Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Despite overwhelming evidence that the death was a suicide (including testimony by Jeanne Vignière, the Calas's Catholic governess), the court in Toulouse held that the elder Calas had murdered his son to prevent him from converting. Calas, who staunchly denied the charge, was tortured in an attempt to get him to admit his guilt. First his arms and legs were stretched until they were pulled from their sockets. An hour later, thirty pints of water were poured down his throat until his body swelled to twice its normal size. Two hours after that, he was tied to a cross in the public square in front of the cathedral, where each of his limbs was broken twice with an iron bar. Through it all Calas swore he was innocent. Finally, he was strangled, and his corpse tied to a stake and burned.

  All the family's possessions were confiscated by the town, and Calas's two daughters were forced into a convent. Donat Calas, the youngest son, fled to Geneva and obtained an audience with Voltaire. Voltaire checked Donat's story out and, deciding it was true, committed himself to clearing Calas's name.

  Voltaire wrote letters and pamphlets. He badgered his admirers at the French court, who included the king's mistress. He appealed to the senior Catholic officials in France, engaged prominent lawyers, and persuaded others to take up the case pro bono. He took Donat Calas into his home, brought another Calas son to Geneva, and set Madame Calas up in Paris, so that the case would never be far from the consciousness of the authorities. To defray expenses, he began a defense fund among whose contributors were Catherine the Great of Russia; Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, wife of George II of England; and Augustus III, king of Poland.

  It took three years, but finally the magistrates of Toulouse gave in. They cleared Calas's name, fired the judge who had convicted him, released his daughters from the nunnery, and granted the Calas family thirty thousand livres in compensation.

  Voltaire said that he never smiled during the entire three years. When the news of the verdict arrived, he wept.

  Even before the Calas affair was concluded, Voltaire took up a similar case, again from near the enlightened Toulouse, of a Protestant named Pierre Sirven who had also been falsely accused of murdering his child to prevent her from converting. With Calas as a grim example, Sirven had fled to Geneva, but all his property had been seized. That case took nine years, but Voltaire was once more successful.

  Because of his ferocity, the names of Calas and Sirven became famous throughout Europe. In fact, anyone whose cause was taken up by Voltaire soon became known across the continent.

  IN 1749, VOLTAIRE BEGAN work on a project that would occupy him, on and off, for the next twenty years. It was nothing less than an attempt to redefine history. Rather than merely provide a chronicle of events from a Eurocentric point of view, Voltaire traced the route of mankind from barbarism to civilization, overlaying events with philosophy. He devoured traditional histories, making notes, rejecting standard treatments, and creating new ones of his own.

  The work had many incarnations and many titles, but Voltaire finally settled on Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à nos jours (Essay on the Morals and Spirit of Nations from Charlemagne to Our Day). The final product was a huge and compendious work, acknowledged for its breadth and astounding scholarship, the first attempt to give Oriental and Islamic civilizations their proper credit in the development of European civilization. It was also a ferocious attack on the Christian churches, asserting, among other things, that the persecution of Christians at the hands of the Romans paled when compared to the persecution by Christians of anyone who thought differently than they did. Prominent among the archvillains in Essai sur les moeurs was John Calvin.

  Voltaire detested Calvin, perhaps more than he detested any other man in history. To him, Calvin personified all that was evil, corrupt, bullying, brutal, and narrow-minded about those who clawed their way to power in the name of God.

  Voltaire devoted an entire chapter to Servetus and referred to him often in his correspondence and other writings. He called Servetus a “very learned doctor” and even credited him with the discovery of circulation of the blood. He described Servetus's imprisonment and showed how Calvin had circumvented Genevan law by putting Fontaine up to go to jail in his stead. The burning was described in grisly detail. “I see from my windows,” he wrote in a letter in 1759 from his estate in Ferney, high on a hillside above Lake Geneva, “the city where Jean Chauvin, the Picard called Calvin, reigned, and the place where he had Servetus burned for the good of his soul.” Servetus, Voltaire concluded in Essai sur les moeurs, had simply been murdered by John Calvin, “an assassination committed in ceremony.”

