During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation until finally in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse to surrender all the records in the Calas case and moved that there be a new trial. The widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles when this decision was made public. A year later the special court which had been ordered to investigate the appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done to death for a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts the King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon the widow and her children. Furthermore the magistrates who had handled the Calas case were deprived of their office and it was politely suggested to the people of Toulouse that such a thing must not happen again. But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many others who had suffered as innocently as Calas. In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead. Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at the intercession of Voltaire, was set free. These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what was to follow. Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry. In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an income tax blank.