Madame Calas asked no more.
"To prosecute the judges and the ringleaders," said a letter to Voltaire from the generous advocate of the Calas, Elias de Beaumont, "requires the permission of the council, and there is great reason to fear that these petty plebeian kings appear powerful enough to cause the permission, through a weakness honored by the name of policy, to be refused." Voltaire, however, was triumphant.

"You were at Paris," he writes to M.de Cideville, "when the last act of the tragedy finished so happily.
The piece is according to the rules; it is, to my thinking, the finest fifth act there is on the stage." Henceforth he finds himself transformed into the defender of the oppressed.

The Protestant Chaumont, at the galleys, owed to him his liberation; he rushed to Ferney to thank Voltaire.

The pastor, who had to introduce him, thus described the interview to Paul Rabaut: "I told him that I had brought him a little fellow who had come to throw himself at his feet to thank him for having, by his intercession, delivered him from the galleys; that it was Chaumont whom I had left in his antechamber, and whom I begged him to permit me to bring in.

At the name of Chaumont M.de Voltaire showed a transport of joy, and rang at once to have him brought in.