ltaire's instructions and with his help, succeeded in
obtaining the judges' unanimous decision that Sirven was innocent of
the crime for which he had already been sentenced to death.

After this, there were no further executions of Protestants in France.
But what became of the Huguenots at the galleys, who still continued
to endure a punishment from day to day, even worse than death
itself?[77] Although, they were often cut off by fever, starvation,
and exposure, many of them contrived to live on to a considerable age.
After the trials of Calas and Sirven, the punishment of the galleys
was evidently drawing to an end. Only two persons were sent to the
galleys during the year in which Pastor Rochette was hanged. But a
circumstance came to light respecting one of the galley-slaves who had
been liberated in that very year (1762), which had the effect of
eventually putting an end to the cruelty.

[Footnote 77: The Huguenots sometimes owed their release from
the galleys to money payments made by Protestants (but this
was done secretly), the price of a galley-slave being about a
thousand crowns; sometimes they owed it to the influence of
Protestant princes; but never to the voluntary mercy of the
Catholics. In 1742, while France was at war with England, and
Prussia was quietly looking on, Antoine Court made an appeal
to Frederick the Great, and at his intervention with Louis
XV. thirty galley-slaves were liberated. The Margrave of
Bayreuth, Culmbach and his wife, the sister of the Great
Frederick, afterwards visited the galleys at Toulon, and
succeeded in obtaining the liberation of several
galley-slaves.]

The punishment was not, however, abolished by Christian feeling, or by
greater humanity on the part of the Catholics; nor was it abolished
through the ministers of justice, and still less by the order of the
King. It was put an end to by the Stage! As Voltaire, the Deist,
terminated the hanging of Protestants, so did Fenouillot, the player,
put an end to their serving as galley-slaves. The termination of this
latter punishment has a curious history attached to it.

It happened that a Huguenot meeting for worship was held in the
neighbourhood of Nismes, on the first day of January, 1756. The place
of meeting was called the Lecque,[78] situated immediately north of
the Tour Magne, from which the greater pa