The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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.