in demanding vengeance.
In this strange affair, we find religion, self-murder and parricide blended. The object of inquiry was, whether a father and a mother had murdered their own son with a view to please God, and whether a brother had murdered his brother, or a friend his friend; or whether the judges had to reproach themselves with having publicly executed an innocent father, or with having acquitted a guilty mother, brother, and friend.
John Calas, a person of sixty-eight years of age, had followed the profession of a merchant in Toulouse for upwards of forty years, and had always borne the character of a tender parent in his family and neighborhood; he was himself by religion a Protestant, as was also his wife, and all his children, one son only excepted, who had abjured heresy, and to whom the father allowed a small annuity; indeed, the good man appeared so far from being infected with that absurd zeal which destroys the bands of society, that he even approved of the conversion of his son, Louis Calas. He had for above thirty years kept in his house a maid-servant, who was a zealous Catholic, and who had brought up all his children.
Another of his sons, whose name was Mark Antony, was a man of letters, but, at the same time, of a restless, gloomy, and impetuous disposition. This young man finding that he had no prospect of getting into business as a merchant, for which indeed he was very unfit, nor of being admitted to the bar as a lawyer, as not being able to obtain the requisite certificates of his being a Catholic, resolved to lay violent hands upon himself, and gave some intimation of his design to one of his friends. In order to confirm himself in the resolution he had formed, he carefully collected everything that had been written upon the subject of suicide, all of which he read with great attention; at length, one day, having lost all his money at play, he chose that as a most proper opportunity for putting his design into execution. One Lavaisse, a young man of nineteen years of age, the son of a lawyer in great repute at Toulouse, and who was esteemed by every one who knew him, happened to come from Bordeaux the evening before,1 when he went by chance to sup with the Calas family at their house, being an acquaintance of that family’s, and of Mark Antony Calas in particular. Old Calas, his wife, Mark Antony, their eldest son, and Peter their second son, supped all together that evening; after supper was over, they retired into another room, where Mark Antony suddenly disappeared. After some time, young Lavaisse took his leave, and Peter Calas accompanied him downstairs; when they came to the warehouse they saw Mark Antony hanging in his shirt behind the door, and his coat and waistcoat folded up and laid upon the counter; his shirt was not in the least rumpled, nor his hair, which he had dressed that day, in any wise disordered; there was no wound upon his body, nor any other mark of violence.2
We shall not here enter into all the minute circumstances with which the lawyers have filled their briefs; nor shall we attempt to describe the grief and distraction of the unhappy parents; their cries were heard by the whole neighborhood. Lavaisse and Peter Calas, almost beside themselves, ran, the one to fetch a surgeon, and the other an officer of justice. While they were thus employed, and old Calas and his wife in all the agonies of grief, the people of the town gathered in crowds about the house. The Toulousians are a superstitious and headstrong people, and look upon all persons, even their own relations, who are not of the same religion as themselves, as monsters and objects of detestation. It was at Toulouse that a solemn thanksgiving was ordered for the death of Henry III. and that the inhabitants took an oath to murder the first person who should propose to acknowledge that great and good prince Henry IV. for their sovereign; and this same city still continues to solemnize, by an annual procession, illuminations, and bonfires, the day on which, about two hundred years ago, it ordered the massacre of four thousand of its citizens for being heretics. In vain has the council issued six decrees prohibiting the keeping of this detestable anniversary, the Toulousians still continuing to celebrate it as a high festival.
Some one among the mob, a greater enthusiast than the rest, cried out that John Calas himself had hanged his son; this cry became in an instant unanimous, some persons taking occasion to observe that the deceased was to have made his abjuration the next day, and that his own family and young Lavaisse had murdered him out of the hatred they bore to the Catholic religion. No sooner was this opinion broached, than it was fully believed by every one; and the whole town was persuaded that it is one of the articles of the Protestant religion for a father or mother to murder their own son, if he attempts to show any inclination to change his faith.
When the minds of the populace are once put into a ferment they are not easily appeased; it was now imagined that all the Protestants of Languedoc had assembled together the preceding night, and had chosen by a plurality of voices one of their sect for an executioner; that the choice had fallen upon Lavaisse; that this young man had, in less than four and twenty hours, received the news of his election, and had come from Bordeaux to assist John Calas, his wife, and their son Peter, to murder a son, a brother, and a friend.
The Sieur David, capitoul of Toulouse, instigated by these rumors, and being desirous of bringing himself into notice, by the ready execution of his office, took a step contrary to all the established rules and ordinances, by ordering the Calas family, together with their Catholic maid-servant and Lavaisse, to be put in irons.
After this a monitory was published, which was as erroneous as the former step. Nay, matters were carried still farther; Mark Antony Calas had certainly died a Calvinist, and as such, if he had laid violent hands on himself, his body ought to have been dragged on a hurdle; whereas it was interred with the greatest funeral pomp in the church of St. Stephen, notwithstanding the curate entered his protest against this profanation of holy ground.
There are in Languedoc four orders of penitents, the white, the blue, the gray, and the black, who wear a long capuchin or hood, having a mask of cloth falling down over the face, in which are two holes for the sight. These orders wanted the Duke of Fitz-James to become one of their body, but he refused them. On the present occasion the white penitents performed a solemn service for Mark Antony Calas as for a martyr; nor was the festival of a real martyr ever celebrated with greater pomp by any church: but then this pomp was truly terrible. Beneath a magnificent canopy was placed a skeleton, which was made to move by springs; this skeleton was to represent Mark Antony Calas, holding in one hand a branch of palm, and, in the other, the pen with which he was to sign his abjuration of heresy; or rather, as the sequel proved, the death-warrant of his father.
And now nothing more remained to be done for this wretch who had been his own murderer but the office of canonization; the people, already to a man, looked on him as a saint; some invoked him, some went to pray at his tomb, some besought him to work miracles, while others gravely recounted those he had already performed; a monk pulled out one or two of his teeth, in order to have some lasting relics; an old woman, more pious than the rest, but unhappily troubled with a deafness, declared that she had heard the sound of bells very plainly at his interment; and a priest was cured of an apoplectic fit, after taking a stout emetic; protocols were drawn up of these stupendous miracles, and the author of this account has in his possession an affidavit to prove that a young man of Toulouse had his brain turned, on having prayed several nights successively at the tomb of the new saint, without having been able to obtain the miracle he requested of him.
Among the order of the white penitents there were some magistrates of justice; the death of John Calas seemed then inevitable.
But what more particularly hastened his fate was the approach of that singular festival, which, as I have already observed, the Toulousians celebrate every year, in commemoration of the massacre of four thousand Huguenots; the year 1762 happened to be the annum seculare of this execrable deed. The inhabitants were busied in making preparations for the solemnity; this circumstance added fresh fuel to the heated imagination of the populace; every one cried out that a scaffold for the execution of the Calas family would be one of the greatest ornaments of the ceremony; and that heaven itself seemed to have brought them thither as victims, to be sacrificed to our holy religion. Twenty persons were ear-witnesses to these speeches, and to others still more outrageous. And this, in the present age! this at a time when philosophy has made so great a progress! and while the pens of a hundred
