After two days they put the priest to death, roasted his body on a
funeral pyre and ate it. His bones were never found. This death gave
great grief at Montreal as well as Quebec, for M. Vignal it will be
remembered had been the chaplain of the Hospitalières there.
After this cruel and horrible repast the party broke up; the Mohawks
took Jacques Dufresne with them, while the Oneidas led away the Sieur
de Brigeac and René Cuillérier. Both of these were condemned to be
burned and de Brigeac, after being horribly mutilated and slowly
burned, succumbed after twenty-four hours' torture, "praying," as the
Historian de Casson relates, "for the conversion of his tormentors
without uttering a cry of complaint."
The same fate awaited Cuillérier, but he had an intercessor in the
person of the sister of the chief, who wished to adopt him as her
brother. Eventually he escaped to the Dutch at Fort Orange, and he
finally made his way back to Montreal in the following year.
During the summer the Vicar Apostolic, Mgr. Laval, made his first visit
to Montreal. He was received with honour on the evening of August 21st.
On this occasion he showed great solicitude for the Hospitalières of
the Hôtel-Dieu, who, by the failure of M. Dauversière, now become a
bankrupt, had lost the funds entrusted to him, and had nothing to live
on, unless the one thousand _livres_' income, granted to the Company
of Montreal by Madame de Bullion for the support of a hospital, was
transferred to them. They were now thinking of going back to France,
but Mgr. Laval arranged, on the request of the inhabitants of Montreal,
that the income of the hospital could support them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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