  In the two hundred years that had passed since Servetus had been led to the stake, there had not been anyone, not even the leaders of the Unitarian movement, who had written so forcefully of his fate. In his passion, Voltaire was motivated not by a love of Servetus—to whom he referred as “mad” and “a fool”—but only by his abhorrence of Calvin. Still, for the first time since his death, the injustice that had befallen Michael Servetus became familiar to the readers of Europe.

  BOOK COLLECTING IN THE eighteenth century was not all that different from book collecting now—celebrity sells. As a result of the writings of Voltaire, when the contents of Louis-Jean Gaignat's library were sold at auction after his death in 1769, the Colladon copy of Christian-ismi Restitutio went for 3,810 livres, more than three times what he had paid for it. The buyer was the most famous book collector in France, Louis César de la Baume Le Blanc, Duc de Lavallière.

  A hundred years before, no Lavallière would have been able to afford a library, much less a copy of Christianismi Restitutio. The Laval-lières had been a family of minor provincial nobles, barely passing for aristocracy, when the family fortunes had suddenly been given a big boost.

  The Lavallière who had done the boosting was the duke's great-aunt Louise. Louise had been a painfully shy girl of sixteen given to unrealistic romantic daydreams when, by a series of fortunate accidents, she was accepted as a maid of honor to Henriette, sister to England's Restoration king Charles II and wife of Philippe, younger brother of Louis XIV of France. A maid of honor's duties included attending her aristocratic mistress at parties, driving with her in the park, and accompanying her on her various sojourns to the magnificent country chalets and palaces that were the playgrounds of the French court.

  It happened that Louis XIV, in his early twenties at the time and married to the devout but not terribly attractive Maria Theresa of Spain, was much enamored of his brother Philippe's vivacious young wife. He and Henriette were often seen chasing each other through the fields by day and taking long intimate walks together at night. Earnest, singularly atrocious love poems were composed by the king for Henri-ette's appreciation.

  Not unreasonably, these innocent pleasures had sparked the malicious rumor that the king was playing around with his brother's wife. Henriette and Louis put their heads together and decided that the king should feign interest in other women to defray suspicion. Henriette then suggested one of her own maids of honor, that mousy little blonde schoolgirl Louise, as a possible candidate for this position. This ruse worked, although not as Henriette had intended. In no time at all, it was Louise who was running through the fields (albeit more slowly, since she had a limp) and taking the long intimate walks with the king.

  Louise's tenure as official royal mistress did not last all that long-it was over by the time she was twenty-three. Then, ever conscious of appearances, Louis had Louise live in the same house with the married woman who replaced her in his affections so that no one would suspect he'd changed allegiances. Still, thanks to this diffident schoolgirl from a nondescript family, the fortunes of the Lavallières were assured.

  Stung by whisperings about the lowly status of his mistress, Louis legitimized the two children Louise bore him who survived, then heaped riches on her and her family. In 1667, the French Parlement was put on notice of the king's intentions with a letter patent that declared Louise the Duch
esse de Vaujours, with the ability to hand down the title and all the wealth that went along with it—which included Vaujours and the barony of Saint-Christophe—“two holdings equally considerable by their revenues”—to her children and her children's children. Louis's generosity did not stop there. Even Louise's brother Jean-François, an anonymous cadet in a minor regiment, was suddenly elevated to command a new company, the Light Horse of the Dauphin, and spent a lot of time with the king.

  None of this mattered to Louise, however. She loved Louis and, broken at the thought of losing him, abandoned all those new worldly goods and gave herself over to God, entering the severe, cloistered world of a Carmelite nun, where she would spend the last thirty years of her life, inspiring a long romantic novel by Alexandre Dumas. Neither of Louise's children provided an heir to the new duchy, so the estates passed to Jean-François, who, unlike his sister, enjoyed every minute of his exalted new position. He in turn passed those riches on to his son Charles-François, who then provided his son, Louis-César, with the means and the position to create one of the most magnificent private libraries the world has ever known.

