afterward to Mgr. Sibour himself, to have his obnoxious work examined by a commission; how this was refused when proceeding from himself as an overture of conciliation, but was subsequently suggested by the Archbishop himself, in the form of a menace, to induce the Abbé Guettée to withdraw from Paris voluntarily, and save himself from the threatened censure and disability; that he declined the latter course and opened himself and his work with every facility to the scrutiny of his judges. He set forth the action of the Council of Rochelle in 1853 — the same which proposed to censure Bossuet — which attacked the eighth volume of the History of the Church of France, and did not spare even the Abbé's personal character; that when he had prepared his defense and asked permission of the Archbishop to publish it, lest it should be seized as the pretext for depriving him of his functions, he was answered that before such permission could be accorded he must resign those functions in the diocese of Paris; that he refused to do this, and that by agreement certain copies of his defense were deposited with the Archbishop, and an agreement made that it should not be published; that though this defense was not made the occasion of his premeditated removal, the pretext for a measure so determined upon was soon after made out of a petty difference of a personal kind between himself and a confrère, without any regard to the importance or the justice of the case; that Mgr. Sibour finally deprived him of the poor office of hospital chaplain, with the evident design of withdrawing from him such means of subsistence as alone prevented his quitting Paris.
This letter, addressed to Mgr. Sibour, protesting against his action and fully exposing the motives that could alone have operated to these persecutions, was printed and a copy sent to the Archbishop before it was published. Under the impression, however, that it had been published, the Archbishop immediately replied by depriving the Abbé of the permission to say mass in Paris, thus completing the disability cast upon him. But upon the Abbé's informing him that the letter had not been published, that it was designed as a defense of himself, not as an attack upon the administration of the diocese, and offering to deposit the edition of the
