Parisot, Peter

, famous for his adventures, and his hostility to the Jesuits, was the son of a weaver at Bar-le-duc, of the name of Parisot, where he was born March 8, 1697. He embraced the monastic life in 1716, and the provincial of his order going to Rome, to attend the election of a general in 1734, took Parisot with him as his secretary. In 1736 he went to Pondicherry, and was made a parish-priest of that city by M. Dupleix, the governor but the Jesuits, with whom he quarrelled, found means to remove him from the East Indies to America, whence he returned to Rome in 1744. He was now employed in drawing up an account of the religious rites of the Malabar Christians but, dreading the intrigues of the Jesuits, withdrew to Lucca, where he completed his work, under the title of “Historical Memoirs relative to the Missions into the Indies,” in 2 vols. 4to. As this work contained some curious discoveries of the means made use of by the Jesuit missionaries to increase their number of converts, he greatly offended both his own order and them, and was obliged to quit his country: he went first to Venice, then to Holland, and afterwards to England, where he established in the neighbourhood of London two manufactories of tapestry. From London he removed to Prussia, and from thence into the duchy of Brunswick. Here he was allowed by the pope to assume the habit of a secular priest. He now assumed the name of the abbé Plate!, went to France, and from thence to Portugal, where, on account of the persecutions which he endured, he obtained a pension. Having completed his great work against the Jesuits, he revisited France, and committed it to the press, in 6 vols. 4to. Afterwards he re-entered the order of the capuchins at Commercy, but, being of a restless disposition, he soon quitted their community, and took up his abode at a village in Lorrain, where he died in 1770, at the age of seventy -three. ¹