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The story has the fatal progression, the dark rigidity, of one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks. Jean Calas, advanced in life, blameless, bewildered, protesting. his innocence, had been broken on the wheel; and the sight of his decent dwelling, which brought home to me all that had been suflered there, spoiled for me, for half an hour, the impression of Toulouse.
After the trials of Calas and Sirven, the punishment of the galleys was evidently drawing to an end. Only two persons were sent to the galleys during the year in which Pastor Rochette was hanged. But a circumstance came to light respecting one of the galley-slaves who had been liberated in that very year , which had the effect of eventually putting an end to the cruelty.
In a word, I was so prepossessed against my going by sea at all, except from Calas to Dover, that I resolved to travel all the way by land; which, as I was not in haste, and did not value the charge, was by much the pleasanter way: and to make it more so, my old captain brought an English gentleman, the son of a merchant in Lisbon, who was willing to travel with me; after which we picked up two more English merchants also, and two young Portuguese gentlemen, the last going to Paris only; so that in all there were six of us, and five servants; the two merchants and the two Portuguese contenting themselves with one servant between two, to save the charge; and as for me, I got an English sailor to travel with me as a servant, besides my man Friday, who was too much a stranger to be capable of supplying the place of a servant on the road.
The fact that these three came to light at all was owing to Voltaire himself. But for his penetration, his courage, and his skill, the terrible murder of Calas would to this day have remained unknown, and the dreadful affair of Abbeville would have been forgotten in a month.
Once, in the course of chaffering over the price of calas, he enounced an old current conviction which is not without holders even to this day; for we may still hear it said by those who will not be decoyed down from the mountain fastnesses of the old Southern doctrines, that their slaves were "the happiest people under the sun."
We'll stop at Peckham's Ranch and at the hotel in Calas on the way." "Whatever ye say," said Sam. "When do ye want to go?" "Day after to-morrow," responded Frances, briskly. "It will be all right then?" "Sure," agreed Silent Sam. "I'll fix ye up." Frances had several important things to do before the time stated. And, too, before that time, something quite unexpected happened.
He was the man who championed Calas? Who had a fowl in the pot for every poor wretch that passed his house? Who was taken to the Pantheon by the people in the Revolution?" "Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still to call without a heart or a God!" "Chut! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged.
Into the mouth of the victim was placed a horn holding three pints of water. In this way thirty pints of water were forced into the body of the sufferer. The pain was beyond description, and yet Jean Calas remained firm. He was then carried to a scaffold in a tumbril. He was bound to a wooden cross that lay on the scaffold.
"When the Family Calas were about to be executed unjustly, with the consent of all the lawyers and statesmen in France, one man in a nation saw the error, and fought for the innocent, and saved them; and that one wise man in a nation of fools was a writer of fiction." "Oh! a learned Oxonian can always answer a poor ignorant thing like me. One swallow does not make summer, for all that."
The fanaticism aroused in the townsfolk by this incident; the execution by torture of Jean Calas, accused as a Protestant of having hanged his son, who had gone over to the Church of Rome; the ruin of the family; the claustration of the daughters; the flight of the widow to Switzerland; her introduction to Voltaire; the excited zeal of that incomparable partisan and the passionate persistence with which, from year to year, he pursued a reversal of judgment till at last he obtained it and devoted the tribunal of Toulouse to execration and the name of the victims to lasting wonder and pity these things form part of one of the most interesting and touching episodes of the social history of the eighteenth century.
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