THE FRENCH CHURCH IN BOSTON 161 



''There are not more than twenty French families 

 here," he wrote from Boston in the winter of ]687, " and 

 their number is diminishing daily, as they remove into 

 the country to buy or take up lands for cultivation with 

 a view to permanent settlement." The way these com- 

 paratively few families held together and maintained their 

 church is remarkable ; all the more so when it is con- 

 sidered that for eight years after Mr. Bonrepos left them 

 they were pastorless, the pulpit being supplied irregularly 

 by :^zechiel Carre, minister of the French colony in Nar- 

 ragausett, Daniel Bondet, of New Oxford, and occasion- 

 ally by Rev. Nehemiah Walter, John Eliot's successor at 

 the First Church in Roxbury, who was an accomplished 

 French scholar, and was glad to render this service to the 

 appreciative refugees 



Affairs were not promising until Mr. Daill6 came to Pastor Daiiie 

 Massachusetts from New York, where he had been settled 

 as minister of the French congregation from the time of 

 his arrival in America. He served as pastor of the French 

 church in Boston from 1696 until his death, nineteen 

 years later. This was the period of greatest prosperity 

 for the church. Mr. Daill6 was received by his brother 

 ministers with the consideration his character and talents 

 merited. He bore a distinguished name— that of the 

 famous minister of Charenton, Jean Daill^, one of the 

 most learned scholars and theologians of his age. Before 

 coming to America, moreover, Pierre had been professor a scholar and 

 in the great Protestant Academy of Saumur, the most fieacher 

 celebrated of the four Protestant colleges of France, '' for 

 eighty years a torch that illuminated all Europe." Like 

 other scholars of his time he wrote Latin fluently, and 

 his letters to Rev. Increase Mather show the marks of the 

 scholar and courteous French gentleman. He was in 

 truth a fine type of the Huguenot, adding to his breeding 

 and learning an earnest and unaffected piety. "He is 

 full of fire, godliness and learning," wrote the Dutch 

 minister Selyns of New York. ' ' Banished on account of 



