THE AFFAIR OF CALAS
In 1761 and 1762, Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc and the seventh
city of France, was one of the most priest-ridden in the kingdom. The
anniversary of that supreme crime of history, the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, was always legally celebrated as a two days’ festival. The
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been commemorated by two frescoes
erected at the public expense. In Toulouse no Protestant could be a
lawyer, a physician, a surgeon, an apothecary, a bookseller, a grocer,
or a printer; he could not keep either a Protestant clerk or a
Protestant servant; and in 1748, an unhappy woman had been fined three
thousand francs for acting as a midwife without having first become a
Roman Catholic.
The city was further celebrated for its monastic orders, the White, the
Black, and the Grey Penitents; and for a collection of relics which
included bones of the children massacred by Herod and a piece of the
robe of the Virgin.
In such a place, not the less, Jean Calas, a Protestant shopkeeper, had
lived honoured and respected for forty years.
On the evening of October 13, 1761, he, his family, and a young friend
sat at supper in his house over his shop, at No. 16 Rue des Filatiers.
Jean Calas, the father, was sixty-three years old, and rather infirm;
kind, benevolent, and serene; anything but a bigot, in that Louis, one
of his sons, who was a Toulouse apprentice, had embraced the Roman faith
with the full consent of his father, who supposed the matter to be one
in which each must judge for himself.
Madame Calas, though of English extraction, was an excellent type of the
best kind of French _bourgeoise_--practical, vigorous, alert--aged about
forty-five.
Peter, the second son, was an amiable but rather weak youth of about
five-and-twenty. There were two daughters, Rose and Nanette, who were
away from home upon this particular evening, as was also Louis (who was
still in receipt of a money allowance from his father); and Donat, the
youngest boy, who was living at Nîmes.
Mark Anthony, the eldest son of the family, was the only unsatisfactory
person in it. Only twenty-eight years old, he was one of those gloomy
and discontented characters who, the world being “a looking-glass which
gives back to every man the reflection of his own face,” saw all life
_en noir_.
His character had been further soured by the discovery that the
profession he had set his heart on was not open to a Protestant; and
that he could not be admitted to the Bar without producing a certificate
from his curé declaring him a Catholic.
Mark Anthony endeavoured to gain this certificate by simply suppressing
his Protestantism. But he failed. Change his religion he would not. If
there was a bigot among the Calas, he was the one. He alone of the
family had bitterly opposed the conversion of Louis.
Another situation he desired he had to give up through his father’s lack
of capital. He grew more and more morose. He hung about the cafés and
the billiard saloons, bitter and idle. In a theatrical company he had
joined he would declaim, it is said, Hamlet’s monologue on death, and
other pieces dealing with suicide, with an “inspired warmth.”
The establishment at the Rue des Filatiers was completed by Jeannette
Viguière, the _bonne à tout faire_, an ardent Roman Catholic and the
faithful friend and servant of the family for thirty years.
On the evening of this October 13, 1761, a friend of the Calas, Gaubert
Lavaysse, a youth about twenty, came in unexpectedly just as the Calas
were going to sit down to supper.
Hospitable Madame bade Mark Anthony, who was sitting in the shop,
“plunged in thought,” go and buy some Roquefort cheese to add to their
simple meal. He did as he was asked. He joined the party at supper in
the parlour, next to the kitchen. They talked on indifferent topics. It
was remembered afterwards that the conversation, among other things,
fell upon some antiquities to be seen at the City Hall, and that Mark
Anthony spoke of them too. At the dessert, about eight o’clock, he got
up, _as was his custom_, from the table and went into the adjoining
kitchen.
“Are you cold, _M. l’Aîné_?” said Jeannette, thinking he had come to
warm himself.
“On the contrary--burning hot,” he answered. And he went out.
The little supper-party meantime had gone into the salon, where, except
Peter, who went to sleep, they talked until a quarter to ten, when
Lavaysse left. Peter was roused to light him out.
