Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 17

is
I
PERSONAL HISTORY OF DUBOIS xi
some two years before the fusillades
embarked
for India
referred to took plaee.'
Be
this as it
was ordained
may,
I
have aseertained that the Abbe
in the diocese of Viviers in
age of twenty- seven, and
1792, at the
France in the same year.
He entered on his Mission work under the guidance of the
Missions Strange res. On reaching India he was attached
to the Pondicherry Mission
and for the first few years he
seems to have laboured in what are now the Southern
left
;
Madras Presidency. He must have quickly
name, for on the fall of Seringapatam
he was specially invited, on the recommendation, it is
Districts of the
made
for himself a
said, of Colonel Wellesley, afterwards
Duke
of Wellington,
and
community which had been forcibly
perverted to Mahomedanism by Tippu Sultan. En passa?U,
I may mention that, through the influence of the Abbe in
Mysore, not a single priest of the Missions ^trangeres was
persecuted by Tippu. For these apostates, we learn, he
Mysore
to visit the capital of
in order to reconvert
reorganize the Christian
pleaded eloquently before Mgr. Champenois, the Bishop,
and with such good effect that he once more gathered the
lost
sheep, of
whom
there were
1,800 in Seringapatam
and established on a per-
the Roman Catholic Church in the province
alone, into the Christian fold,
manent
basis
of Mysore.
Of the practical farsightedness which guided
we may judge by two incidents that have
been incidentally recorded of him. He met the problem
of the poverty of the people committed to his care by
founding agricultural colonies on the lines that have
him
in his work,
during these past few years been advocated by the Salvation
Army and
others, his principal colony being at Sathalli,
near Hassan
and he used his influence to such good
preventing epidemics of small-pox by promoting
vaccination (then, be it remembered, a comparatively novel
effect in
;