1In the south of France stood the city of Toulouse, built of rose-red brick. It was a devout city and a proud one. Every year it kept a feast, with processions and bonfires, to remember a day two hundred years gone when its people had risen and killed some four thousand of their neighbours for praying in the new way and not the old.
2In the time of this story, those who prayed in the new way were called Protestants, and the law of France did not admit that they existed. Their marriages were no marriages. Their pastors, when caught, were hanged. They could not be lawyers or doctors or hold any office. But they could buy and sell, and so a few hundred of them still lived in Toulouse, quietly, behind their shop counters.
3One of these was a seller of printed cloth named Jean Calas. He was sixty-three years old, with weak legs. He had kept his shop in the street of the thread-sellers for forty years and had never been before a judge. He had a wife, four sons and two daughters. And he had a serving-woman named Jeanne, a devout Catholic, who had been with the family near thirty years and had raised every one of the children.
4Mark this about Jeanne, for it matters. One of the sons, Louis, had left his father's faith and become a Catholic, and it was Jeanne who had led him to it. Jean Calas was grieved. He did not turn her out. He did not cast off the boy either, but paid him an allowance, as the law required and as he would have done without the law. That was the kind of man he was.
5The youngest son was named Donat. He was apprenticed to a merchant in another town, some days' ride away, and he was not at home on the night it happened. That is why he lived free to tell it.
6It was an evening in October. The family sat at supper in the room above the shop: the father, the mother, the eldest son Marc-Antoine, the second son Pierre, and a young friend who was passing through. Jeanne served. Marc-Antoine was twenty-eight, a clever, gloomy man. He had studied for the law, and had found at the end that he could not be admitted without a paper from a priest swearing he was a Catholic. He would not lie for it, and he hated the shop. He had taken to dice.
7He ate little. Before the meal was done he rose and went down the stairs. Jeanne told him to come near the fire. He said, "I am burning." They thought he had gone out to walk, as he often did.
8Some hours later the friend took his leave, and Pierre went down with a candle to light him to the street door. The door of the shop stood open. They held up the candle, and they saw the elder brother.
9He had hanged himself between the two leaves of the inner door.
10Now hear the first Closing, for it was made by the family themselves, out of love. In that country the body of one who took his own life was tried like a living criminal. It was dragged naked through the streets on a hurdle, face down, while the people threw mud, and then hung on the gibbet. The old father could not bear that for his son. In his first horror he told the others: say we found him lying on the floor. Say someone must have come in from the street and done it.
11It was a small lie, told to spare the dead. It cost him everything.
12The cries had brought the street to the door. A crowd filled the shop with torches. And someone in that crowd, no one ever learned who, called out a sentence. "The father has done it! The boy was going to turn Catholic tomorrow, and the Huguenots have strangled him!"
13There was no truth in it. Marc-Antoine had never said a word of changing his faith. But the sentence ran through Toulouse that night faster than a man could ride, and by morning the whole city knew it for a fact.
14A magistrate came, a hot, hasty man who wished to make his name. He did not look at the door or the rope. He did not search the shop. He had the father, the mother, Pierre, the young guest and old Jeanne all marched to the cells of the town hall by torchlight. It is told that Jean Calas left a candle burning in his passage, thinking he would be home within the hour. He never saw the house again.
15Then the city went mad in a solemn way. The dead man was declared a martyr. The brotherhoods of penitents, in their white hoods, carried him to the church with banners. Over the bier they set up a skeleton, borrowed from a surgeon, holding in one hand a palm branch and in the other a paper on which was written: I renounce heresy. Masses were said for him in every chapel. After that, who could say he had hanged himself for debts at dice?
16The trial lasted five months. The family had told two stories, and that was held against them. No one asked how a lame man of sixty-three had overpowered the strongest of his sons with no cry heard and no bruise on either. No one asked why a Catholic servant of thirty years would stand by and watch a young man murdered for wishing to join her own church. There were thirteen judges. In the end eight of them voted for death, and that was enough.
17They thought, even then, that the old man would confess on the wheel and name the others. He was put to the question first, with ropes and then with water. He named no one. He said there was nothing to name.
18On a March day he was taken in a cart to the square. What was done there took two hours, and it will not be set down here. Know that it was the law's hardest death, and that a priest stood beside him to the end, urging him to confess. He said only that he died innocent, and he prayed that his judges might be forgiven, for they had been deceived. The priest came down from the scaffold weeping, and told the crowd that this was how the martyrs used to die.
19Because he had confessed nothing, the court could not well hang the rest. Pierre was banished. The two daughters were shut in convents. The widow was put out into the street without a coin, and the shop and all in it were seized by the crown. And the youngest son, Donat, got a letter in a hand he did not know, telling him to leave France that night.
20He went on foot over the mountains to Geneva. He was twenty-two. He had a few coins, and a name that was now the name of a child-murderer, and no trade he could follow in a strange town. He found work with a cloth-seller who asked no questions. He did not speak of where he came from.
21Now a short ride from Geneva, just over the French line, lived the most famous writer in Europe. Voltaire was nearly seventy. He had no teeth, and wore a nightcap at noon, and believed himself to be dying, as he had believed for forty years. He had bought a great house with a garden at a village called Ferney, close to the border, for the old reason: so that if the king's men came by the front, he might be in another country by the back.
