After two days they put the priest to death, roasted his body on a funeral pyre and ate it. His bones were never found. This death gave great grief at Montreal as well as Quebec, for M. Vignal it will be remembered had been the chaplain of the Hospitalières there.
After this cruel and horrible repast the party broke up; the Mohawks took Jacques Dufresne with them, while the Oneidas led away the Sieur de Brigeac and René Cuillérier. Both of these were condemned to be burned and de Brigeac, after being horribly mutilated and slowly burned, succumbed after twenty-four hours' torture, "praying," as the Historian de Casson relates, "for the conversion of his tormentors without uttering a cry of complaint."
The same fate awaited Cuillérier, but he had an intercessor in the person of the sister of the chief, who wished to adopt him as her brother. Eventually he escaped to the Dutch at Fort Orange, and he finally made his way back to Montreal in the following year.
During the summer the Vicar Apostolic, Mgr. Laval, made his first visit to Montreal. He was received with honour on the evening of August 21st. On this occasion he showed great solicitude for the Hospitalières of the Hôtel-Dieu, who, by the failure of M. Dauversière, now become a bankrupt, had lost the funds entrusted to him, and had nothing to live on, unless the one thousand _livres_' income, granted to the Company of Montreal by Madame de Bullion for the support of a hospital, was transferred to them. They were now thinking of going back to France, but Mgr. Laval arranged, on the request of the inhabitants of Montreal, that the income of the hospital could support them.
At the same time Montreal was visited again by the Abbé de Queylus. He arrived at Quebec, incognito, on the third day of August. Since his absence he had not been idle in pushing the ecclesiastical position of Montreal, for on calling on the vicar apostolic, he astonished him by communicating to him the results of his visit to Rome, viz., the apostolic Bull of the Dateria, creating Montreal into an independent parish, and a mandate from the archbishop of Rouen charging the bishop of Petrea to preside at the installation of M. de Queylus as the canonical "parochus." Finally the vicar general reminded M. de Queylus of the _lettre de cachet_ of February 27, 1660, forbidding his return. Queylus retorted by quoting a contradictory "_lettre de cachet_" annulling it. The vicar general refused to accept the Bull of the Dateria on the ground that it was obtained surreptitiously, and he cancelled the jurisdiction of Rouen as incompatible with his own as vicar apostolic. On August 4th he forbade Queylus to go to Montreal under penalty of disobedience. This he communicated to d'Argenson, but the night of the 5th or 6th of August saw de Queylus making for Montreal furtively by canoe, with no obstacle placed in his way by the sympathetic governor. M. de Queylus had large landed property interests in Montreal, in fact he was one of the largest proprietors and one of its chief mainstays. It was therefore argued that he could not, as a private individual, be stayed from attending to his business there. On the 6th, Laval issued the ecclesiastical suspension of de Queylus unless he returned to Quebec. Meanwhile the abbé remained at Montreal and no doubt received Laval on his official visit of August 21st, already mentioned. On August 29th he grieved with his brethren over the massacre of his fellow Sulpician, M. Lemaître, and he performed several important business transactions as "Superior of Ecclesiastics Associated for the Conversion of the Savages."