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.