22He had written a tale not long before, a bitter, laughing tale about a young man kicked through every misery the world holds. It ended with the young man on a small farm, having given up hope of mending the world, saying only this: "we must cultivate our garden." All Europe had read it. And Voltaire had taken his own advice. He planted trees. He bred horses. He was done with the world.
23A merchant passing through from the south told him the story of Calas at dinner. Voltaire shrugged at first. A fanatic Huguenot had killed his son, or fanatic judges had killed an innocent man; either way, he said, it was a fine picture of the times.
24But the thing would not leave him. If the father was guilty, it was the most unnatural crime of the age. If he was innocent, then eight judges and a city had done a murder with all the forms of law, and would do it again. One or the other was true. Which?
25He learned that a son of the dead man was hiding in Geneva. He sent for him.
26Donat came to Ferney in his one coat, expecting he knew not what. He was shown into a room full of books, and a very old, very thin man in a furred gown looked at him with eyes like a bird's.
27Voltaire did not comfort him. He questioned him, for hours, as a judge should have done and none had. What was your father's temper? Did he ever strike you? Did he strike your brother Louis, when Louis changed his faith? What did your mother say then? What kind of man was Marc-Antoine? Did he owe money? Did you ever hear him speak of becoming a Catholic?
28Donat answered as well as he could. He said that his father had never raised a hand to any of them in his life. He said that his parents had wept over Louis and had gone on feeding him. He said that his brother was unhappy, and read books about self-murder, and that he, Donat, had been afraid for him. He was a plain young man with no art in him. Halfway through he began to cry, and was ashamed, and went on answering.
29Voltaire watched him. He had spent sixty years among liars: courtiers, actors, kings. He knew the look of the thing. He did not see it here.
30Still he did not trust his own eyes. He wrote to Toulouse, to men of both faiths. He wrote to lawyers. When Pierre, the banished brother, got away and came to Geneva, Voltaire had him in and questioned him apart, to see whether the two tales matched in the small things, where liars forget to agree. They matched.
31Then he was sure. And then he was ashamed of his garden.
32Listen to what one old man did from a writing table. No one in France could make the court of Toulouse so much as show its papers, except the king in council.
33So Voltaire set out to move the king in council. He wrote letters, ten and twenty in a day, by candle, in bed, propped on pillows. He wrote to dukes and to duchesses, to the king's ministers, to the king's lady, to bankers, to every person of weight he had ever flattered or amused. He paid lawyers in Paris out of his own purse. He raised money in England, in Holland, in Geneva, wherever his name would open a purse.
34He found the widow, who was hiding in a village, broken, wanting only to be left alone. He persuaded her that she must go to Paris and be seen, and he paid for her coach. He wrote a book on why people of different faiths should bear with one another, and built it round the death of Jean Calas, and it was read from Lisbon to Petersburg.
35He was not a gentle man. He did some of it out of hatred for the kind of mind that had lit the bonfires at Toulouse. But here is a thing to notice. He did not say that the faith of those judges was the crime. One of the first to speak for the family was a nun in the convent where a Calas daughter was shut up. She had come to love the girl, and she wrote to great persons in Paris that these were good people, falsely accused. Voltaire had her letter copied and sent everywhere. The fault he hunted was not in a creed. It was in a closed mind with a rope in its hand.
36It took three years. Donat lived that time in Geneva, selling cloth, and walked out to Ferney on Sundays to answer some new small question about the shop door. Within a year the king's council agreed to hear the matter, and ordered the court of Toulouse to send its records. In the second year the old sentence was struck down. In the third year, forty judges of the king's own household sat in Paris and read every page.
37On the ninth day of March, three years to the day after the sentence, they gave their finding. All forty were of one mind. Jean Calas was innocent. His name was restored, and the names of his wife, his sons, his servant and his guest. The king gave the family a sum of money from his own treasury. The hasty magistrate of Toulouse was put out of his office.
38The news reached Ferney by courier some days later. Donat was there. He never forgot how the old man opened the packet, and read it, and read it again, and could not speak; and then how the two of them, the most famous man in Europe and a draper's boy, stood in the room among the books and wept like children.
39Nothing had been undone. Jean Calas was still dead, and no court on earth could give him back the two hours on that square. Voltaire knew it. That was the bitterness in the cup.
40But something had been opened that had been shut. In all the years before, a court in France had answered to no one for what it did in its own chambers. Now a draper's widow had made the highest court of a province eat its sentence in the sight of Europe. Other families came to Ferney after that, with other stories, and the old man took up one after another until he died. Within a lifetime the wheel and the question by torture were struck out of the laws of France. They went because people had been made to look at them.
41And Voltaire had been changed. He had told the world to cultivate its garden. He found that his garden had no wall on the side of Toulouse. The rope in that shop doorway had been tied to him the whole time, and to everyone, and he had only needed to pull on it to feel it.
42Far to the north and east, on the cold sea, in a town of seven bridges, there lived a small man who had never left his own province and never would. He kept his hours so exactly that it was said his neighbours set their clocks by him. He was asking what it is in a person that no court and no king has the right to use. Now hear how he answered, and what it cost him.