Footnote 68: The King granted 480 livres of reward to the spy who detected Benezet and procured his apprehension by the soldiers.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 69: Ripert de Monclar, procureur-général, writing in 1755, says: "According to the jurisprudence of this kingdom, there are no French Protestants, and yet, according to the truth of facts, there are three millions. These imaginary beings fill the towns, provinces, and rural districts, and the capital alone contains sixty thousand of them."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 70: Athanase Coquerel, "Les Forçats pour la Foi," 91.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 71: "Madame de Pompadour découvrit que Louis XV. pourrait lui-même s'amuser à faire l'éducation de ces jeunes malheureuses. De petites filles de neuf à douze ans, lorsqu'elles avaient attiré les regards de la police par leur beauté, étaient enlevées à leurs mères par plusieurs artifices, conduites à Versailles, et retenues dans les parties les plus élevées et les plus inaccessibles des petits appartements du roi.... Le nombre des malheureuses qui passèrent successivement à Parc-aux-Cerfs est immense; à leur sortie elles étaient mariées à des hommes vils ou crédules auxquels elles apportaient une bonne dot. Quelques unes conservaient un traitement fort considerable." "Les dépenses du Parc-aux-Cerfs, dit Lacratelle, se payaient avec des acquits du comptant. Il est difficile de les évaluer; mais il ne peut y avoir aucune exagération à affirmer qu'elles coûtèrent plus de 100 millions à l'État. Dans quelques libelles on les porte jusqu'à un milliard."—Sismondi, Histoire de Française, Brussels, 1844, xx. 153-4. The account given by Sismondi of the debauches of this persecutor of the Huguenots is very full. It is not given in the "Old Court Life of France," recently written by a lady.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 72: Sismondi, xx. 157.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 73: Sismondi, xx. 328.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 74: To be broken alive on the wheel was one of the most horrible of tortures, a bequest from ages of violence and barbarism. It was preserved in France mainly for the punishment of Protestants. The prisoner was extended on a St. Andrew's cross, with eight notches cut on it—one below each arm between the elbow and wrist, another between each elbow and the shoulders, one under each thigh, and one under each leg. The executioner, armed with a heavy triangular bar of iron, gave a heavy blow on each of these eight places, and broke the bone. Another blow was given in the pit of the stomach. The mangled victim was lifted from the cross and stretched on a small wheel placed vertically at one of the ends of the cross, his back on the upper part of the wheel, his head and feet hanging down. There the tortured creature hung until he died. Some lingered five or six hours, others much longer. This horrible method of torture was only abolished at the French Revolution in 1790.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 75: While Voltaire lived at Lausanne, one of the baillies (the chief magistrates of the city) said to him: "Monsieur de Voltaire, they say that you have written against the good God: it is very wrong, but I hope He will pardon you.... But, Monsieur de Voltaire, take very good care not to write against their excellencies of Berne, our sovereign lords, for be assured that they will never forgive you."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 76: It may be added that, after the reversal of the sentence, David, the judge who had first condemned Calas, went insane, and died in a madhouse.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 77: The Huguenots sometimes owed their release from the galleys to money payments made by Protestants (but this was done secretly), the price of a galley-slave being about a thousand crowns; sometimes they owed it to the influence of Protestant princes; but never to the voluntary mercy of the Catholics. In 1742, while France was at war with England, and Prussia was quietly looking on, Antoine Court made an appeal to Frederick the Great, and at his intervention with Louis XV. thirty galley-slaves were liberated. The Margrave of Bayreuth, Culmbach and his wife, the sister of the Great Frederick, afterwards visited the galleys at Toulon, and succeeded in obtaining the liberation of several galley-slaves.[Back to Main Text]