Noël Chabanel was a young Auvergnat Jesuit who had served as professor of rhetoric at Toulouse before being assigned to New France in 1643. He arrived at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons in 1644 at thirty-one. He never managed to learn Wendat well despite years of effort — a frustration that combined with severe physical revulsion at the diet, sanitation, and conditions of village life to make him constantly miserable. In 1647, in a famous private vow recorded in his papers, he bound himself by perpetual vow to remain in the Huron mission until death — a vow taken not in zeal but in deliberate defiance of his own consistent inclination to abandon the work.
He survived the destruction of Brébeuf and Lalemant at Saint-Ignace in March 1649 and the killing of Garnier at Étarita on December 7. The next day, December 8, 1649, he was returning from the small Jesuit refuge on Christian Island to the mainland to assist the few surviving Petun Catholics. He was killed on the trail by an apostate Huron — a member of the small minority who had retained their pre-Christian allegiances and who, under the catastrophe of the year, blamed the Jesuits for the disasters. Canonized 1930.