the usual extravagant display of it. Indignation sped from word to deed, and the Americans were given a dose of their own specific. Père Antoine was elected parish priest by popular vote, with all the hurrahs of a political expression; and he stood by the results of the count. The vicar-general, reduced to second rank in the diocese, appealed to law to enforce his authority. The quarrel grew apace. The lordly Casa Calvo, with his retinue of Spanish officers, became partisans of their candidate as against American authority. This moved the vicar-general to invoke the aid of the chief executive, against "the ambition of a refractory monk, supported in his apostasy by the fanaticism of a misguided populace, and by the countenance of an individual (Casa Calvo) whose interference was to be attributed less to zeal for religion, than to the indulgence of private passions and the promotion of views equally dangerous to religion and civil order," and he informed Claiborne that two emissaries had gone to Havana to secure a reinforcement of monks to sustain Père Antoine in his schismatic and rebellious conduct.
The governor judiciously declined to interfere in the religious part of the squabble, but the political hint struck home. During his next fit of apprehension from a Spanish invasion, he summoned Père Antoine before him, and, in spite of his protestations of loyalty, made him take the oath of allegiance to the United States, in the presence of witnesses. To his religious executive, however, Père Antoine remained non-compliant and independent, and was a terror ever to succeeding bishops. His little cabin cell, on the corner of St. Anthony's alley and Bourbon street, with its bare floor and pallet lying on a couple of planks, and rough
