To the pleasing and polite Lachaise, in 1709, succeeded as confessor the gloomy Letellier. He was cruel, ardent, and inflexible in his enmities, reserved, mysterious, and cunning in his dark projects,[261] concealing always the violence of his passions under a cold and impassive exterior. His predecessor had left him little to do in the way of wholesale persecution and massacre. The Huguenots had been murdered by thousands, and three hundred thousand Calvinist families had fled from their unrelenting enemies. The Jansenists had been in part disbanded, and death had removed from the contest the Pascals, the Nicoles, the De Lacys, and the whole of the Arnauld family. Only a few nuns, who could no more receive novices or pupils, and with whom, therefore, their order must necessarily be extinguished, remained in the monastery of Port-Royal for the ferocious Letellier. He sent thither a troop of rough and licentious soldiers, who dragged those delicate and feeble women from their abode, and conducted them prisoners as obstinate heretics, to be confined in different monasteries. Yet the dwelling which those sainted nuns had occupied, the church where they had worshipped the Lord, the tombs where many of them lay, and which they had sought in the hope to be delivered from their persecutors, and there to rest their wearied bodies in peace, still remained untouched. Letellier, to glut his revenge, turned his rage against their glorious monuments, had the monastery and church pulled down; and, violating with Vandalic ferocity the asylum of the dead, he caused the bodies to be exhumed and thrown together in a heap, to be devoured by the dogs, and had the plough driven over the sacred edifice.[262] After such examples as these, it is unnecessary to add more to shew the influence the Jesuits possessed in France, and the abominable use they made of it. We have gone beyond the epoch we have prefixed to this chapter, the facts we have last reported having occurred in 1709, 1711, and 1713. And we have done so, because these events mark the time from which the power of the Jesuits began in France to decline from its ascendancy. Let us now see what was the conduct and the influence of the Jesuits in other countries.