and put out to use for one hundred and fifty years,
at the expiration of which time they are to be divided
between the then existing descendants of the said
Rennepont; and it is calculated that this sum, increased
by so many accumulations, will by then have become
enormous, and will amount to at least forty or fifty
millions of livres tournois. From motives which
are not known, but which are duly stated in a testamentary
document, the said Rennepont has concealed from his
family, whom the edicts against the Protestants have
driven out of France, the investment of these fifty
thousand crowns; and has only desired his relations
to preserve in their line from generation to generation,
the charge to the last survivors, to meet in Paris,
Rue Saint-Francois, a hundred and fifty years hence,
on February the 13th, 1832. And that this charge
might not be forgotten, he employed a person, whose
description is known, but not his real occupation,
to cause to be manufactured sundry bronze medals,
on which the request and date are engraved, and to
deliver one to each member of the family—a
measure the more necessary, as, from some other motive
equally unknown, but probably explained in the testament,
the heirs are to present themselves on the day in question,
before noon, in person, and not by any attorney, or
representative, or to forfeit all claim to the inheritance.
The stranger who undertook to distribute the medals
to the different members of the family of Rennepont
is a man of thirty to thirty-six years of age, of tall
stature, and with a proud and sad expression of countenance.
He has black eyebrows, very thick, and singularly
joined together. He is known as Joseph, and
is much suspected of being an active and dangerous
emissary of the wretched republicans and heretics
of the Seven United Provinces. It results from
these premises, that this sum, surreptitiously confided
by a relapsed heretic to unknown hands, has escaped
the confiscation decreed in our favor by our well-beloved
king. A serious fraud and injury has therefore
been committed, and we are bound to take every means
to recover this our right, if not immediately, at
least in some future time. Our Society being
(for the greater glory of God and our Holy Father)
imperishable, it will be easy, thanks to the connections
we keep up with all parts of the world, by means of
missions and other establishments, to follow the line
of this family of Rennepont from generation to generation,
without ever losing sight of it—so that
a hundred and fifty years hence, at the moment of
the division of this immense accumulation of property,
our Company may claim the inheritance of which it
has been so treacherously deprived, and recover it
by any means in its power, fas aut nefas, even by
craft or violence—our Company not being
bound to act tenderly with the future detainers of
our goods, of which we have been maliciously deprived
by an infamous and sacrilegious heretic—and
because it is right to defend, preserve, and recover