When the two got downstairs into the shop a sharp cry of alarm reached
the salon. Jean Calas hurried down. Madame stood at the top of the
stairs for a moment, wondering and trembling. Then she went down.
Lavaysse came out of the shop and gently forced her upstairs, saying she
should be told all.
In the shop Lavaysse and Peter had found the dead body of the unhappy
Mark Anthony suspended from a wooden instrument used in binding bales of
cloth, which the poor boy had placed between two doorposts, and on which
he had hanged himself. On the counter lay his coat and vest, neatly
folded.
Jean Calas cut the cord, lifted the body down, put it on the ground, and
used all possible means to restore life. Impelled by that awful sense of
unknown disaster, Madame and Jeannette came down too, and with tears,
and calling the boy’s name, tried all remedies--unavailingly.
Meanwhile, Calas had bidden Peter go for the doctor. He came, by name
one Gorse, but he could do nothing. Then Peter, beside himself, would
have rushed into the street to tell their misfortune abroad. His father
caught hold of him: “Do not spread a report that he has killed himself;
at least save our honour.”
The feeling was in any case a perfectly natural one. But how much more
natural in that dreadful day when, as Calas knew well, the body of a man
proven a suicide was placed naked on a hurdle with the face turned to
the ground, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet.
Lavaysse had also run out of the house. Peter, finding him at a
neighbour’s, told him to deny that Mark Anthony had committed suicide.
Lavaysse agreed. Voltaire spoke hereafter of that decision as “a natural
and equitable” one. It was. But it was one of the most fatal ever
uttered.
The neighbours were roused by now. Many rushed in to give assistance.
Among others was an old friend of the family’s, Cazeing by name.
Clausade, a lawyer, said the police ought to be fetched. Lavaysse ran to
fetch them.
Meanwhile a crowd had gathered outside the house. It had the
characteristics of most crowds--perhaps of all French crowds--it was
intensely excited; it was exceedingly inventive; and it would follow a
leader like sheep. What _had_ happened in that house? In 1835 there
still stood over the door a signboard with the inscription, “Jean Calas,
_Marchand d’Indiennes_”. It stood there then. Calas? Calas? Why, Calas
was a Huguenot. From among the people came a word--one of those idle
words for which men shall give account in the Day of Judgment--“These
Huguenots have killed their son to prevent him turning Catholic!” The
idea was dramatic and pleased. The crowd caught it up. It was the match
to the fagot, and the whole bonfire was ablaze at once.
But there was one man there at least, David de Beaudrigue, one of the
chief magistrates of the city, whom, from his position, it should have
been impossible to move a hair’s breadth by an irresponsible word, and
who is eternally infamous that, hearing such a cry, he believed it. But,
for the doom of Calas, Beaudrigue was both bigot and fanatic. It has
been well said by Parton, one of Voltaire’s biographers, that “if the
words had blazed ... across the midnight sky in letters of miraculous
fire,” Beaudrigue “could not have believed them with more complete and
instantaneous faith.”
He hastened into the house with his officers and arrested every person
in it, including young Lavaysse, who had fought his way back there
through the crowd, and Cazeing the friend. Through the ill-lit streets,
thronged with an excited mob, the little party were taken to the Hôtel
de Ville. Mark Anthony’s body was borne on a bier before them. The Calas
and their friends thought, as they might well think, that they were only
going to give testimony of what had occurred. Grief, not fear, was in
their hearts. So little did they anticipate not returning to their house
that evening that Peter had put a lighted candle in one of the windows
to light them when they came back. “Blow it out,” said David. “You will
not return so soon.”
On every step of that dreadful journey to the Hôtel de Ville the ardent
imagination of that southern crowd grew hotter. From saying that Calas
had murdered his son to prevent him turning Catholic, it was only a step
to the assertion that among the Huguenots such an act was common,
encouraged, and esteemed a virtue. Before that town hall was reached
Mark Anthony had become a martyr to the true faith; and Jean, his
father, was already condemned to the most horrible of all deaths, on the
most horrible of all accusations.
