But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many others who had suffered as innocently as Calas.
In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead.
Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at the intercession of Voltaire, was set free.
These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what was to follow.
Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.
In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an income tax blank.
Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless idiot, much given to brooding. In March of the year 1764 she left her home. The parents searched far and wide but found no trace of the child until a few days later when the bishop of the district informed the father that the girl had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a nun and was now in a convent.
Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the spirit of the Protestants in that part of France. Sirven humbly answered that everything undoubtedly would be for the best in this worst of all possible worlds and meekly accepted the inevitable. But in the unaccustomed atmosphere of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the last vestiges of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself, she was returned to her own people. She was then in a state of terrible mental depression and in such continual horror of voices and spooks that her parents feared for her life. A short time afterwards she once more disappeared. Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.
At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people were in a mood to believe anything that was said against a Protestant. The Sirvens, remembering what had just happened to innocent Jean Calas, decided not to court a similar fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through the Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to death, they at last reached Switzerland. They had not left a moment too soon. A few months later, both the father and the mother were found guilty (in their absence) of the crime of having murdered their child and were ordered to be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the execution of their parents and thereafter to be banished for life.