The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of such a disgrace. They stood around and talked of what they ought to do and what they were going to do until one of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent for the police, and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was immediately filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for the death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to prevent him from becoming a Catholic.”
In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial nest of eighteenth century France, with boredom like a black funeral pall hanging heavily upon the entire community, the most idiotic and fantastic yarns were given credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.
The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under such suspicious circumstances, at once arrested the entire family, their guests and their servants and every one who had recently been seen in or near the Calas home. They dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in irons and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most desperate criminals. The next day they were examined. All of them told the same story. How Marc Antony had come into the house in his usual spirits, how he had left the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his solitary walks, etc., etc.
By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse had taken a hand in the matter and with their help the dreadful news of this bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed one of his own children because he was about to return to the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout the land of Languedoc.
Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony, the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich patron of the local Basilica.
During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after the suicide, the trial began.
One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the wheel.
He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed, he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice, exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and ordered him to be strangled to death.
The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva.
The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods, wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to such a terrible death without very good reason.