  LOUIS CÉSAR DE LA BAUME LE BLANC was born Duc de Vaujours on October 9, 1708, while his great-aunt Louise, ill and tired, was approaching the end of her life. He became the Duc de Lavallière, peer of France, at age thirty-one, when Charles-François died.

  The new duke quickly became a favorite of the new king, Louis XV, his uncle once removed. He was named captain of the hunt in 1745 and grand falconer of France three years later, both coveted positions in the reign of as obsessive a sportsman as Louis. He was allowed to ask many favors of the king for his friends and neighbors, thereby ensuring that he became a beloved and respected man. Largesse aside, Lavallière seems to have been genuinely popular. He was erudite, thoughtful, and charming. Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress (a position of enormous influence, the duke was well aware), named Lavallière director of her personal theater at Versailles. All of these honors and all this popularity served to increase his wealth, and by the time he was forty, the duke had more than doubled the family's already hefty fortunes, thus allowing him even greater resources to indulge in his passion for rare books.

  The Duc de Lavallière was that most fortunate of collectors, a man with an obsession to own every famous book he could get his hands on and the money to afford to go out and do it. He was a child of the Enlightenment and, naturally, an admirer and correspondent of Voltaire. His tastes ran to science, history, and theology, and away from the more traditional fields of poetry and art.

  He began buying rare books in 1738, and by the time he died in 1780 at age seventy-two, Lavallière had amassed a library of more than one hundred thousand books. The collection was divided into the main categories of “Theology,” “Jurisprudence,” “Science and Arts,” “Belles Lettres,” and “History.” Each main category had numerous sub-categories. Under science, for example, there were headings for physics, botany, optics, medicine, anatomy, surgery, chemistry, alchemy, astronomy, and metallurgy, and a section on natural history that was said to be “twice as extensive as that owned by the King.” Among the authors represented in medicine, for example, were Galen, Vesalius, Avicenna, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, and even Symphorien Champier.

  In theology, the first and most prominent section, there were dozens and dozens of Bibles—Bibles in Latin, Bibles in Greek, Bibles in Hebrew, Bibles in French, Bibles in German, Bibles in other assorted languages, and, for the well-versed, polyglot Bibles. At least fifteen of these were incunabula (literally “cradle” or “birthplace,” here meaning books printed before 1501), including a Vulgate Bible by Fust and Schoeffer from 1462. There was also a 1522 first edition of Cardinal Ximenes's Complutensian Polyglot Bible. In addition, the duke owned Psalters, liturgies, books of hours, and the work of virtually every prominent Christian scholar in history. Lavallière was extremely interested in heterodoxy and acquired any number of volumes that had been considered heretical when they were first published. Among the many books in his library by religious dissenters, mystics, and other heretics were a number by Michael Servetus.

  The Duc de Lavallière was one of the most prominent Servetus collectors in the world. He owned two editions of the Pagnini Bible edited by Michel de Villenueve; a copy of The Syrups; first editions of De Trinitatis Erroribus and Dialogorum de Trinitate; both the 1535 and the 154.1 editions of the Geography; the 1546 manuscript copy of Christian-ismi Restitutio, the one in which Servetus had first mentioned pulmonary circulation (and had mentioned the possibility of emigrating to the Americas); Mead's copy of the Dummer reprint; and, of course, the “example unique” Colladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio.

  Upon his death, Lavallière left the entire library to his only child, a daughter, the Duchesse de Châtillon. The duchess was neither the collector nor the intellectual that her father had been, and she decided to put the library up for auction. It took three years of cataloging and preparation by the most prestigious bookseller in France, the firm of Guillaume de Bure & Son, before the library was ready to be sold. Most of the actual work was done by the late duke's chief librarian, l'Abbé Rive, and his young Belgian assistant, Joseph Van Praet.

