The missionaries were fragile persons and not all was rose-coloured in their life.
Those who have been accepted into the Society may be sent away only for serious reasons on the request of the superior plus a two-thirds majority voted assent of the other Missionaries.
Request to the Capitular Vicars of Aix, 25 January 1816, O.W. XIII n.2
The expulsion of the 25 year-old Auguste Icard put this prescription into practice just a few weeks after it had been written. Already before the Society came together, Eugene had written to Forbin Janson (19 December 1815): “Icard is too impetuous and is annoyed at the slowness of the others.” In the Register of Admissions to the Novitiate, Eugene made a note next to Icard’s entry that “reasons of major importance” obliged him “shortly after to notify Icard he was no longer to consider himself a member of our Society.”
Over twenty years later Eugene recalled in his Mémoires the one “whose name we no longer mention amongst us” in this way:
Can one believe that the very one who indicated the first (ed. companions) whom I chose, and who proposed himself to join me with them, was a miserable priest whom I had to chase after the first mission. He never rid himself of his infamous habits, and lived as a bad priest for the rest of the few years he spent on this earth, and died without any religious assistance, impenitent, by a death that they say was self-inflicted”
Rambert, La vie de Monseigneur Charles-Joseph-Eugène de Mazenod,
Tome I, p. 164
In 1823, Emmanuel Maunier and Sébastien Deblieu also left the Missionaries of Provence to be diocesan priests elsewhere.
Three of Eugene’s original five first companions did not persevere! Indeed the missionary is a fragile vessel.