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Updated: June 8, 2025
The widow of Jean Calas always fell in a faint when she heard the words of the death-decree sounded on the street. There was a Hanoverian officer in the Indian war against Typoo-Saib, a good and brave soldier, who would feel sick if he heard the word "tiger" pronounced. It was said that he had experienced the ravages of this beast. The therapeutic value of music has long been known.
Voltaire pleading for the Calas will not make me turn my back on religious liberty; Channing writing pages against slavery, revealing a heart more Christian than his doctrine; Parker, blending his noble efforts in favor of the negroes with his assaults against the Bible, will not alienate me from a cause which was mine before it was theirs.
"I ought to look upon myself as in some sort a witness," he writes: "several months ago Peter Calas, who is accused of having assisted his father and mother in a murder, was in my neighborhood with another of his brothers. I have wavered a long while as to the innocence of this family; I could not believe that any judges would have condemned to a fearful death an innocent father of a family.
He received under his protection at Geneva the widow and children of the Protestant Calas, who had been broken on the wheel in 1762 because he was falsely declared to have killed his son in order to prevent his turning Catholic.
This nobleman was a just man, and it had been in a great measure through his influence that the judgment of Calas had been reconsidered and reversed. Fabre, while on the rowers' bench, had often met with a M. Johannot, a French Protestant, settled at Frankfort-on-Maine, to whom he stated his case.
I preserve every word of yours as a dear consolation; I guard each of your promises as a holy hope. Voltaire has saved Calas. Sing for me, sir, and I will bless your memory to the day of my death. I am innocent!... For eight long years I have suffered; and I am still suffering from the stain upon my honour. I grieve for a sight of the sun, but I still love life. Sing for me."
Such were his noble defence of the Calas family, his successful attack upon the outrages committed upon Sirven and his family, securing the liberation of Espinasse from the galleys, the vindication of General Lally, and the brave battle for D'Etalonde and La Barre, together with many other cases in which his powerful pen proved its strength in defence of the weak against the oppression of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny.
He appealed to philosophers, to men of letters, to ladies of the court, and even to priests and bishops, denouncing the sentence pronounced against Calas, the most iniquitous, he said, that any court professing to act in the name of justice had ever pronounced. Ferney was visited by many foreigners, from Germany, America, England, and Russia; as well as by numerous persons of influence in France.
Her mental activity was evinced not more in the cunning aptness of her songs than in the droll wisdom of her sayings. Not the melody only, but the often audacious, epigrammatic philosophy of her tongue as well, sold her calas and gingercakes. But in one direction her wisdom proved scant. She presumed too much on her insignificance.
There was a word or two more exchanged, and then, after a moment of silence, with a gentle "Eh, bien," and a gesture to which they were accustomed, he stepped away backward, they resumed their hurried walk and talk, and he turned into the rue Bienville. "I tell you," Doctor Keene used to say, "that old woman's a thinker." His allusion was to Clemence, the marchande des calas.
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