When the prisoners reached the place they still persisted in that most
natural but most fatal falsehood, that Mark had not committed suicide.
It still did not occur to their simplicity and their innocence that they
could ever be accused of murdering one so dear to them. They were soon
to be enlightened. They were separated, locked, with irons on their
feet, into separate cells. Jean Calas and Peter were left in complete
darkness. Cazeing was soon released. But Lavaysse, the unhappy young
visitor, was imprisoned too. On the days following they were each
separately examined on oath. All then confessed that the boy had
committed suicide, and all told stories which tallied with each other.
Their depositions were such that if clear evidence, reason, and justice
ever appealed to bigots, they would have been liberated at once.
But David had been occupying his time in still further infuriating the
people. The priests seconded him. One of his own colleagues warned him
not to go so fast.
“I take all the responsibility,” he answered. “It is in the cause of
religion.”
It is noticeable that, in his bloody haste, and though he assumed the
case to be one of murder, he had never examined the shop at the Rue des
Filatiers to see if it bore marks of a struggle, or the clothes of the
supposed murderers. Yet how could it be thought that “the most vigorous
man in the province,” eight-and-twenty years old, would allow his feeble
father of sixty-three to strangle and hang him without making any
resistance? And if resistance was made, where were the rents and the
bloodstains?
If, too, the boy had been killed because he was about to change his
religion, should not his room have been searched for some object of
Catholic piety, some signs of the dreadful struggle of the soul? His
person _was_ searched. On it were found a few papers of ribald songs.
For three weeks the body of this strange martyr was kept embalmed, lying
in the torture chamber of the Hôtel de Ville. As it had been assumed
without a shred of evidence that Mark Anthony had been about to join the
Roman Church, it was equally easy to assume that he had also been about
to enter one of the monastic orders. Popular fancy chose the White
Penitents as the order of Mark’s intentions. He was buried on a Sunday
afternoon, “with more than royal pomp,” in the great cathedral, and with
the full and splendid rites of the Roman Church. Thousands of persons
were present, and a few days after a solemn service for the repose of
the soul of their Brother was held by the White Penitents.
For three successive Sundays from the pulpits in all the churches was
read an admonition to give testimony, “by hearsay or otherwise,” against
Jean Calas.
To be sure, such testimony would never be difficult to obtain in any
case or in any place, but in priest-ridden Toulouse, against Jean Calas,
it might well have been on all lips.
After the five prisoners had spent five months in separate dungeons,
chained by the feet, the trial began. It must be remembered that of the
accused one was Jeannette, an ardent Roman Catholic, who had not only
helped to convert Louis, but who had given no offence to his Protestant
relatives by so doing.
On March 9, 1762, Jean Calas was tried first, and alone, for the murder
of his son on the previous October 13th. He was tried by thirteen
members of the Toulouse Parliament who held ten sessions. The witnesses
against him were of this kind: a painter named Mattei said that his wife
had told him that a person named Mandrille had told her that some person
unnamed had told _her_ that he had heard Mark Anthony’s cries at the
other end of the town. Some of the witnesses against Calas disappeared
before the trial came on, feeling the strain on their inventive powers
too great.
It was assumed by the prosecution that Mark Anthony _could_ not have
hanged himself in the place where the Calas swore they had found him;
but, as has been noted, the prosecution never went to see the place.
_For_ the prisoner, on the other hand, was the most overwhelming
evidence.
First, it was the most unnatural of crimes. Secondly, it was impossible
at the father’s age and weakness that he should have murdered his strong
son alone. If he had not murdered him alone, it must have been with the
assistance of the family party, of whom one was Jeannette, the ardent
Catholic, and another was Lavaysse, the casual visitor.
The testimony of all these people _for_ Calas agreed absolutely--except
on one or two minor and wholly immaterial points.
