Storia do Mogor 366.1.7

366.1.7

Now I ask you, gentlemen, since you live in Pondicherry, if there are in it more than one thousand four hundred Christians, including the French gentlemen, the topasses (persons of mixed blood), and the Malabãris (Tamils); I do not believe there can be more, and I look on it as rather an exaggeration than an underestimate. Again I ask you, and entreat you for the love of God to tell me, if in the whole territory of Pondicherry and its dependencies there is more than an area four leagues in circumference. Excepting Ariancupam, where there may be some forty Malabari Christians and as many Frenchmen, and where one of our fathers is stationed to minister to them, is there any other place where [297] a single Christian could be found ? Gentlemen, you are incapable of asserting the contrary, for I am persuaded your consciences are much more timid than those of the reverend Jesuit fathers.