(John), the name of a most unfortunate Protestant merchant at Toulouse, inhumanly butchered under forms of law cruelly prostituted to shelter the languishing dictates of ignorant Popish zeal. He had lived... lived 40 years at Toulouse. His wife was an English woman of French extraction; and they had five sons; one of whom, Lewis, had turned Catholic through the persuasions of a Catholic maid who had lived 30 years in the family. In October 1761, the family consisted of Calas, his wife, Mark Anthony their son, Peter their second son, and this maid. Anthony was educated for the bar; but being of a melancholy turn of mind, was continually dwelling on passages from authors on the subject of suicide, and one night in that month hanged himself on a bar laid across two folding doors in their shop. The crowd collected by the confusion of the family on so shocking a discovery, took it into their heads that he had been strangled by the family to prevent his changing his religion, and that this was a common practice among Protestants. The officers of justice adopted the popular tale, and were supplied by the mob with what they accepted as evidences of the fact. The fraternity of white penitents got the body, buried it with great ceremony, and performed a solemn service for him as a martyr; the Franciscans did the same: and after these formalities no one doubted the guilt of the devoted heretical family. They were all condemned to the torture, to bring them to confession: they appealed to the parliament; who, as weak and as wicked as the subordinate magistrates, sentenced the father to the torture ordinary and extraordinary, to be broken alive upon the wheel, and then to be burned to ashes. A diabolical decree! which to the shame of humanity was actually carried into execution. Peter Calas, the other son, was banished for life; and the rest were acquitted. The distracted widow found some friends, and among the rest M. Voltaire, who laid her case before the council of state at Versailles, and the parliament of Toulouse were ordered to transmit the proceedings; which argued something like a disposition toward examining into the treatment of this injured family; but France being a Popish government, the voice of justice was stifled.