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.”