Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony, the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich patron of the local Basilica. During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after the suicide, the trial began. One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the wheel. He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed, he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice, exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and ordered him to be strangled to death.