But, in the case of this prisoner, it was not merely that the law of his
day declared him guilty until he was proved innocent. Calas was declared
guilty without being allowed a chance of proving himself innocent. The
accused was never then permitted a counsel. But with Calas, the people
sat on the judgment seat with Pilate; assumed the prisoner’s guilt, not
without evidence, but in the teeth of it, and had condemned him before
he was tried. Some of the magistrates themselves belonged to the
confraternity of the White Penitents.
One of them only--M. de Lasalle--had the courage to object to the
mockery of the proceedings. “You are all Calas,” said a brother judge.
“And you,” answered Lasalle, “are all People.”
By eight votes to five, then, “a weak old man was to be condemned to the
most awful of all deaths” (first the torture, and then to be broken on
the wheel) “for having strangled and hanged with his feeble hands, in
hatred of the Catholic religon, his robust and vigorous son who had no
more inclination towards that religion than the father himself.” The
words are the words of him who, said Madame du Deffand, became all men’s
_avocat_, Voltaire.
Out of those thirteen judges three voted for torture only, and two
suggested that it might be better to examine the shop at the Rue des
Filatiers and see if a suicide _were_ impossible. One hero alone voted
for complete acquittal.
The terms of the sentence display a savage ferocity, of which only a
religious hatred is capable. To the exquisite tortures to which Calas
was condemned, even the brutes who, drunk with blood and believing in
neither God nor devil committed the worst excesses of the French
Revolution, never fell.
This mock trial had taken place on March 9th. On March 10th that
sentence of ghoulish and delighted cruelty was read to the victim. He
was taken straight to the torture-room, the oath was administered, and
with the rack in front to remind him of the fate awaiting him, he was
cross-examined. He answered as he had always answered--He was innocent.
When asked who were his accomplices, he replied that as there had been
no crime there could be no accomplices. One witness speaks of his
“calmness and serenity.” Yet he was a feeble man, not young, who for
five months had been chained in a dark dungeon, accused of the most
awful of crimes, and knowing that in his downfall he had dragged down
with him everything he loved best in the world.
He was then put to the first torture--the _Question Ordinaire_. The very
record of such horrors still makes the blood run cold. But what man
could bear, man can bear to hear. First bound by the wrists to an iron
ring in the wall, four feet above the ground, “and his feet to another
ring in the floor of the room,” with an ample length of rope between,
“the body was stretched till every limb was drawn from its socket.” The
agony was then “increased tenfold by sliding a wooden horse under the
lower rope.” Thus, in mortal torment, Calas was questioned again. He
maintained his innocence, and “neither wavered nor cried out.”
After a rest--a rest!--of half an hour, during which the magistrates and
a priest questioned him again, he was put to the _Question
Extraordinaire_. Water was poured into his mouth by force until “he
suffered the anguish of a hundred drownings.”
He was then questioned again; and again maintained his innocence. Then
more water was poured into him, until his body was swollen to twice its
natural size. He was again questioned; with the same results.
Then the devils called Christians, who persecuted him in the name of
Christ, saw that their aim would be defeated. Calas would not confess.
But he could die.
He was taken on a tumbril in his shirt only--how many were to go thus to
doom after him!--to the place of execution. From time to time he said “I
am innocent.” The crowd--in temper and intent the crowd who eighteen
hundred years before had cried “Crucify Him!”--reviled him as he went,
as they had reviled his Master. At the scaffold a priest, whom he knew
personally, once more exhorted him to confess. “What, Father!” he said.
“Do you too believe that a man could kill his own son?” Then, again like
the Truth for Whom he suffered, he was bound on a cross. The executioner
broke each of his limbs in two places with an iron bar. He lived thus
for two hours, praying for his judges.
A few moments before his death a priest again exhorted him to confess.
