But if Paris was tepid, that cold King seemed to be getting a little warmer. Voltaire wrote to tell Duclos on January 20th that his Majesty had restored to him an old pension.
“What will Fréron say to that? What will Pompignan?” wrote the delighted pensioner naïvely. There was also a rumour that his Majesty has been pleased to recall M. de Voltaire. That was false. And Voltaire, since he could not reach the grapes, took the very sensible rôle of declaring that they were sour. No doubt they really were. The fruit of his own labours was at least far sweeter. To work in the Ferney garden with Lambert, his stupid gardener—“my privateer”—was safer too. “Love like a fool when you are young—work like a devil when you are old,” was one of Voltaire’s rules of life. He had to his hand new work, beside which even gardening at Ferney was dull and useless, and waiting in a king’s antechamber a shame and a contempt.
On March 10, 1762, Jean Calas was broken on the wheel.
CHAPTER XXXVI
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.