Honour was now meted out to this humble Jesuit much to his discomfiture. Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, called him to court and compelled him to throw back his cloak and tell of the hideous manner in which his fingers had been eaten or burned. The queen, descending from the throne, took his hand in hers and, with tears streaming down her cheeks, devoutly kissed the mutilated members and exclaimed: "People write romances for us—but was ever a romance like this? And it is all true."
This form of public exhibition was displeasing to Jogues but the permission granted by Pope Urbain VIII, at the request of some of his admirers, to have the canonical impediment raised against his faculty to say mass because of his mutilated fingers, was a source of gratification. The answer of Urbain to the request was "Indignum esset martyrum Christi, Christi non bibere sanguinem"—"it would be wrong to prevent the martyr of Christ from drinking the blood of Christ."
Isaac Jogues did not loiter to be lionized in Paris, but in June was in Quebec, and was now appointed to serve the sick and hearten the defenders of the stockade of Montreal. In July he was present at a parley with the Indians at a conference held at Three Rivers, where he met Father Bressani, who had also had a similar experience of the tortures of the Iroquois and whose fingers were also wanting. After a treaty had been made Jogues returned to Montreal. One result of this treaty was that an ambassador was to be sent to the Mohawks and Father Jogues, as he spoke the Iroquois tongue, was appointed to revisit those who had so ill used him. But it was two years later before the actual embassy started from Three Rivers, on May 16, 1646. Father Jogues reached Lake Andiatarocté on the eve of Corpus Christi, the feast of the Blessed Sacrament, and called it the "Lake of the Blessed Sacrament." A century later this was renamed by Sir William Johnson "Lake George" in honour of the English king. On June 5th Jogues reached Ossernenon, and in his character as ambassador was well received. At the council held on June 10th or June 16th the party returned, reaching Quebec on July 3rd. Jogues petitioned to be sent back to the Mohawks as a missionary. On September 27th he left Quebec for the Iroquois country. He wrote to a friend: "Ibo sed non redibo—I go but I shall not return," as though his fate were revealed to him.
LAKE OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENT
Before he reached Ossernenon he learned that the hatchet had been dug up to meet him. As an ambassador he had been respected, but as a Christian missionary a hostile reception awaited him. An innocent box of vestments left behind him on his previous visit was the cause. A pestilence had broken out and the crops were withered. Therefore these misfortunes were due to the Manitou in the box. Jogues could have avoided Ossernenon and returned to Quebec, but he faced his enemies, who met him with the sorcerer, Ondersonk. Jogues wore his clerical garb. His garments were stripped off him; he was slashed with knives and led, mangled and bleeding, to the scene of his recent triumph as an ambassador. A council was held at Tionnontoguen to see what was to be done with him. The Wolf-Tortoise family were against killing him, as were most of the Bears, and he was spared.
But the Bears, bent on vengeance, invited the wounded Jogues to a feast on October 18th. He left his cabin and followed to the festive wigwam, and as he entered a Mohawk, waiting behind the door brought down his axe with a crash on to his skull. His head was hacked off and fixed on a stake of the palisade, and his body was flung into the Mohawk River hard by.
There is no reasonable doubt but that the place of his martyrdom occurred at Auriesville on the south shore of the Mohawk just above the Schoharie. "So died," says Ingram Kip, the Protestant bishop of California, "one of that glorious band that had shown greater devotion in the cause of Christianity than has ever been seen since the time of the Apostles; men whose lives and sufferings reveal a story more touching and pathetic than anything in the records of our country, and whose names should ever be kept in grateful remembrance; stern, high-wrought men who might have stood high in court or camp, and who could contrast their desolate state in the lowly wigwam with the refinement and affluence that waited on them in their earlier years, but who had given up home and love of kindred and the golden ties of relationship for God and man."