Numbers of Jesuits were, meantime, besieging the General with petitions to be made missionaries among the Pariahs, for few could act the part that Beschi was playing. To be a Pariah was easy, and attempts to evangelize that class continued to be made in Madura up to the time of the Suppression. Conversions were numerous, and Bouchet, a contemporary of Beschi, heard as many as 100,000 confessions in a single year. It is said that the particularly fervent converts among the Brahmins used to cut off their hair as a sacrifice, when they were baptized, and a great number of locks, some of which were four and five feet long, adorned Beschi's church in Tiroucavalor. But these conversions connoted persecution. Bouchet, who was Beschi's successor among the high-class Brahmins, was several times arrested and condemned to death. On one occasion, when he was sentenced to be burned alive and was being covered with oil to make the flames more active, the executioners were so startled by his apparent unconcern that they dropped the work and set him free. Bouchet thought that the Church of Madura was specially blessed by being persecuted, and that explained for him how he was able to baptize 20,000 Hindoos. He had the care of thirty churches, which meant untold labor. About the trifles of never eating meat, fresh eggs or fish, living in straw-covered cabins without beds, seats or furniture, and never having the luxury of a table or spoon or knife or fork at meal times,--that never gave the missionaries a thought. The consolation for these privations was that at times they would hear the confessions of entire villages and never have to deal with a mortal sin. Probably Simon Carvalho,--Marshall calls him Laynez--who had received 10,000 people into the Church, and was at one time almost torn to pieces by a mob, and at another hunted for five months to be put to death, would have preferred this work, in which he had been employed for thirty years, to that of administering the diocese of Mylapore, of which Clement XI made him bishop later.