“I have said it,” he answered. “I die innocent.” At that supreme moment
he mentioned Lavaysse--the boy upon whom he had brought so unwittingly
ruin and disgrace. Then David de Beaudrigue, who felt that he was in
some sort cheated of his prey without a confession, bade him turn and
look at the fire which was to burn him, and confess all. He turned and
looked. The executioner strangled him; and he died without a word.
His noble courage at least saved the lives of his family. Peter was
condemned to perpetual banishment, “which if he was guilty was too
little; and if he was innocent was too much.” He was forced into a
monastery; and, being a weak character and told that if he did not
abjure his religion he should die as his father had died, he recanted in
a terror not unnatural.
His mother was liberated. She crept away with Jeannette into the country
near Toulouse, to hide her broken heart. Her two daughters were flung
each into a separate convent. Young Lavaysse was sent back to his
family, ruined alike in health and in prospects.
Donat Calas, the youngest of the family, the apprentice at Nîmes, had
had to leave France when the trial came on, for fear of being indicted
as an accomplice. He went to Geneva.
On March 22, 1762, only twelve days after the death of Jean Calas,
Voltaire mentioned the case in writing to Le Bault. He was not at once
moved to take any side. The affair was not his. But if he did take any,
it was the side of Catholicism. “We are not worth much,” he said airily,
“but the Huguenots are worse than we are. _They_ declaim against
comedy.”
But the affair made him think. Two days later he wrote that it “took him
by the heart.” Then he learnt that Donat was near him--at Geneva; that
the boy had fled there on hearing of the trial. _That_ seemed like
guilt. “I am interested as a man, and a little as a philosopher. I want
to know _on which side_ is this horror of fanaticism.” At the end of
March, Audibert, a merchant of Marseilles, who had happened to be in
Toulouse when the Calas tragedy was enacted, called on Voltaire and told
him the facts of the case as they had appeared to him. Foul play
somewhere, thinks Alain’s pupil and Arouet’s son, putting those facts
together. But where? “I told him (Audibert) that the crime of Calas was
not probable; but it was still more improbable that disinterested judges
should condemn an innocent man to be broken on the wheel.”
Disinterested? There lay the crux. Voltaire’s feelings were roused; but
they had not run away with him. On March 27th, he wrote to d’Argental:
“You will ask me, perhaps, why I interest myself so strongly in this
Calas who was broken on the wheel? It is because I am a man.... Could
you not induce M. de Choiseul to have this fearful case investigated?”
Every day, nay every hour, a mind far keener and shrewder than any
Choiseul’s was investigating it then: collecting evidence; writing
innumerable letters; working, working; tempering with cool discretion a
zeal that burnt hotter every moment as the innocence of Calas forced
itself upon his soul; labouring with that “fiery patience,” that
critical judiciousness, which in such a case alone could win.
At the end of April he went from Ferney to Délices, that he might be
nearer Donat Calas; study him; hear an account of his family from his
own lips. The boy was only fifteen; cried when he told that piteous
story; and spoke of both his father and mother as infinitely kind and
indulgent to all their children.
Lest he should be moved by those emotions which grew stronger every day,
or by a moral conviction in the innocence of Calas not fully borne out
by physical facts, Voltaire sought the opinion of wise and capable
friends. He employed Végobre, an able (and notably unimaginative) lawyer
of Geneva, to investigate legal points; and for hours and hours would
remain closeted with him. Ribotte-Charon, a merchant of Toulouse,
himself warmly interested in the case, Voltaire induced to examine the
site of the supposed murder and to study local details. Chazel, a
solicitor of Montpellier, he engaged to interview the leading
magistrates of the Languedoc district and to procure documents.
But to obtain a formal investigation of the affair it was necessary to
get the ear of the Chancellor of France, the Count of Saint-Florentin.
