She repaid him for his compliments—on the spot. She helped him to vindicate General Lally.
It must not be thought that statues and visitors, old age in the present, and death in a near future, made Voltaire forget to fight l’infâme, or the iniquitous legal system which was often l’infâme’s strongest support. He never forgot anything; and his mind had room for a thousand interests that never jostled or hurt each other.
In 1772, it had been greatly occupied by the case of the Bombelles.
Madame de Bombelles, a Protestant, had the misfortune to be the wife of a French officer who grew tired of her, and in order that he might marry someone else, discarded his wife on the excuse that they had been married by Protestant rites. The unhappy woman pleaded her case at law. It was decided against her; her marriage declared null and void; ordained that she should pay the costs of the suit; that her child should be educated as a Catholic, at its father’s expense. Voltaire pleaded long and loud against a decision so shameful, and pleaded, as usual, as if the interest in hand were the only one he had in the world.
But though l’infâme was responsible for much, the cruelly unjust justice of the day had upon its guilty soul crimes with which l’infâme had nothing to do.
There had been the case of Martin—condemned to the wheel “on an equivocal meaning.” The wretched man, arraigned on a wholly unfounded suspicion of murder, when one of the witnesses said that he did not recognise him as the person he had seen escaping from the scene of action, cried out, “Thank God! There is one who has not recognised me!” Which the judge took to mean, “Thank God! I committed the murder but have not been recognised by the witness.”
The real murderer confessed before long, but not before Martin had been tortured and broken on the wheel, his little fortune confiscated, and his innocent family dispersed abroad, so that they never even knew perhaps that their father was proved innocent—too late.
Voltaire wrote an account of the case to d’Alembert. “Fine phrases! Fine phrases!” he said once to an admirer complimenting him on his style. “I never made one in my life!” He never did. He wrote to make men act, as he had always written; and the substance of his tale was ever so great and so moving that the simpler the form of it, the more effective.
In 1773, he wrote the “Fragment on the Criminal Lawsuit of the Montbaillis.”
It is only four pages long. It tells, in language to be understood by any child, the story of a husband and wife, snuff-makers of St. Omer, who in July, 1770, had been accused of murdering their drunken old mother.