For ten months he listened to their prayers without being allowed to take part in them, and he lived in the most absolute isolation. But on July 13, 1707, Pontchartrain wrote to the Prior of Mount Saint-Michel that he might allow the prisoner to hear mass, and even admit him to confession. “The King,” he added, “does not pretend to deprive him of the succour which he might find in this sacrament; and his Majesty has merely thought that, before admitting him to it, you ought to have him examined with especial care, as it is to be feared, from what has already happened, that his devotion is only feigned and illusory, in order to deceive and induce you to guard him with less care.”[298] Singular fear of a flight, impracticable in itself, and impossible to be prolonged for any length of time in a country where all was strange and hostile to him! Pontchartrain requested the General of the Benedictines at Rome to send to Mount Saint-Michel a monk learned in Oriental languages, to whom the most absolute discretion was prescribed with respect to the disclosures which Avedick might make to him otherwise than under the seal of confession,[299] but which were not to be kept secret from the Prior, who was charged to transmit them to the Minister. Thus it was that they did not content themselves with detaining the person of the Patriarch: they endeavoured to penetrate to the recesses of his soul, with the view of enlightening themselves upon the true sentiments,[300] and possibly upon the projects of the prisoner. The first word that he utters, and which can be understood, is a protest of right against might. “Let them judge me,” he says,[301] “and condemn me to the punishment that I deserve; or, if I am innocent, let it be proclaimed, and let them set me at liberty!” He was neither judged nor set at liberty; and his protest, forwarded by the Prior to Versailles, was suppressed in Pontchartrain’s cabinet. It is true that at the same time the most alarming intelligence reached the Minister from Constantinople, coupled with the most pressing entreaties from the court of the Vatican, and from the French embassy at the Porte, to isolate and guard the prisoner more strictly still.