This was the work of Voltaire.
THE SIRVEN FAMILY.
Sirven, a Protestant, lived in Languedoc with his wife and three daughters. The housekeeper of the bishop wanted to make one of the daughters a Catholic.
The law allowed the bishop to take the child of Protestants from their parents for the sake of its soul. This little girl was so taken and placed in a convent. She ran away and came back to her parents. Her poor little body was covered with the marks of the convent whip.
"Suffer little children to come unto me."
The child was out of her mind—suddenly she disappeared, and a few days after her little body was found in a well, three miles from home.
The cry was raised that her folks had murdered her to keep her from becoming a Catholic.
This happened only a little way from the Christian City of Toulouse while Jean Calas was in prison. The Sirvens knew that a trial would end in conviction. They fled. In their absence they were convicted, their property confiscated, the parents sentenced to die by the hangman, the daughters to be under the gallows during the execution of their mother, and then to be exiled.
The family fled in the midst of winter; the married daughter gave birth to a child in the snows of the Alps; the mother died, and, at last reaching Switzerland, the father found himself without means of support.
They went to Voltaire. He espoused their cause. He took care of them, gave them the means to live, and labored to annul the sentence that had been pronounced against them for nine long and weary years. He appealed to kings for money, to Catharine II. of Russia, and to hundreds of others. He was successful. He said of this case: The Sirvens were tried and condemned in two hours in January, 1762, and now in January, 1772, after ten years of effort, they have been restored to their rights.