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.