“GENTLEMEN--M. des Chênes has arrived and informed me of the many courtesies the Magnificent Council have shown him, as my representative, and the honours they have bestowed on my daughter. If anything could alleviate my grief, it would be the manner in which they have taken part in my affliction. Your attentions during her illness had already greatly touched me, but all that you have done under these circumstances has engraved in my heart the most vivid and sincere gratitude. “Receive, gentlemen, I pray, my best assurances thereof, and be fully persuaded of the perfect and inviolable attachment with which I have the honour to be, sirs, your very humble and obedient servant, MONTMORENCY.” (Geneva, Records of the Magnificent Council, February 1775.) [47] Sixteen hundred pounds. IV Moles and niggers--Mutiny in the Convent--Marriage of Mademoiselle de Bourbonne--The first communion. “About this time Dom Rigoley de Juvigny having come to confess a nun, happened to be in the cloisters at the moment when the class was leaving Mass, so that he was seen by all the pupils, and was the butt of all their jokes. “If it had been Dom Thémines, our own confessor, we should not have allowed ourselves all these jokes, but we thought it of no consequence when it was the nuns’ confessor. So one said one thing, one another. “There was then in the red class a mistress we could not endure, called Madame de Saint Jérôme. As her complexion was very dark, and Dom Rigoley’s also, some of us declared that if they were married their offspring would be moles and little niggers. Although it was very silly, this joke became so much the fashion that in the whole class we talked of nothing but moles and little niggers; and when we quarrelled we said to each other: ‘Do you take me for a mole, or for a little nigger?’ “However, as it was chiefly in our class (the white one) that this joke had been made, and as some of us were in the midst of our devotions preparing for the approaching first communion, we reproached ourselves very much for this joke. So we determined to confess it; but as about thirty of us were guilty, we wrote a letter in which we said we had sinned against modesty and charity by saying that if Dom Rigoley married Madame de Saint Jérôme, moles and little niggers would be the result; and we sent the letter to Dom Thémines. This became known all through the establishment, and was much laughed at; but Madame de Saint Jérôme took a great aversion to the white class. But then, there was not a single pupil whom she liked or who liked her.