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.