All that concerned the fate of this beloved chief was sought after with avidity, and accepted with a credulous but touching confidence. One day an Armenian affirmed that he had seen him in Holland, and received a magnificent present for this happy piece of news; he disappeared, however, before it was discovered to be false.[312] Later, two Turkish slaves from Malta affirmed that Avedick was detained there a prisoner. They contrived by this artifice to get their ransoms paid, and the false information brought by them not being devoid of probability, two rich Armenians determined to charter a vessel and proceed to Malta to claim the prisoner. Ferriol, called upon to furnish them with a letter of recommendation both for Malta and for Rome, where they were to continue their researches, ostensibly did so. But he secretly forwarded by another channel to the Cardinal de la Trémouille, French ambassador to the Holy See, a private despatch,[313] in which he recommended the greatest circumspection and the exercise of an incessant surveillance over the two Armenians. With reference to the Divan, whose demands continued to be both precise and firm, Ferriol, reduced to shifts, was always contriving fresh artifices in order to appease the Grand Vizier’s resentment.[314] At times he promised to send one of the officers of the embassy in search of Avedick. Then the report having spread abroad that the Grand Patriarch was confined at Messina, Ferriol engaged to beg the King of France to demand of his grandson, Philip V., King of Spain, that he should be set at liberty and sent back.[315] But he always affirmed that he was a stranger to the abduction, and that he was entirely ignorant of where Avedick was. On this last point, and on that only, he was sincere. The government of Louis XIV. had concealed even from its representative at Constantinople the transfer of the prisoner to Mount Saint-Michel, and Ferriol, very well informed of every detail of Avedick’s transport to Marseilles, had been prudently kept in the most complete ignorance of ulterior decisions. But if he was unacquainted with them, he at least inspired them by his spiteful insistance, by his implacability in pursuing his enemy even in his most profound and most irretrievable fall. “He does not care to demand the death of the sinner,” he says, “but he must do penance, and must never be set at liberty.” “If Avedick is in the prisons of the Holy Office,” we read in another despatch, “he will never leave them; if he is in France, I beg of you to order him to be placed in a dark chamber, from which he can never behold the day.” “Whatever penance,” says he, elsewhere, “he may perform for his crimes and for his persecution of the Latins, will never be sufficiently great.”[316]