The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

But of this course Voltaire disapproved. “Let well alone,” he said in substance: and they did.

It must be observed that not only had the sullen Parliament of Toulouse put every obstacle in the way of the new trial taking place, but that it never ratified the judgment of the Council of Paris. But that mattered little. The worst that Toulouse could do was done.

One of the magistrates, the infamous David de Beaudrigue, “paid dearly for the blood of the Calas.” In February, 1764, he was degraded from his office. He afterwards committed suicide. That innocent blood was indeed on him and his children. His grandson fell a victim to the fury of the tigers of the Revolution, who had not forgotten the drama of the Rue des Filatiers.

When the courier came with the news of the verdict to Ferney, young Donat Calas was with Voltaire, and Voltaire said that his old eyes wept as many tears as the boy’s. In a passion of delight he wrote to Cideville that this was the most splendid fifth act ever seen on a stage.

But he had not done with the Calas yet. The King’s gifts of money were insufficient. So Voltaire got up subscriptions for engravings of Carmontel’s picture, and made all his rich friends subscribe handsomely for copies. One hung over his own bed for the rest of his life.

Peter and Donat Calas settled in Geneva. When in 1770 their mother and Lavaysse visited them there, they all came on to Ferney. Voltaire said that he cried like a child. He never forgot to do everything in his power to benefit and help the two young men, and gave at least one of them employment in his weaving industry when he established it at Ferney.

The Calas case was not without wide results on current literature, art, and the drama.

Coquerel, who wrote a history of the case, states that there are no fewer than one hundred and thirteen publications relating to it. It forms the subject of ten plays and “seven long poems.”

Besides Carmontel’s engraving, there are pictures of “Jean Calas saying Good-bye to his Family,” “Voltaire promising his support to the Calas Family,” and many others.

But its most important, its one immortal result, was the “Treatise on Tolerance”—the work of the man without whom Calas would never have been avenged, and l’infâme been left unchecked till the Revolution.