Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/187

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PRISONERS.
167

Walsh, the superior, was removed. According to Richard Ferris, who supplanted him, he had refused to render any accounts, and had sold to the butterman for 500 francs the 2700 volumes of the English Benedictines, including a unique edition of the Fathers. Ferris, displaced by Paul Long, whom Archbishop Murray sent over on the fall of the Empire to restore the College into a seminary, was reinstated during the Hundred Days, was then again superseded by Long, but in 1820 recovered his post. He had been quartermaster under Condé in 1792, now kept his carriage, and had so completely unfrocked himself that he had a wife (?) and children. He resigned after a time, and bought a mansion near Soissons, where he died in 1828. His collaterals in Ireland claimed his property, on the ground that his son was illegitimate, and that the grandchildren were consequently not heirs-at-law; but the distance and expense deterred them from proceeding with the suit, or a compromise may have been effected. Papers on this unedifying episode are still preserved at the College, which I believe has since been as harmoniously managed as for many years, both before and after the Revolution, it was the reverse. Ferris was unmistakably "a character," for though a priest, and with a right hand paralysed, he challenged Hély d'Oissel, his co-trustee, who had rebuked him for his quarrelsomeness. Reminded by Captain