The inventive French temperament concluded that they must have murdered her, because a drunken mother is a trial, and her loss would be a gain. A quarrel they had had with her on the last evening of her life (the reconciliation which followed was conveniently forgotten) lent colour to the theory.
The positive facts that the doctor, who was at once called, attributed the old woman’s death to apoplexy; that she not only left no money behind her, but that with her death expired the licence to make snuff, which was her son’s only means of livelihood; that the accused were known to have been patient and affectionate in their filial relationship; were themselves of quiet and gentle character; and that there was not a single witness to the crime for which they were arraigned—had no weight with either the populace or the magistrates.
On November 19, 1771, Montbailli was tortured and broken on the wheel; and his wife, aged only twenty-four, was left in prison in irons, awaiting the birth of her child, and then death by the hand of the executioner.
But that dreadful reprieve gave her relatives time to appeal to the only man in France who could save her.
Voltaire laid the matter before the Chancellor Maupeou. The case was re-tried. Both the Montbaillis were declared innocent. And that fickle and dangerous people who had compassed the death of her husband, and who, but for Voltaire, would have compassed her own, received back the wife with tears of joy.
Voltaire had not spared himself. If he wrote briefly, he wrote often. That style, so simple to read, was not nearly so simple to write. Before things are made clear to the reader they have to be still clearer to the writer, who must know at least twice as much as he tells. Then, too, every fresh case brought Voltaire others. While he was writing pamphlets for the Montbaillis, he was also writing pamphlets on the case of a certain Comte de Morangiés; he was working hard for young d’Étallonde; he was appealing for his own poor people of Ferney and Gex; and he was in the midst of the suit for the vindication of Lally.
General Lally was a hot-headed Irish Jacobite, who had plotted in France for the restoration of the Stuarts, and who, when he was sent to India in the service of France, had declared his policy to be “No more English in India.”
A clerk called Clive frustrated that little plan. Among a shipload of French prisoners sent to England was General Lally. England released him on parole. He returned to France—a country never noted for her tenderness to the unsuccessful. Besides popular indignation, he had to face that of the disappointed shareholders in the East India Company, and the ill-will of a government that supposed the best way to appease England would be to maltreat Lally.
He “was accused of all crimes” of which a man could be capable. He demanded an investigation. “I bring here my head and my innocence,” he wrote to Choiseul, “and await your orders.”
He awaited them for fifteen months in the Bastille—untried.