For three years, with a constancy which he often managed to conceal beneath an appearance of levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing the Calas.  “It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate family,” said Diderot to Mdlle.  Voland:  “O, my friend, what a noble work for genius!  This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue.  Why, what are the Calas to him?  What can awaken his interest in them?  What reason has he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?” From the borders of the Lake of Geneva, from his solitude at Genthod, Charles Bonnet, far from favorable generally to Voltaire, writes to Haller, “Voltaire has done a work on tolerance which is said to be good; he will not publish it until after the affair of the unfortunate Calas has been decided by the king’s council.  Voltaire’s zeal for these unfortunates might cover a multitude of sins; that zeal does not relax, and, if they obtain satisfaction, it will be principally to his championship that they will owe it.  He receives much commendation for this business, and he deserves it fully.”

The sentence of the council cleared the accused and the memory of John Calas, ordering that their names should be erased and effaced from the registers, and the judgment transcribed upon the margin of the charge-sheet.  The king at the same time granted Madame Calas and her children a gratuity of thirty-six thousand livres, a tacit and inadequate compensation for the expenses and losses caused them by the fanatical injustice of the Parliament of Toulouse.  Madame Calas asked no more.  “To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders,” said a letter to Voltaire from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, “requires the permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission, through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused.”

Voltaire, however, was triumphant.  “You were at Paris,” he writes to M. de Cideville, “when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily.  The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest fifth act there is on the stage.”  Henceforth he finds himself transformed into the defender of the oppressed.  The Protestant Chaumont, at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank Voltaire.  The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the interview to Paul Rabaut:  “I told him that I had brought him a little fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having, by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to bring in.  At the name of Chaumont M. de Voltaire showed a transport of joy, and rang at once to have him brought in.  Never did any scene appear to me more amusing and