Voltaire incited every powerful friend he had in the world to assail
this person. Villars and Richelieu were made to bombard him. What was
the use of Dr. Tronchin’s famous and influential patients if they could
not be induced to attack M. Florentin too? Tronchin roused them, and
they did as they were told. At Geneva was the Duchesse d’Enville, also a
Tronchin patient, clever, powerful, and enlightened. Voltaire fired her
with his own enthusiasm, and she wrote direct to Saint-Florentin. As for
Madame de Pompadour and Choiseul, Voltaire undertook them himself. The
Pompadour was always “one of us” in her heart; and while she hated the
Jesuits, Choiseul did not love them.
By the end of June, Voltaire had brought Madame Calas up to Paris and
begged his Angels, “in the name of humankind,” to take her broken life
under their wings. She had not been easy to persuade to come. She was
crushed to the earth, as she might well be. Hope for the future, or hope
for vengeance for the past, she had none. Only one passionate desire
seems to have been left her--to get back her daughters from the convents
into which they had been forced. The property of criminals was then
confiscated to the King, and she had not a farthing in the world. But
Voltaire paid all her expenses--content to wait until the generosity of
Europe should refund him. For counsel he gave her d’Alembert and the
famous _avocat_, Mariette. On June 11th, he appointed Élie de Beaumont
as Mariette’s colleague. It is always a part of cleverness to discover
the cleverness of others. Beaumont was young and unknown; but he was a
most able choice.
On July 4th, Peter Calas escaped from his monastery, and joined Donat at
Geneva. Voltaire had thus the two brothers under observation. He put
them through searching inquiries. Peter was naturally a most important
witness.
On July 5th, Voltaire first spoke to d’Argental of the “Original
Documents concerning the Calas” which in this month he gave to the
world. They are for all time a model of editorial genius. They consist
only of an extract from a letter from Madame Calas, and of a letter from
Donat Calas to his mother. Voltaire’s name did not appear at all. They
contain that most damning of all evidence--a perfectly clear and simple
statement of plain facts. If the editor contributed order and brevity,
he left the quiet pathos of the woman and the passionate eagerness of
the boy to speak for themselves.
The “Original Documents” he quickly followed up by a “Memoir and
Declaration”: the “Memoir” purporting to be by Donat Calas, the
“Declaration” by Peter.
Once again he wholly obliterated himself. Only a Voltaire’s genius could
have curbed a Voltaire’s passion and made him rein in, even for a while,
his own fiery eloquence, speak as those poor Calas would have spoken,
and wait.
He knew now, by every proof which can carry conviction to the mind, that
they were innocent: and he had given those proofs to the world.
But that was not enough. In August he published “The History of
Elizabeth Canning and of the Calas.” Nothing he ever wrote shows more
clearly how perfectly he understood that April nation, his countrymen.
“Documents” and “Declarations”! Why, they at least _sounded_ dull; and
eighteenth-century Paris was not even going to run the risk of a yawn.
“One might break half a dozen innocent people on the wheel, and in Paris
people would only talk of the new comedy and think of a good supper.”
But Paris loved to be made to laugh one moment and to weep the next; to
have its quick pity touched and its quick humour tickled--in a breath.
“The History of Elizabeth Canning” is sarcastically amusing--an account
of that enterprising young Englishwoman who nearly had another woman
hanged on the strength of a story invented by herself and her relatives.
“It is in vain that the law wishes that two witnesses should be able to
hang an accused. If the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury
depose that they have seen me assassinate my father and my mother, and
eat them whole for breakfast in a quarter of an hour, the Chancellor and
the Archbishop must be sent to Bedlam, instead of burning me on their
fine testimony. Put on one hand a thing absurd and impossible, and on
the other a thousand witnesses and reasoners, and the impossibility
ought to give the lie to all testimonies and reasonings.”
“The History of the Calas” was that sombre and terrible story told by a
master mind: passionate, and yet cool; moving, and yet cautious in
argument; the work at once of the ablest, keenest, shrewdest lawyer in
the case, and of the man who said of himself, almost without
exaggeration, that for three years, until Calas was vindicated, a smile
never escaped him for which he did not reproach himself as for a crime.
