112 VOLTAIRE. 



remained for several years, and received her education. 

 But, above all, he was the protector of the oppressed, 

 whether by political or ecclesiastical tyranny. His 

 fame rests on an imperishable foundation as a great 

 writer certainly the greatest of a highly polite and 

 cultivated age; but these claims to our respect are 

 mingled with sad regrets at the pernicious tendency 

 of no small portion of his works. As the champion 

 of injured virtue, the avenger of enormous public 

 crimes, he claims a veneration which embalms his 

 memory in the hearts of all good men ; and this part of 

 his character untarnished by any stain, enfeebled by 

 no failing, is justly to be set up against the charges to 

 which other passages of his story are exposed, redeeming 

 those passages from the dislike or the contempt which 

 they are calculated to inspire towards their author. 



During the winter of 1761-62, a scene of mingled 

 judicial bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty was enacted in 

 Languedoc, the account of which reached Ferney, 

 where the unhappy family of its victims sought refuge. 

 A young man, twenty-eight years of age, Marc 

 Antoine Galas, the son of a respectable old Calvinist, 

 was found dead, having, it appears, hanged himself. 

 There arose a suspicion nearly amounting to insanity 

 in the mind of a fanatical magistrate of the name of 

 David, that the young man had been hanged by the 

 father to prevent him from becoming a Catholic. 

 There was another son already converted, and whom 

 the father, so far from repudiating, supplied with a hand- 

 some allowance. There was a visitor of the family, a 

 youth of nineteen years old, present at the time when the 

 murder was supposed to have been committed ; as were 



