I had not the time to wait; the hour of the departure of the trains had come; I told you: “Please, my lord, send that chalice to Rev. Mr. Brassard, of Longueuil, who will forward it to me in a few days, to Chicago.” And the next day, one of your secretaries went to Rev. Mr. Brassard, and gave him the chalice you had promised me, which is still in my hands. And the Rev. Mr. Brassard is there still living, to be the witness of what I say, and to bring that fact to your memory, if you have forgotten it.
Well, my lord, I do believe that a bishop will never give a chalice to a priest to say mass, when he knows that that priest is interdicted. And the best proof that you know very well that I was not interdicted by your rash and unjust sentence, is that you gave me that chalice as a token of your esteem and of my honesty, etc.
Respectfully,
C. CHINIQUY.
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, the following lines from him: