CHAPTER XIV.
Avedick is at first confined in the Prisons of the Arsenal—From Marseilles he is conducted to Mount Saint-Michel—Description of Mount Saint-Michel—Treatment to which Avedick is exposed—His useless Protestations against this Abuse of Force—Universal Emotion excited throughout the East—Complaints of the Divan—Ferriol’s Impudence—Terrible Reprisals practised on the Catholics—False Avedicks—Expedients to which Ferriol is reduced—Inquietude of the Roman Court—Duplicity of Louis XIV.’s Government—Avedick is transferred to the Bastille—Suggestions of which he is the Object—He abjures and is set at Liberty—He dies at Paris in the Rue Férou—Delusive Document drawn up with Reference to this Death—Share of Responsibility which attaches to each of the Authors of the Abduction.
It was not at Marseilles that Avedick was detained, neither was he sent, as has been said, to Messina, or to the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to be imprisoned. Louis XIV. was too prudent and too circumspect to leave in a port of the Mediterranean an individual whom his co-religionists, supported by the Ottoman Porte, were energetically demanding and seeking with anxious solicitude. Directly the Government of Louis XIV. was advised of the outcry which the disappearance of the Grand Patriarch had excited in the East, an Exempt was sent to Marseilles, to M. de Montmor, intendant of the galleys, in order to withdraw Avedick from the prisons of the Arsenal, and conduct him, “under good and sure guard,” to the other extremity of France. At the same time it was enjoined “to all governors, mayors, syndics, and other officials, to give the Exempt every protection, aid, and assistance in case of need,”[291] rather an unnecessary precaution in the case of this weak and inoffensive old man.
Near the ancient boundary of Brittany and Normandy,[292] rises a narrow rock surrounded on all sides by the waves, or by quicksands left uncovered by the sea when it falls at every tide. These sands, which extend to the firm land over a distance of nearly a couple of miles, are rendered very dangerous to cross by the mouths of several small streams.[293] On this rock, impressed with a savage grandeur, some monks had, in the eighth century,[294] constructed a monastery, where they lived isolated from the rest of the world, from which they were sometimes separated by vast plains of sand, and sometimes by the waters of the sea at regular but not far distant intervals. It was to this Abbey of Mount Saint-Michel, occupied by Benedictines, alternately devoting themselves to work and prayer, that the Grand Patriarch of the Armenians was conducted. The Prior of the abbey received orders to strictly guard the prisoner brought to him, “without allowing him to hold communication with any one, either by word of mouth or by writing,”[295] a very superfluous precaution in the case of an Armenian whose language nobody knew, who was ignorant of French, and who found himself in the midst of monks who from his arrival were taught to curse him. He was represented to them, indeed, as a detestable persecutor of Catholics[296]—this man who had been three times exiled and twice deposed by them, snatched violently from his country, at one time cast upon the coast of Syria and confined in a dungeon into which the water penetrated, at another carried into a strange land, thousands of miles from his native land, where for five years he was to drag out a miserable existence and then die. An object of horror to the monks, doubly exiled in this place of exile, like them separated from the world by obstacles almost as insuperable as those which parted them, separated from them also by the repulsion which he inspired, more unhappy still than in his first prison, where at least he breathed the air of his native land, Avedick could not even preserve the hope of being delivered. That consolatory prospect which his meeting with Spartaly at Genoa had permitted him to entertain, he was now obliged to renounce; since, even supposing that his letters had reached the Ottoman Porte,[297] no one would dream of coming to seek him on so distant and desert a coast. As far as his gaze extended he could expect to see no vessel of deliverance appear. Whether the sea covered the sands or whether it ebbed and left them dry, there was the same frightful solitude, the same mournful silence, broken at times by the roar of the waves beating against the rock, or by the peaceful and monotonous chants of the monks.
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.
