yet he loved them still. He might have been far more of a bookworm than he really was, from the tone of his letters at this time. “I live at a little hermitage among books” ... “I am living quietly here in the enjoyment of my books” ... “Serving God and my friends, I am resolved to spend the time quietly among my books and my neighbours;” and much more of the same kind. Now and then, it is true, when news from the great outside world comes to him, sitting helpless in his hermitage, he is seized with restless impatience and confesses himself _malheureux_. But this is only in letters to his own family and to his friend Père Joseph: the face turned to the King and to all public personages is dignified, grave and serene.