He did not appeal to “that great and supreme judge of all suits and
causes, public opinion,” in vain. The Calas case became the talk of
Europe. Men felt, as Donat had been made to say in his Memoir, that “the
cause was the cause of all families; of Nature; of religon; of the
State; and of foreign countries.”
Voltaire had his Calas pamphlets translated and published in Germany and
England. Generous England came forward with a subscription list for the
unhappy family, headed by the young Queen of George III., and to which
the Empress of Russia and the King of Poland became contributors.
But still, to rouse men’s interest was but a means to an end. The end
was to obtain first from the Council of Paris a decree ordering that the
case should be re-tried, and then that fresh trial itself. The obstacles
were not few or trifling. Louis XV. and Saint-Florentin, in spite of the
influence brought to bear upon them, were both opposed to such a course.
A too strict and searching justice did not suit the monarchy of France.
Louis XV. was always wise enough to let sleeping dogs lie if he could,
instead of convening States-General and dismissing and recalling
ministers to please the people they governed, like that weak fool, his
successor. “Why can’t you leave it alone?” was the motto of both King
and Chancellor over the Calas case. And they would have lived up to it,
but that the public opinion which had a Voltaire as its mouthpiece was
too strong for them.
Another difficulty lay in the fact that Lavaysse _père_ was so terrified
by the Parliament of Toulouse that he took much persuading before he
would appear openly on the side of Voltaire and as a witness for his own
son. Then, too, the natural passionate eagerness of Madame Calas to get
back her daughters, immediately and before the time was ripe, had to be
curbed; and, far worse than all, that miserable Toulouse Parliament had
so far entirely declined to furnish any of the papers concerning the
trial, or even the decree of arrest.
[Illustration: MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON
_From an Engraving after a Picture by Carle Van Loo_]
In September, Élie de Beaumont was ready with an able “Memoir” on the
case, signed by fifteen of his brother barristers. He showed that there
were “three impossibilities” in the way of Calas having murdered his
son. “The fourth,” said Voltaire, “is that of resisting your arguments.”
The “Memoir” was naturally more technical than Voltaire’s, but it was
not more clever, nor half so moving.
Another friend of the case, the brave Lasalle, who had become “the
public _avocat_ for Calas in all the houses of Toulouse,” and had been
challenged to a duel on the subject by a brother magistrate, was also in
Paris in November. In December, through the untiring exertions of the
Duchesse d’Enville, herself a mother, Nanette and Rose, the daughters,
were restored to Madame Calas.
On December 29th, Voltaire wrote that this restoration was an infallible
test of the progress of the case. But, he added, “it is shameful that
the affair drags so long.”
Drags so long! Through the kindly veil that hides the future, even a
Voltaire’s keen eyes could not penetrate. For nine months he had now
dreamt Calas, worked Calas, lived Calas. Every letter he wrote is full
of him. For that one man whom he had never seen, and who died as, after
all, thousands of others had died, the victim of religious hatred,
Voltaire forgot the drama which his soul loved, and that aggravating
Jean Jacques’s latest novel, “Émile,” which his soul scorned. Calas!
Calas! For those nine months the thing beat upon his brain as regularly
and unremittingly as the sea breaks on the shore. For Calas was more
than a case: he was a type.
Voltaire had first thought that he saw in that dreadful story _l’infâme_
in the garb of a cold and cruel Calvinism, changing the tenderest
instincts of the human heart into a ferocity which made a father the
murderer of his own son. And then he had discovered that it was that old
_l’infâme_ he knew better--_l’infâme_ who in the person of priest and
magistrate kept the people ignorant, and then inflamed that ignorance
for their shameful ends.
What Calas had suffered, others might suffer. While he was unavenged,
while that criminal law and procedure which condemned him went
unreformed, while his judges were not rendered execrable to other men
and hateful to themselves, who was safe?
To Voltaire the cause of Calas was the cause of Tolerance; that
Tolerance which was the principle and the passion of his life.