and convinced Voltaire of the entire innocence of the family.

Voltaire was no friend of the Huguenots. He believed the Huguenot
spirit to be a republican spirit. In his "Siecle de Louis XIV.," when
treating of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he affirmed that
the Reformed were the enemies of the State; and though he depicted
feelingly the cruelties they had suffered, he also stated clearly that
he thought they had deserved them. Voltaire probably owed his hatred
of the Protestants to the Jesuits, by whom he was educated. He was
brought up at the Jesuit College of Louis le Grand, the chief
persecutor of the Huguenots. Voltaire also owed much of the looseness
of his principles to his godfather, the Abbe Chateauneuf, grand-prior
of Vendome, the Abbe de Chalieu, and others, who educated him in an
utter contempt for the doctrines they were appointed and paid to
teach. It was when but a mere youth that Father Lejay, one of
Voltaire's instructors, predicted that he would yet be the Coryphaeus
of Deism in France.

Nor was Voltaire better pleased with the Swiss Calvinists. He
encountered some of the most pedantic of them while residing at
Lausanne and Geneva.[75] At the latter place, he covered with sarcasm
the "twenty-four periwigs"--the Protestant council of the city. They
would not allow him to set up a theatre in Geneva, so he determined to
set up one himself at La Chatelaine, about a mile off, but beyond the
Genevese frontier. His object, he professed, was "to corrupt the
pedantic city." The theatre is still standing, though it is now used
only as a hayloft. The box is preserved from which Voltaire cheered
the performance of his own and other plays.

[Footnote 75: While Voltaire lived at Lausanne, one of the
baillies (the chief magistrates of the city) said to him:
"Monsieur de Voltaire, they say that you have written against
the good God: it is very wrong, but I hope He will pardon
you.... But, Monsieur de Voltaire, take very good care not to
write against their excellencies of Berne, our sovereign
lords, for be assured that they will _never_ forgive you."]

But though Voltaire hated Protestantism like every other religion, he
also hated injustice. It was because of this that he took up the case
of the Calas family, so soon as he had become satisfied of their
innocence. But what a difficulty he had to encounter in endeavouring
to upset the decision o