On receiving the news of Avedick’s disappearance, the officers of the Divan and the Grand Vizier himself, justly excited, had demanded of Ferriol what had become of him. The French ambassador answered with assurance that the individual in question had not been given in charge to him, and that no doubt the vessel on board which he had been carried into exile was one of those English or Dutch corsairs which the Grand Seignior tolerated, even in the Dardanelles, to the prejudice of his custom-house officers and of the interests of his sovereignty.[302] This attempted diversion did not succeed for any length of time. English and Dutch, questioned in their turn, having no satisfactory reply to give, the Grand Vizier ordered torture to be applied to the Chiaoux who had conducted Avedick to Chio; and in the midst of his torments the wretch avowed the whole truth.[303] The Vizier at once solemnly sent the Chiaoux-Bachi to the French embassy in order to claim Avedick as a subject of the Grand Seignior. Maurocordato, the first interpreter of the Divan, presented himself a few minutes afterwards to join his demands to those of the Chiaoux-Bachi, and to insist that the abducted person should be immediately sent back to Constantinople. The preciseness and energy of the demand did not trouble Ferriol, and with great presence of mind he replied, “I am ignorant of all that has happened; and truly I cannot have any confidence in the depositions of the Chiaoux charged to conduct Avedick. He declared, on returning to Constantinople, that he had been taken prisoner by a corsair. Who will say that the second deposition, made during the torments of the torture, is more accurate than the first? Moreover, if the French captain has carried off Avedick by force to Italy or France, he will be punished. But may it not be the case that the ex-Patriarch, fearing death in his third exile, has employed the captain to take him to a place of safety?” Little satisfied with this reply, Maurocordato threatened Ferriol, in the Sultan’s name, with general persecutions against the Armenian Catholics. “If Avedick is in France,” answered Ferriol, “I shall write with the view of his being compelled to return. But the Grand Seignior is master of his own subjects. He can have all the Armenians put to death indifferently, without any such threat being able to make me acknowledge that of which I am ignorant.”[304]
The threat was put into execution, and the Catholics, in whose pretended interest Avedick was abducted, were the objects of a frightful vengeance. A hatti-cherif ordered the arrest of the principal Armenians of the Latin rite,[305] nine of whom escaped death by apostasy, and three intrepidly confessing their faith, died martyrs near the Pama-Capou Gate;[306] several Armenians were put to the torture and questioned during their torments as to the fate of Avedick;[307] all proselytizing was interdicted to the Jesuits, and the printing establishment which they had founded was destroyed; the two Armenian patriarchs, who had authorised the Catholic missionaries to preach in their churches, were arrested and thrown into prison; a barat of the Sultan recalled Avedick to the post of Grand Patriarch; his vekil or vicar, Joanes, was appointed to fulfil his duties ad interim,[308] the measures of rigour and the proscriptions[309] being increased from the moment of his elevation to power; all the Catholics were obliged to fly or hide themselves; against them universal fury was directed, amongst them were desolation and ruin; such, at Constantinople and throughout the whole Turkish empire, were the immediate and terrible consequences of Avedick’s abduction. So true is it that violence invariably leads to violence, and that an abuse of force is sooner or later followed by reprisals which, although they are to be deplored, cannot be altogether condemned, since, if they are without excuse, they, at least, have their explanation in an immutable law common to all nations and all epochs!
This exasperation against the Catholics was equalled only by the affection which their unfortunate victim inspired. In all the churches prayers were said every evening for his prompt return. For a moment it was believed that they were answered.[310] The news spread through Constantinople that Avedick was at Rodosto, a town thirty leagues off. Some Armenians immediately set off to meet him, with the view of bringing him back in triumph. But they only found an impostor who had succeeded in deceiving a large number of schismatics, and in collecting a considerable sum in alms, by taking advantage of the enthusiasm excited everywhere by the mere name of the Patriarch.[311]
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]
From Rome also the most earnest entreaties and the most pressing recommendations “to confine the prisoner still more closely”[317] reached Louis XIV. Twice did the Minister of Exterior Relations, the Marquis de Torcy, charge the Cardinal de la Trémouille to remove the inquietudes of the congregation of the Holy Office. “The orders to redouble attention and watchfulness,” wrote Torcy, “have been renewed. He is seen only by the person who gives him his food. They converse only by signs, and, when he hears mass on fête-days and Sundays, he is put in a place apart from all others.” At the same time,[318] the Minister informed the Cardinal that the Armenians, who had come to Marseilles, had departed again without being able to find any traces of Avedick. “We know,” he added,[319] “that the valet of the Patriarch is about to come from Leghorn to France, likewise with the view of discovering what has become of his master. But on his arrival he will be arrested and closely imprisoned.” These despatches were, we see, of a nature to entirely reassure the Holy Office,[320] and Louis XIV. showed himself as vigilant a guardian of Avedick’s person as he had been, through his ambassador, the principal author, and, in his despatches, the unreserved approver of the abduction.
He went further still, and entering in his turn on that path of duplicity in which Ferriol had long since outstripped him, Louis XIV. wrote to his representative near the Porte: “It is impossible for us to satisfy the Grand Vizier’s demands with reference to Avedick. He is no longer in a state to be sent living to Constantinople.”[321] Louis XIV. added “that the news of his death had been given him, at the very moment when, in order to be agreeable to the Grand Vizier, he was having the Patriarch sought for in Spain and Italy with the view of delivering him up to his legitimate sovereign.”
