1798, Bigex lived for a time high up on the Great St Bernard, from where he returned to Lausanne and then had to move on again, this time to Geneva. Throughout this period he was nevertheless able to sustain effective communications links sufficient to enable him to provide the necessary spiritual support to the congregations in the diocese. Authorship During his years of exile beyond the far shore of the lake Bigex also found time to produce and arrange publication of several substantive books intended to address the evils that had befallen the church from the French revolution and the ensuing Revolutionary Wars. These included "Instruction à l'usage des fidèles du diocèse de Genève", "Le Catholique du Jura" and "le Missionnaire catholique, ou Instructions familières sur la religion". The last of these was expressly intended to reduce the influence among the people of revolutionary doctrines which, in his view, "were misleading people everywhere". The book ran to 344 pages and was highly effective in the judgement of at least one commentator. Several editions were produced by various printer-publishers over just a few years. Copies turned up in virtually every diocese in France. The French government felt bound to react. The loose knit confederacy was re-invented as the Helvetic Republic following the 1798 invasion. The responsible French government minister applied pressure on the Helvetic Republic to communicate his complaints to the authorities in Bern that they had permitted an emigrant to publish in the Lausanne bailiwick, and from there to introduce into France, a work which they held to be seditious. The author, called upon to defend himself in the face of the French government complaints, defended himself with "as much prudence as dignity", and was thereby able to ensure that the Swiss authorities made an entirely appropriate response to the complaint. Interestingly, while the Paris government launched a minor diplomatic incident over the book with the Swiss authorities, in Paris itself two widely-distributed newspapers were extolling its virtues in lavish terms. It was while he was still based in Lausanne that Bigex conceived and launched his "Étrennes catholiques / Étrennes religieuses pour l'an de grâce ..." project, which involved producing a compilation twice yearly - later, possibly, annually - of simple but cogently argued essays and judiciously adapted extracts, according to the Catholic viewpoint of the author-compiler, whose own objective was simply to "combat the false doctrines of the times