every one should take it that he exercised particular care in seeing every day whether the vessels of the church were supplied with it, to fill them when they were empty; and during the winter, for fear that the vessels should freeze too hard and the people could not take any as they entered and left the church, he used to bring them himself every evening and place them by our stove, and take them back at four o’clock in the morning when he went to open the doors.”

With a touching humility the pious old man scrupulously conformed to the rules of the seminary and to the orders of the superior of the house.  Only a few days before his death, he experienced such pain that Brother Houssart declared his intention of going and asking from the superior of the seminary a dispensation for the sick man from being present at the services.  At once the patient became silent; in spite of his tortures not a complaint escaped his lips.  It was Holy Wednesday:  it was impossible to be absent on that day from religious ceremonies.  We do not know which to admire most in such an attitude, whether the piety of the prelate or his submission to the superior of the seminary, since he would have been resigned if he had been forbidden to go to church, or, finally, his energy in stifling the groans which suffering wrenched from his physical nature.  Few saints carried mortification and renunciation of terrestrial good as far as he.  “He is certainly the most austere man in the world and the most indifferent to worldly advantage,” wrote Mother Mary of the Incarnation.  “He gives away everything and lives like a pauper; and we may truly say that he has the very spirit of poverty.  It is not he who will make friends for worldly advancement and to increase his revenue; he is dead to all that....  He practises this poverty in his house, in his living, in his furniture, in his servants, for he has only one gardener, whom he lends to the poor when they need one, and one valet....”  This picture falls short of the truth.  For forty years he arose at two o’clock in the morning, summer and winter:  in his last years illness could only wrest from him one hour more of repose, and he arose then at three o’clock.  As soon as he was dressed, he remained at prayer till four and then went to church.  He opened the doors himself, and rang the bells for mass, which he said, half an hour later, especially for the poor workmen, who began their day by this pious exercise.

His thanksgiving after the holy sacrifice lasted till seven o’clock, and yet, even in the greatest cold of the severe Canadian winter, he had nothing to warm his frozen limbs but the brazier which he had used to celebrate the mass.  A good part of his day, and often of the night, when his sufferings deprived him of sleep, was also devoted to prayer or spiritual reading, and nothing was more edifying than to see the pious octogenarian telling his beads or reciting his breviary while walking slowly through the paths