former
governor-general, Jean Dudouyt, Thomas Morel, Ange de Maizerets and
Hugues Pommier. Except the first, who was a Burgundian, they were all
born in the two provinces of Brittany and Normandy, the cradles of the
majority of our ancestors.

The founder of the seminary had wished the livings to be transferable;
later the government decided to the contrary, and the edict of 1679
decreed that the tithes should be payable only to the permanent
priests; nevertheless the majority of them remained of their own free
will attached to the seminary. They had learned there to practise a
complete abnegation, and to give to the faithful the example of a united
and fervent clerical family. "Our goods were held in common with those
of the bishop," wrote M. de Maizerets, "I have never seen any
distinction made among us between poor and rich, or the birth and rank
of any one questioned, since we all consider each other as brothers."

The pious bishop himself set an example of disinterestedness; all that
he had, namely an income of two thousand five hundred francs, which the
Jesuits paid him as the tithes of the grain harvested upon their
property, and a revenue of a thousand francs which he had from his
friends in France, went into the seminary. MM. de Bernieres, de
Maizerets and Dudouyt vied in the imitation of their model, and they
likewise abandoned to the holy house their goods and their pensions. The
prelate confined himself, like the others, from humility even more than
from economy on behalf of the community, to the greatest simplicity in
dress as well as in his environment. Aiming at the highest degree of
possible perfection, he was satisfied with the coarsest fare, and
incessantly added voluntary privations to the sacrifices demanded of him
by his difficult duties. Does not this apostolic poverty recall the
seminary established by the pious founder of St. Sulpice, who wrote:
"Each had at dinner a bowl of soup and a small portion of butcher's
meat, without dessert, and in the evening likewise a little roast
mutton"?

Mortification diminished in no wise the activity of the prelate;
learning that the Seminary of Foreign Missions at Paris, that nursery of
apostles, had just been definitely established (1663), he considered it
his duty to establish his own more firmly by affiliating it with that of
the French capital. "I have learned with joy," wrote he, "of the
establishment of your Seminary of Foreign Missions, and that the