Then a special court was formed of fifteen members of the dying and rotten Parliament of Paris; and this man, who had “spent his last rupee in the public service,” was accused of having sold Pondichery to his bitterest foes, the English, and upon no fewer than one hundred and fifty-nine other counts.
In the teeth of all testimony the unanimous voice of those fifteen judges condemned him to be beheaded. Surly, churlish, and embittered, imprudent speech was proven against him. But no worse offence. “He is the only man who has had his head cut off for being ungracious.” That coward, the King, shut himself up in Choisy, so that no petition for mercy might reach him.
On May 6, 1766, Lally, General, sixty-four years old, and six times wounded in the service of his adopted country, was taken, gagged and handcuffed, to the Place de Grève and there beheaded. The gag was removed at the foot of the scaffold. But he was wise enough to disappoint the mob, and died without a word.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” That spirit is not extinct in France yet.
But if Lally’s innocent blood cried in vain from the ground to King, magistracy, and mob, it reached old ears that to their last hour would never be deaf to the tale of wrong.
“I have the vanity to think that God has made me for an avocat,” said Voltaire.
He had closely followed the General’s trial. His prosecutor was Pasquier, who had received a royal pension for condemning poor mad Damiens to horrible tortures—Pasquier, “with the snout of an ox and the heart of a tiger,” and Voltaire’s especial detestation.
It may have been that hatred which first made him examine the documents concerning this trial. Also, he had met Lally at Richelieu’s, and worked with him at d’Argenson’s.
On June 16, 1766, he wrote to d’Alembert, “I will stake my neck on it he was not a traitor”; and a few days later, to d’Argental, “It is my fate to be dissatisfied with the sentences of the Parliament. I dare to be so with that which has condemned Lally.”
Dissatisfied with wrong? There have been thousands of men good enough for that, who have lived and died dissatisfied with it, without lifting a finger to put right in its place.