The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva. The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods, wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to such a terrible death without very good reason. But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open house to all comers and no questions asked, had a visit from an honest merchant from Marseilles who had happened to be in Toulouse at the time of the trial and who was able to give him some first-hand information. Then at last he began to understand the horror of the crime that had been committed and from that moment on he could think of nothing else. There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just. Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should dare to accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder, and he prepared his case as carefully as if he had been a professional attorney. He interviewed the Calas boy who had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every one who could possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions, lest his anger and his indignation carry him away. And when he felt sure of his ground, he opened his campaign.