On January 21st or 22d, the unhappy father tore himself from them, and for a month remained hidden among the mountains, only ten miles from Castres. Then he moved on. Through the snows of an icy winter he crossed the frontier, arrived at Geneva, and early in the April of 1762, at Lausanne.
His family, after having endured infinite perils and hardships, arrived there in June. On the way, among the glaciers and in the bitter cold of a mountain winter, Marie Anne had borne a dead child.
They had one consolation. Their flight was not unnecessary. Three Declarations had been published against them; though it was not until March 29, 1764, that the court formally sentenced the parents to be hanged, and the daughters to witness that execution, and then to perpetual banishment under pain of death.
On September 11th this sentence was carried out in effigy.
By that time the generous republicans of Berne had given Madame and her daughters, who were living at Lausanne, a little pension; their property having, of course, been confiscated to the King. Père Sirven was working at his trade at Geneva, and so was a near neighbour of Voltaire’s.
Moultou, the friend and correspondent of Rousseau, brought the Sirvens one day to Ferney. Voltaire already knew their history. But the time was not ripe for another Quixotic knight-errantry. Calas was not yet vindicated. Apart from the inordinate amount of work it would entail, to take a second case in hand might militate against the interests of the first. Then the affair of the Sirvens would present far greater legal difficulties. They had fled the kingdom. They would have to be acquitted, if they were to be acquitted, not by the Parliament of Paris, but by the Parliament of Toulouse. And Voltaire was too much of an artist not to be perfectly aware that this cause would not have the éclat and the dramatic effects of the Calas’. “It lacked a scaffold.”
But when the Sirvens clung with tears about his feet and implored him, as the saviour of Calas, to save them also—“What was I to do? What would you have done in my place?” “It is impossible to picture so much innocence and so much wretchedness.” When the d’Argentals reproached him as unwise, “Here are too many parricide lawsuits indeed,” he wrote. “But, my dear angels, whose fault is that?” And, again, as his excuse, “I have only done in the horrible disasters of Calas and the Sirvens what all men do: I have followed my bent. That of a philosopher is not to pity the unfortunate, but to serve them.” He records himself how a priest said to him, “Why interfere? Let the dead bury their dead”; and how he replied, “I have found an Israelite by the roadside: let me give him a little oil and wine for his wounds. You are the Levite: let me be the Samaritan.”
That priest’s answer, if any, is not recorded.
In short the thing was done.
On March 8, 1765, the day before the Calas suit was triumphantly concluded, Voltaire wrote joyfully that the generous Élie de Beaumont would also defend the Sirvens. After that March 9th Voltaire could throw himself yet more thoroughly into the case. Calas is vindicated! So shall the Sirvens be!