Ten thousand copies of this exposure of the depravity of the
bishop were published in Montreal. I asked the whole people
of Canada to go to the Rev. Mr. Schneider and to the Rev. Mr.
Brassard, to know the truth, and many went. The bishop remained
confounded. It was proved that he had committed
against me a most outrageous act of tyranny and perfidy; and
that I was perfectly innocent and honest, and that he knew it, in
the very hour that he tried to destroy my character. Probably
the bishop of Montreal had destroyed the copy of the declaration
of the poor girl he had employed, and thinking that this
was the only copy of her declaration of my innocence and honesty,
he thought he could speak of the so-called interdict, after I
was a Protestant. But in that he was cruelly mistaken, for, as I
have already said, by the great mercy of God, three other authenticated
copies had been kept; one by the Rev. Mr. Schneider himself,
another by the Rev. Mr. Brassard, another by one whom it
is not necessary to mention, and then he had no suspicion that
the revelation of his unchristian conduct and of his determination
to destroy me with the false oath of a prostitute, were in the
hands of too many people to be denied.
The bishop of Chicago, whom I met a few days after, told
me what I was well aware of before:
"That such a sentence was a perfect nullity in every way,
and it was a disgrace only for those who were blind enough to
trample under their feet the laws of God and men to satisfy their
bad passions."
A few days after the publication of that letter in Canada,
Mr. Brassard wrote me:
"Your last letter has completely unmasked our poor bishop,
and revealed to the world his malice, injustice and hypocrisy.
He felt so confounded by it, that he has been three days without
being able to eat or drink anything, and three nights without
sleeping. Every one says that the chastisement you have given
him is a terrible one, when it is in the face of the whole world;
but he deserved it."
When I received that last friendly letter from Mr. Brassard,
on the 1st of April, 1857, I was far from suspecting that on the
15th of the same month, I should read in the press of Canada,
teh following lines from him:
