PIGEON, Peter Charles Francis, curate of St Peter du Regard, in the diocese of Bayeux, was one of the priests lately belonging to the king's house at Winchester. He was born in Lower Normandy, of honest and virtuous parents, and of a decent fortune. His inclinations early led him to embrace the ecclesiastical state, from which neither the solicitations of his friends, nor the prospect of a more ample fortune on the death of his elder brother, could withdraw him. Several of his schoolfellows and masters, who are now resident in the king's house at Winchester, bear the most ample testimony to his assiduity, regularity, piety, and the sweetness of his disposition, during the whole course of his education. The sweetness of temper, in particular, was so remarkable, and so clearly depicted on his countenance, as to have gained him the esteem and affection of such of the inhabitants of Winchester as by any means had become acquainted with him. He was seven years employed in quality of vicar, or, as we should call it, curate, of a large parish in the diocese of Seez, where his virtues and talents had ample scope for exertion. His practice was to rise at five o'clock every morning, and to spend the whole time till noon (the usual time of dining for persons in his station) in prayer and study. The rest of the day, till evening, he devoted to visiting the sick, and other exterior duties of his function. In 1789, the year of the French revolution, M. Pigeon was promoted to a curacy, or rather a rectory, in the diocese of Bayeux, called the parish of St Peter du Regard, near the town of Condé sur Noireau. It was easy for him to gain the good-will and the protection of his parishioners; but a Jacobin club in the above-mentioned town seemed to have no other subject to deliberate upon than the various ways of harassing and persecuting M. Pigeon and certain other priests in the neighbourhood, who had from motives of conscience refused the famous civic oath. It would be tedious to relate the many cruelties which were at different times exercised upon him, and the imminent danger of losing his life to which he was exposed, by the blows that were inflicted on him, by his being thrown into water, and being obliged to wander in woods and other solitary places, without any food or place to lay his head, in order to avoid his persecutors. We may form some judgement of the spirit of his persecutors from the following circumstance. Being disappointed on a particular occasion in the search they were making after M. Pigeon, with the view of amusing themselves with his sufferings, they made themselves amends by seizing his mother, a respectable lady of 74 years of age, and his two sisters, whom they placed upon asses with their faces turned backwards, obliging them in derision to hold the tails of these animals. Thus they were conducted in pain and ignominy throughout the whole town of Condé, for no other alleged crime except being the nearest relations of M. Pigeon. At length the decree for transporting all the ecclesiastics arrived; and this gentleman, with several others, after having been stripped of all their money, was shipped from Port Bessin, and landed at Portsmouth, where he
was shortly after received into the establishment at Foxton, and, upon that being dissolved in order to make room for prisoners of war, into the king's house at Winchester. Being of a studious turn, he was accustomed, as many of his brethren also were, to betake himself to the neighbouring lanes and thickets for the sake of greater solitude. With this view having, about ten o'clock in the morning, Aug. 28. 1793, retired to a certain little valley, on the north-east side of a place called Oram's Arbour, the same place where the county elections for Hampshire are held, he was there found, between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, murdered, with the upper part of his skull absolutely broken from the lower part, and a large hedge-flake, covered with blood, lying by him, as were the papers on which he had been transcribing a manuscript sermon, with the hearing of which he had been much edified, and the sermon itself which he was copying, together with his pen, imbrued in blood. His watch was carried away, though part of the chain, which had by some means been broken, was left behind. He was writing the word paradise, the last letters of which remained unwritten when the fatal blow was given him, which appears evidently to have been discharged upon him from a gap in a hedge which was immediately behind him. At first the suspicion of this cruel murder fell upon the French democrats, who, to the number of 200, are prisoners of war, at the neighbouring town of Alresford, as one of that number, who had broken his parole, had, about three weeks before, been taken up in Winchester, and both there and at Alresford had repeatedly threatened to murder his uncle, a priest, whom he understood to be then at Winchester, not without fervent wishes of having it in his power to murder the whole establishment, consisting of more than 600 persons. However, as no French prisoner was seen that day in the neighbourhood of Winchester, as none of them were known to have left Alresford, it is evidently reasonable to acquiesce in the verdict of the coroner; namely, that the murder was committed by a person or persons unknown. The most noble marquis of Buckingham, whose munificence and kindness to those conscientious exiles, the emigrant French clergy, can only be conceived by those who have been witnesses of the same, with the truly respectable corps of the Buckinghamshire militia, then quartered at Winchester, joined in paying the last mark of respect to the unfortunate deceased, by attending his funeral, which was performed at the Roman Catholic burying-ground, called St James's, near the said city, on Saturday, Aug. 29. He was just 38 years of age when he was murdered.