THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE I?9
ficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all, they
might not yet make him into a good Capuchin. "What were the events
that turned him from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to a bitter anti-
clericalism which admitted no compromise, but waged relentless war to
"crush the infamy" of ecclesiasticism?
Not far from Ferney lay Toulouse, the seventh city of France. In Vol-
taire's day the Catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty there; the
city commemorated with frescoes the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(an edict which had given freedom of worship to Protestants), and celebrated
as a great feast the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. No
Protestant in Toulouse could be a lawyer, or a physician, or an apothecary,
or a grocer, or a book-seller, or a printer; nor could a Catholic
keep a Protestant servant or clerk in 1748 a woman had been fined
3000 francs for using a Protestant midwife.
Now it happened that Jean Galas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had a
daughter who became a Catholic, and a son who hanged himself, presumably
because of disappointment in business. There was a law in
Toulouse that every suicide should be placed naked on a hurdle, with
face down, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet.
The father, to avert this, asked his relatives and his friends to testify to
a natural death. In consequence, rumor began to talk of murder, and to
bint that the father had killed the son to prevent his imminent con-
version to Catholicism. Galas was arrested, put to the torture, and died
soon after (1761). His family, ruined and hunted, fled to Ferney, and
sought the aid of Voltaire. He took them into his home, comforted them,
and marveled at the story of medieval persecution which they told.
About the same time (1762) came the death of Elizabeth Sirvens;
again rumor charged that she had been pushed into a well just as she
was about to announce her conversion to Catholicism. That a timid
minority of Protestants would hardly dare to behave in this way was a
rational consideration, and therefore out of the purview of rumor. In
1765 a young man by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was arrested
on the charge of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he
confessed his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body was flung into
the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of Voltaire's Philosophic
Dictionary, which had been found on the lad, was burned with him.
For almost the first time in his life, Voltaire became a thoroughly
serious man. When d'Alembert, disgusted equally with state, church and
people, wrote that hereafter he would merely mock at everything, Voltaire
answered, "This is not a time for jesting; wit does not harmonize
with massacres. ... Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It
is rather the country of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew." It was with
Voltaire now as with Zola and Anatole France in the case of Dreyfus;
this tyrannous injustice lifted him up; he ceased to be merely a mar* of