This drove Harris to set the law in motion also, on his own information, backed by the reports of others on whom Du Moulin had forced false money. A warrant was issued against the Frenchman, his house was searched, and in a secret drawer all the apparatus of a counterfeiter of coin was discovered—files, moulds, chemicals, and many implements. This evidence was damnatory; his guilt seemed all the more clear from the impudence with which he had assailed Harris and his insistence in passing the bad money. Conviction followed, and he was sentenced to death. But for a mere accident, which brought about confession, he would certainly have suffered on the scaffold.
A day or two before he was to have been executed, one Williams, a seal engraver, was thrown from his horse and killed, whereupon his wife fell ill, and in poignant remorse confessed that her husband was one of a gang of counterfeiters, and that she helped him by “putting off” the coins. One of the gang hired himself as servant to Du Moulin, and, using a whole set of false keys, soon became free of all drawers and receptacles, in which he planted large quantities of false money, substituting them for an equal number of good pieces.
The members of this gang were arrested and examined separately. They altogether repudiated the charge, but Du Moulin’s servant was dumbfounded when some bad money was found in his quarters. On this he turned king’s evidence, and his accomplices were convicted.
CALAS.
A case in which “justice” was manifestly unjust is that of the shameful prosecution and punishment of Calas, a judicial murder begun in wicked intolerance and carried out with almost inconceivable cruelty.
Bitter, implacable hatred of the Protestant or Reformed faith and all who professed it survived in the South of France till late in the eighteenth century. There was no more bigoted city than Toulouse, which had had its own massacre ten years before St. Bartholomew, and perpetuated the memory of this “deliverance,” as it was called, by public fêtes on its anniversary. It was on the eve of the fête of 1761 that a terrible catastrophe occurred in the house of one Jean Calas, a respectable draper, who had the misfortune to be a heretic—in other words, a criminal, according to the ideas of Toulouse.
Marc Antoine Galas, the eldest son of the family, was found in a cupboard just off the shop, hanging by the neck, and quite dead. The shocking discovery was made by the third brother, Pierre. It was then between nine and ten p.m.; he had gone downstairs with a friend who had supped with them, and had come suddenly upon the corpse.
The alarm was soon raised in the town, and the officers of the law hastened to the spot. In Toulouse the police was in the hands of the capitouls, functionaries akin to the sheriffs and common councillors of a corporation, and one of the leading men among them just then was a certain David de Beaudrigue, who became the evil genius of this unfortunate Calas family. He was bigoted, ambitious, self-sufficient, full of his own importance, fiercely energetic in temperament, and undeviating in his pursuit of any fixed idea.
