But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he was right, and the French poetry of the Prussian king was atrocious. But His Majesty’s attitude upon the subject of religious liberty left nothing to be desired and that was more than could be said of any other European monarch.
And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned to his native land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal sentences by which the French courts tried to maintain order without some very scathing words of protest. All his life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on the sixth day of creation had bestowed upon the most sublime product of His handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated and loathed stupidity in every shape, form and manner. The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of his anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening to demolish, this “infamous enemy” was nothing more or less than the lazy stupidity of the mass of the people who refused to think for themselves as long as they had enough to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.
From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself pursued by a gigantic machine which seemed to move through sheer force of lethargy and combined the cruelty of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency of Juggernaut. To destroy or at least upset this contraption become the obsession of his old years, and the French government, to give this particular devil his due, ably assisted him in his efforts by providing the world with a choice collection of legal scandals.
The first one occurred in the year 1761.
In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France there lived a certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant. Toulouse had always been a pious city. No Protestant was there allowed to hold office or to be a doctor or a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was permitted to keep a Protestant servant. And on August 23rd and 24th of each year the entire community celebrated the glorious anniversary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew with a solemn feast of praise and thanksgiving.
Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had lived all his life in complete harmony with his neighbors. One of his sons had turned Catholic, but the father had continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children were entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them best.
But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was Marc Antony, the oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but that career was closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and refused to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused an attack of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey upon the young man’s mind. He began to entertain his father and mother with long recitations of Hamlet’s well known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.
This went on for some time and then one night, while the family was entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped into his father’s storeroom, took a piece of packing rope and hanged himself from the doorpost.
There his father found him a few hours later, his coat and vest neatly folded upon the counter.
The family was in despair. In those days the body of a person who had committed suicide was dragged nude and face downward through the streets of the town and was hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by the birds.