s portrait cannot but be viewed with love and
admiration, and the reader would think an apology for placing it before him
superfluous. {168}

"Avignon and the Comtat had been declared, by the assembly, united to
France. Jourdan, surnamed _Coup-tete_, was at Avignon with his banditti.
The unfortunate persons shut up in the prisons were devoted by him to
death. An immense pit was opened to serve as their grave, and loads of sand
were carried thither to cover the bodies. There were six hundred prisoners
in the castle: the hour was fixed for putting them to death and throwing
them, one after the other, into the pit. There was, at Avignon, a virtuous
priest, one of those men for whom we feel, on earth, a veneration, like
that paid to the saints in heaven. His name was Nolhac; he had formerly
been rector of the noviciat of the Jesuits at Thoulouse, and was now eighty
years old. For thirty years he had been the parish priest of St.
Symphorien, a parish, which he had taken in preference, from its being that
of the poor. During all these years, spent in the town, he had been the
father and refuge of the indigent, the consoler of the afflicted, the
adviser and friend of the {169} inhabitants, and he would not listen to
their entreaties, to quit the place, on the arrival of the jacobins with
Jourdan and his banditti. He could never resolve to leave his parishoners,
deprived of their minister, in the beginning of the troubles of the schism,
and far less to leave them, deprived of the consolations of religion, while
under the tyranny of the banditti. Martyrdom, the glory of shedding his
blood for Jesus Christ, for his church, or for the faithful, were, to him,
but the accomplishment of desires and wishes, which, all his life, had been
formed in his soul, and with which he knew how to inspire his disciples,
when he was directing them in the paths _of perfection_. His life itself
had been but a martyrdom, concealed by a countenance always serene, and
always beaming angelic joy, with peace of conscience. His body, clothed
with the hair-shirt, had needed the strong constitution, with which nature
had endowed him, to support him under the mortifications, watchings, and
fasts he endured, through all the activity of a minister and the austerity
of {170} an anchorite. Daily at prayer and meditation long before light;
daily visiting the sick and the poor, whom he never left without
administering, together with spiritual consolations, temporal