A certain Irish Capuchin, Father Donovan of Cork, was a chaplain of a noble French family in Paris when the Revolution broke out. His friends fled, and he, as having been concerned with aristocrats, was thrown into prison. One morning, after he had spent the night preparing a number of his fellow-prisoners for death, he was suddenly called out with a batch of condemned and trundeled off to the guillotine. Just as he was about to get his foot on the ladder, an officer of the French guard called out in Irish: "Are there any Gaels among you?" "Seven," answered Father Donovan, in the same language. "Then let there not be any fear on you," shouted the officer, and the seven were saved.
--Seumas MacManus (1869-1960), The Story of the Irish Race, p. 476. New York: Devin Adair Co. 1921.
This story is not as farfetched as it might seem. Many Irishmen went to the Continent to be educated during the 1700s, a time when the British had imposed draconian Penal Laws in Ireland that subjugated the native population. Many Irish soldiers served and lived in Spain, Austria and France during these years.
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