The suppression of the Order of Ignatius (it was not confirmed by royal edict until 1764) first occurred to him as a splendid tilt at l’infâme—as the happiest omen for the future that those who had been so intolerant should themselves be tolerated no more. But reflection cooled him. What is the good of being rid of Jesuit foxes if one falls to Jansenist wolves? “We expel the Jesuits,” he wrote to that good old friend of his, the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, in July, “and remain the prey of the convulsionists. It is only Protestant princes who behave sensibly. They keep priests in their right place.”
None of these reflections taken singly, nor all of them taken together, prevented Voltaire from receiving into his house—“as chaplain,” he said sardonically—the Jesuit priest called Father Adam, whom he had known at Colmar in 1754, and whose acquaintance he had since renewed at neighbouring Ornex. To be sure, Voltaire had no need to be afraid of any priestly influence, especially from one of whom he was fond of saying, that though Father Adam, he was not the first of men.
Like the Protestant princes, Voltaire knew very well how to keep his priest in his proper place. The Father was an indolent man, with a little fortune of his own and a rather quarrelsome disposition. But he made himself useful at Ferney for thirteen years by entertaining the visitors and playing chess with his lord and master. One of the visitors declared that Adam was Jesuit enough to let himself be beaten at the game—his opponent so dearly loved to win! But another, La Harpe, who was at Ferney a whole year, denies this and declares that Voltaire frequently lost the game, and his temper, and when he saw things were going badly with him told anecdotes to distract his adversary’s attention. A third authority states that when the game was practically lost to him, M. de Voltaire would begin gently humming a tune. If Adam did not take the hint and retire at once, Voltaire flung the chessmen one after another at the Father’s head. Prudent Adam, however, usually left at once. When Voltaire had become calmer, he would call out profanely, “Adam, where art thou?” The Father came back; and the game was resumed as if nothing had happened.
Another member of a colony, which, as Voltaire said, was enough to make one die of laughter, was the fat Swiss servant, Barbara or Bonne-Baba, who showed her contempt for her illustrious master quite plainly and to his great enjoyment, and assured him she could not understand how anybody could be silly enough to think he had an ounce of common-sense.
If it was a laughable household, it was, as its master also said, a household that laughed from morning till night, and could be, that lively cripple d’Aumard included, as light-hearted as childhood.
But through all, never forgotten for a moment or put aside for a day, was the affair of Calas.
On March 7, 1763, that affair had its first triumph. On that day the Council of Paris met at Versailles, the Chancellor presiding, and all the councillors and ministers, religious and civil, attending, and decreed that there should be a new trial and that the Toulouse Parliament should produce the records of the old. Madame Calas and her two girls were present. All through the winter it had been considered an honour to call upon them, or to meet them at the d’Argentals’ house. Councillors and officials vied with each other in thoughtful attentions to them all. During the sitting of the court one of the girls fainted, and was nearly killed with kindness. Some person, thought to be young Lavaysse, with a style charmingly candid and simple, has written an account of the day. Not only was the court “all Calas”—its eighty-four members unanimously voted for the case to be retried—but her Catholic Majesty, Marie Leczinska herself, who had by no means forgotten to hate their great avocat, Voltaire, received Madame Calas and her daughters with kindness. The King himself had “formally approved” that the papers of the procedure at Toulouse should be sent to the Council of Paris. The hostile influence of Saint-Florentin had been more than counteracted by the favourable, though secret, influence of Choiseul.
When Voltaire, waiting feverishly at Ferney, heard the long-hoped-for decree, his heart gave one great leap of joy. “Then there is justice on the earth; there is humanity,” he wrote. “Men are not all rogues, as people say; ... it seems to me that the day of the Council of State is a great day for philosophy.”
He eagerly concluded that this at last was the beginning of the end. But there was still infinite room for that slow courage called patience.
Now being passed from hand to hand in Paris, and having been so passed since the beginning of the year 1763, was what may be called the fruit of the Calas case: fruit of which men to-day may still eat and live: the pamphlet of two hundred pages which advanced by many years the reign of justice, of mercy, and of humanity—the “Treatise on Tolerance.”