  Although the auction was to include just slightly more than half of the library's contents, about fifty-six thousand books, it would be the most celebrated sale of rare books in the eighteenth century, and Bure & Son produced a catalog worthy of the occasion. It was printed in two parts with three volumes each, almost one thousand pages, all six books bound in fine hand-tooled leather. The paper was thick and rich. The frontispiece, taken from a 1767 engraving, depicted a young, exceedingly handsome duke, much as he would have appeared in, say, 1740. This was followed immediately by a long section entitled Avertusement, an exposition on the magnificence of the library, the extraordinary value of its contents, and the reasons why each and every person of any wealth whatever would be almost criminal in neglecting to bid.

  The catalog was sent to every major library in France and all over Europe. The auction would comprise 5,668 lots containing some of the most rare and coveted books and manuscripts in the world. Despite all the wealthy commoners who had availed themselves of a catalog, it was nations themselves, through their royal and imperial libraries, who were expected to be the major bidders. For France, this meant the Bib-liothèque Royale.

  The Bibliothèque Royale was an unusual and enlightened institution for eighteenth-century Europe. While technically the king's own library, it was, in fact, a public establishment, separate from the palaces and châteaus and available to all the scholars of France. It had been founded by Charles IX—he who had screamed, “Kill them all!” and precipitated the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Public reading rooms had been introduced in the seventeenth century, and the library's contents had come to be considered as much the property of the nation as that of the king. At the auction, the library would be represented by two agents recently engaged for the purpose, l'Abbé Rive and the new assistant curator, Joseph Van Praet.

  The auction began on January 1784, and did not conclude until May 5. Kings, queens, and nobles of every sort from every country on the continent sent agents, as did wealthy merchants, lawyers, physicians, and other collectors who had money but not title. When it was over, the auction brought in 464,677 livres (and change), which translates into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in today's market. (Two years later, the Marquis de Paulmy purchased 27,000 of the remaining books for 80,000 livres and used them to found another national library, the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal.)

  Curiously, for an auction of this magnitude, most of the items fetched relatively modest prices, 10 to 50 livres. For example, a second edition of Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica went for only 13 livres. A pristine copy of an Aldine work on astronomy fetched only slightly more, 100 livres.

  The secondary Servetus material largely followed the pattern. Lots 44 and 45, the Pagnini Bibles, sold for 72 and 121 livres respectively, and the cop
y of The Syrups for only 10 livres. The 1535 edition of the Geography, with the unfortunate passage about the Holy Land, sold for 60 livres, and the 1541, which was in superb condition, for 49 livres.

  (This latter copy was recently for sale through a major London book dealer. The asking price was forty thousand pounds, or roughly sixty thousand dollars. A thousand to one may not be an accurate conversion from 1784 livres to current dollars, but at least for the major items, it is reasonably close.)

  The most important Servetus material, however, was his own theological work. Lot 911, the first editions of De Trinitatis Erroribus and Di-alogorum de Trinitate sold for 700 livres. The next item, the 1546 manuscript copy of Christianismi Restitutio, was sold to the Bibliothèque Royale for 240 livres.

  Then it was time for Lot 913, what was then thought to be the only surviving copy in the world of Christianismi Restitutio. No one knew how high the bidding would go. The price kept going up and up as agents for the competitors sent their surreptitious signals to the auctioneer. Finally, at 4,120 livres, the bidding was over. The winner was once again the Bibliothèque Royale. The treasure had been preserved for France. Immediately after the sale of the Colladon Christianismi Restitutio, Lot 914, the Mead reprint, sold for 1,700 livres, also to the Bibliothèque Royale.

  The last item in the Servetus section of the theology category was Lot 915, Calvin's Defense of the True Faith of the Sacred Trinity Against the Hideous Errors of Michael Servetus, Spaniard.

  It was purchased by an unidentified buyer for 19 livres.

  ALL IN ALL, the Bibliothèque Royale purchased nearly nine hundred volumes, of which 286 were incunabula and 210 were manuscripts. Five years later, of course, the Bibliothèque Royale, as well as everything else that was “Royale,” was caught up in the firestorm of the Revolution. As a repository of national treasures, the Bibliothèque Royale, quickly renamed the Bibliothèque de la Nation, was spared the fury of the mob. The leaders of the revolution even pleaded with local citizens to maintain the library as a public service—the library system had no money, and every other library in Paris had been forced to close.