While submitting to their yoke, Ferriol sometimes could not prevent himself from complaining of it. “All here wish to pass for ministers,” he wrote to Torcy. “They believe themselves more enlightened than the ambassadors, and the order of each is reversed. These good fathers, who ought only to go to the convict-prison and the houses of Christians established in the country, do not abstain from visiting persons of power, and from imposing upon everybody in political affairs. When an ambassador wishes to reduce them within the bounds which seem to be prescribed for them, they treat him as a man devoid of religion who sacrifices everything to his ambition.”[247] Assuredly this is the language of truth, everything proves it. But although these complaints were well founded, although the domination of the Jesuits was then real enough, we cannot feel much concern for this voluntary victim of their encroachments. Not only, indeed, did Ferriol refrain from endeavouring to throw off their heavy yoke, although it sometimes weighed on his self-esteem; but also, forgetting the character with which he was invested, and passing from a brief and honourable independence to a servile devotion, he became the executioner of the vengeance of a few missionaries with so much implacability, that in fighting their adversaries he seemed to be engaging his own personal enemies. His hatred, revived and cleverly kept up by baleful excitements, is about to docilely follow the direction indicated to it, and to strike without pity, to pursue without respite, to cause to disappear and overwhelm, a long time even after his own fall, a great Armenian personage whom it is now time to introduce in his turn into this story, and to make known to our readers. FOOTNOTES: [218] _L’Homme au Masque de Fer, Mémoire Historique, par le Chevalier de Taulès, Ancien Consul-général en Syrie_, Paris, 1825. Hammer, _Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman depuis son Origine jusqu’à nos Jours_, vol. xiii. p. 187. M. Ubicini, _Lettres sur la Turquie_, Paris, Dumaine, 1854, part ii. p. 256. [219] Aubry de la Motraye, _Voyage en Europe, Asie, et Afrique_, La Haye, 1727, 2 vols. in folio, vol. i. p. 371. Didot’s _Biographie Universelle_, article “Avedick.” [220] Instructions given to M. de Ferriol on his departure for Constantinople:--Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, section Turkey, 33.