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.

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.