D'où recouurerés [153] vous tout cela qui leur manque? Ou cõme vous en passerez vous? O Dieu que nous deuisons bien à nostr'aise en France. Et le beau estoit, qu'après qu'on s'estoit rompu le cerueau à force de demandes, & recherches, comme lon se pensoit en fin d'auoir bien rencõtré la pierre philosophale; on trouuoit neantmoins puis apres, que lon auoit pris le phantosme pour le corps, & l'ombre pour le solide: & que tout ce precieux Elixir s'en alloit en fumée. Souuent on s'estoit mocqué de nous au lieu de nous enseigner, & aucunesfois on nous auoit supposé des paroles des-honnestes, que nous allions innocemment preschotãt pour belles sentences de l'Euangile. Dieu sçait, qui estoyent les suggesteurs de tels sacrileges. [149] CHAPTER XVI. [i.e., xv.] SIEUR DE POTRINCOURT'S RETURN TO FRANCE, AND THE DIFFICULTY OF LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF THE SAVAGES. WE have heretofore explained the necessity which was urging sieur de Potrincourt to send his people back to France without delay. Now he wished to take them there himself, to more efficiently arrange all the affairs and especially to procure an immediate supply of provisions: for unless he did this, those whom he was leaving at Port Royal would be without means of passing the Winter, in evident danger of being carried off by famine. For this reason then, he departed about the middle of July of the same year, 1611, and arrived in France at the end of the following month of [150] August; he left his son, sieur de Biencourt, in his place, with twenty-two persons, counting the two Jesuits, who, seeing that for the conversion of the Pagans the language of the country was absolutely necessary, resolved to apply themselves to it with all diligence. But it would be hard to understand the great difficulties which they here encountered: the principal one being, that they had neither interpreter nor teacher. To be sure sieur de Biencourt, and some of the others, knew a little of it very well, enough for trade and ordinary affairs; but when there was a question of speaking about God and religious matters, there was the difficulty, there, the "not understand." Therefore, they were obliged to learn the language by themselves, inquiring of the savages how they called each thing. And the task was not so very wearisome as long [151] as what was asked about could be touched or seen: a stone, a river, a house; to strike, to jump, to laugh, to sit down. But when it came to internal and spiritual acts, which cannot be demonstrated to the senses, and in regard to words which are called abstract and universal, such as, to believe, to doubt, to hope, to discourse, to apprehend, an animal, a body, a substance, a spirit, virtue, vice, sin, reason, justice, etc.,--for these things they had to labor and sweat; in these were the pains of travail.