head but presumed to lecture the patron of the Kangxi Dictionary on the permissible meanings of the character ;—and stubborn that he had finally been expelled from the country on 17 December and Christian missionaries required to receive an imperial permit (, piào) attesting to their support of "the method of Matteo Ricci" and their willingness to remain in China for the rest of their lives. Finally receiving notice of , Tournon had ordered a summary and automatic excommunication of any Christian permitting Confucian rituals from Nanjing on 25 January 1707; on 7 February, he had further issued instructions concerning the piao examination—again on pain of excommunication—that precluded its ever being approved. Enraged, the emperor finally had him arrested and deported on 13 June, with the Portuguese then holding him under house arrest for their own reasons. Second Roman Embassy About half of the missionaries then in China joined Maigrot and Tournon in exile. At the emperor's insistence, a second embassy was dispatched to Rome to overturn and Maigrot and Tournon's various rulings in 1706; this was apparently lost at sea. Unable to secure a residence permit without fear of excommunication, Noël joined a third embassy. (He has sometimes been said to have been specifically requested by the Kangxi Emperor, although this seems unlikely.) Noël departed for Europe from Macao on 14 January 1708 on the Portuguese ship Bom Jesus de Mazagão das Brotas with the Jesuits José Ramón Arxó and António Francesco Giuseppe Provana and the Chinese convert Louis Fan. Traveling via Batavia and Bahia, Brazil, they arrived in Lisbon in September and in Rome by February the next year. En route, he sent a letter ahead to the pope imploring: Clement supported Tournon completely. A decree from the Holy Office was issued on 25 September 1710 upholding all of his rules and condemnations. The embassy may have been enjoined from sending the Kangxi Emperor any notice of that fact, since he never learned the fate of either of his embassies; in 1716, he resorted to providing open letters (the "Red Manifesto") to passing European merchants to try to ascertain their fate. (Noël, however, was not one of those individually listed for the merchants to search for.) In Europe Noël then appears to have moved to Prague, in the Austrian Empire's Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). There, he published mathematical and astronomical observations from India and China