This prisoner, still sufficiently menacing and formidable at the bottom of his dungeon for Rome as well as Versailles to be thus concerned about his fate, this old man, the object of so many preoccupations, and, throughout the whole of the Levant, of regrets which he did not even have the consolation of knowing, was not thought to be sufficiently surely isolated by the sands and the sea that surround Mount Saint-Michel. The moats, the massive doors, and the towers of the Bastille were considered necessary. “On December 18, 1709,” says Dujonca in his journal, “there has entered a very important prisoner, whose name was not mentioned.”[322] This was Avedick, whose death, announced by Louis XIV., the majority of the Armenians had long since been mourning. The same recommendations which the Prior of Mount Saint-Michel had received were given to M. de Bernaville, governor of the State prison, and he was forbidden “to allow the slightest communication between his new prisoner and any other person.”[323] However, Louis XIV. was not slow in authorising an exception to this rule. A project, long since favoured by the King’s government, and the execution of which would render it for ever impossible for Avedick to return to Constantinople, was about to be realized. This was to instruct him in the Catholic religion, to determine him to submit to the authority of the Holy See, and thus to lead him to discredit himself with those of his co-religionists who still doubted of his death. Such was the end, for the accomplishment of which a monk had been placed near the Patriarch during the two years of his stay at Mount Saint-Michel. At the Bastille the suggestions became more pressing, and Armenian books were given to him,[324] in which he might learn the Catholic doctrines, and convince himself how narrow were the grounds of difference which separated the Latin Armenians from the schismatics. These he traversed, and, on September 22, 1710, he abjured between the hands of the Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, by an instrument written in the Armenian language, three translations of which in Latin were delivered, one to the Cardinal, another to the Minister of Exterior Relations, and the third to Avedick himself.[325] A few days afterwards he was ordained priest in the church of Notre-Dame. This abjuration was the only means Avedick had of recovering his liberty; and, depressed by so many storms, he ceded, after five years of close captivity, to the natural desire of breathing a free air during the few remaining years that he had to live.
In the early part of 1711, an old man, bowed by adversity still more than by weight of years, his countenance furrowed by deep wrinkles, his eyesight nearly gone, might be seen every morning to leave a little house in the Rue Férou, where he dwelt with his interpreter.[326] Having preserved in his attire some remnant of the Armenian costume, being a foreigner in language and manners, and sustaining by the aid of a stick his enfeebled body, he attracted attention, and people followed him with their glances to the church of Saint-Sulpice, to which he was attached as priest, and where he every day said mass.[327] This was the religious chief and civil protector of several millions of Armenians, the enemy of Ferriol and of the Jesuits, and the vanquished in the long struggle sustained against them. He did not long enjoy his liberty, but died on July 21, 1711, ten months after having quitted the Bastille, without relations or friends, having demanded and received the consolations and the sacraments of that Roman Church[328] whose ardent missionaries had been the cause of all his misfortunes. Thus terminated this life, commenced in obscurity and misery, continued on the patriarchal throne, crossed with unhoped-for elevations and sudden falls, and completed mournfully in exile.
Louis XIV., exhausting precautions, and pushing imposture and mockery to their extreme limits, had an instrument drawn up by the Lieutenant of Police d’Argenson, in which were attested the King’s sorrow on hearing of this death, and the promptitude which the monarch had shown in giving liberty to the prisoner directly the foreigner had been able to make it understood what his quality was. By a singular euphemism, Avedick was termed a disgracié, and Louis XIV. declared that he had never approved the violence, and still less the crimes, which, unknown to his Majesty, had been committed in Turkey on the person of the deceased.[329] This lying document was to have been sent to Constantinople in case the Porte should reclaim Avedick in too menacing a manner. But it was unnecessary. Several changes of Grand Viziers contributed to abate the demands, and to render them less pressing. At long intervals the name of the ex-Patriarch recurred in the conversations between the Ottoman prime minister and the French ambassador;[330] then, by degrees, the Divan no longer occupied itself with it. The remembrance of Avedick was less profoundly engrafted there than in the grateful hearts of the Armenians.
But this is not the complete dénoûment of the drama. At the very time when Ferriol’s victim was dying, he himself was returning from Constantinople insane, having been, two years since, replaced in his post, which, with an extravagant pretension,[331] he had, however, up to that time refused to quit. It was, in some measure, necessary to use force to compel him to embark.[332] For a long time he had recognized the enormous fault he had committed, and on January 6, 1709, had written to Torcy, “I know only of one thing for which people can reproach me—it is the abduction of Avedick.”[333] But this was not the cause of his recall, which was evidently entirely due to the too certain signs of his insanity.[334] It cannot be denied that Louis XIV.[335] approved the violation of the law of nations, of which Avedick was the victim; and if the Catholic missionaries are responsible for having suggested this crime, as Ferriol is for the orders transmitted to Chio, the government of Louis XIV. is not the less so for having prolonged and aggravated its consequences by the treatment to which the prisoner was subjected.