The Caillaux Drama

For English readers to realize the full importance of this document I must explain that the Public Prosecutor or Procureur Général ranks as a Government official, and holds almost the same position as a judge holds in England, with the difference that he does not judge but prosecutes. For influence to be brought to bear on such an official by members of the Government is much the same thing as though Cabinet Ministers in England had ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions and the judge who was to try Mr. Jabez Balfour to adjourn the trial for six or seven months for political reasons. Supposing such a thing to have been possible, and Jabez Balfour to have disappeared from England so that he never came up for trial at all, one can imagine the outcry which would have been raised. Here in plain English, as plain and as simple English as I can summon to my help, is the translation of Monsieur Fabre’s accusing document:

V. Fabre.

The reading of this statement from the rostrum of the Chamber was followed within forty-eight hours by the resignation of Monsieur Monis from the Cabinet, and its immediate result was the resumption of the work of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry which had sat on the Rochette case. This commission (over which of course Monsieur Jaurès presided, as he had presided over the others) conducted the inquiry, as all such inquiries invariably are conducted in France, on political lines. The sessions of the commission did not pass off without the resignation of some of its members, the public was inclined to shrug its shoulders at the leniency of its examination of past Ministers of the State, and the wording of its verdict when delivered was a farce, not altogether unworthy of the date on which the Paris morning papers published it, the first of April. The Parliamentary Commission could find no stronger words to stigmatize the situation described in Monsieur Fabre’s statement, which description the inquiry proved to be true, than “a deplorable abuse of influence.” The phrase has become a joke in Paris now, and is in popular use on the boulevards. The Chamber of Deputies, however, before the close of the Parliamentary session, found other words to express the nation’s displeasure, and after a session which lasted from two o’clock in the afternoon of April 3 till two o’clock in the morning of April 4, the Chamber of Deputies adjourned for the Easter holidays, having voted the following order of the day:

The debate, of which this significant order of the day was the corollary, was not only an extremely interesting, but a very stormy one. In the course of it, a member of the Chamber challenged Monsieur Doumergue, the Prime Minister, to fight him, but the quarrel was smoothed over. Monsieur Briand, Monsieur Barthou, Monsieur Barrès, Monsieur Doumergue, and Monsieur Jaurès all took a very active part in the debate, and when the Chamber finally adjourned till June, in other words till after the general elections, the general impression was that the Doumergue Ministry would not return to power.

With this historic debate ends the first chapter of the Caillaux drama. The vibrations of a revolver shot in a newspaper office in the Rue Drouot have eddied and spread till France was set aquiver. The woman who fired the shot, the wife of the man who an hour before the shot was fired was the most powerful man in France, knew before she was taken to her cell in Saint Lazare that the first consequence of her act had been the headlong downfall of her husband. She must feel now like a child who has pulled up a little stone and caused an avalanche, and not only France but Europe and the whole world are wondering what may go to pieces in the wreckage.

FOOTNOTES:

II
CELL NO. 12

It is a very short drive from the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre to the prison of Saint Lazare, where Madame Caillaux was taken from the police-station. She had been taken from the office of the Figaro to the police-station in her own luxurious car. She drove to Saint Lazare in one of the horrible red taxicabs which have rattled for too many years about the streets of Paris, with a member of the police force in plain clothes seated beside her, another on the uncomfortable little seat opposite, and a third on the box by the driver. The prison authorities had been advised by telephone of her arrival at the prison, and arrangements had been made to put her into pistole No. 12, the cell in which Louise Michel, Valentine Merelli, Madame Humbert, Madame Steinheil and many other Parisian celebrities awaited their trials. The cab drove into the courtyard of the prison and the gates closed behind it. The police handed their prisoner over, with the usual formalities, to the prison authorities, she was kept waiting while she was inscribed on the prison books, she was searched—for no prisoner escapes this formality—and was told to walk forward to a large open space between two staircases. The house of correction of Saint Lazare is a very old building, which dates from the beginning of the twelfth century. It was a hospital for lepers in 1110, and remained one till 1515, when the monks of the Order of Saint Victor took it over, and abolished the lepers’ hospital. In 1632 Saint Vincent de Paul and the priests of the order became the inmates of Saint Lazare, and in 1779 it became a house of correction and provisional and permanent detention for men. On July 13, 1789, when famine raged in Paris, the mob broke into Saint Lazare, and looted the enormous stock of food which the Lazarists were known to be keeping there. The monks were driven out, the building sacked and the store houses gutted by fire. The convent of Saint Lazare then became a State prison in which suspects were kept. It is now a prison for women. There is room for about twelve hundred prisoners, but at a pinch the old building would hold 1600. The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first consists of women who are awaiting trial, or who have been sentenced to less than a year’s imprisonment. The second division consists of girls under age who have been sentenced to confinement in a house of correction till they are twenty-one, the third division is that of unfortunates whose sentences of imprisonment are short ones. Saint Lazare prison, though of course under State control, is in practice ruled by a body of nuns who, while responsible to the authorities, have really the entire management of the enormous prison in their hands and hold the real power. It is a huge bleak wilderness of stone with echoing corridors and haunting silences, and has been sentenced to demolition for sanitary reasons for many years. But threatened buildings live long in France when they belong to the State. A modern prison, such as Fresnes in France or any of the English prisons, is a pleasure resort compared with Saint Lazare, and there is less difference between Fresnes and a cheap hydropathic than there is between the prison of Saint Lazare and the prison of Fresnes. The silence, the darkness, the cold, damp, and dirt are perhaps the worst of its discomforts, but I have been told by women who have been imprisoned there that the mental and physical torture of the months in which they waited trial surpassed anything that could be imagined. Within an hour after her arrival Madame Caillaux ceased to wear her name and became a number—No. 12. The number she received is considered a favour, for cell No. 12 is the most spacious of all the cells in Saint Lazare.

In the large open space between the two stairways is a high chair, almost a throne, on which sits Sister Léonide, the chief superintendent of the prison nuns. She is a woman of about forty. A handsome woman with a stern set face. The drawing of her in this volume was done specially for me by the well-known artist of St. Lazare, Monsieur Albert Morand. Monsieur Morand is one of the few men who have been authorized to make drawings of St. Lazare, and his work has the honour of a special place in the Carnavalet Museum. His drawings which are reproduced in this volume are probably unique. The nickname which the prisoners give Sœur Léonide is “Bostock,” after the famous American lion tamer, who, in his day, was a celebrity in Paris. Her severity is not more remarkable than is her power of quelling the first signs of mutiny among the prisoners by a mere glance, and it was the quick-witted appreciation of this power of the eye which gave her her name. Sister Léonide made a sign to one of the two women who stood by her. The woman, a prison attendant who goes by the ironically prison-given name of a soubrette, opened a door and motioned to No. 12 to walk straight on down a half-lighted misty corridor, painted a muddy brown. This corridor seems endless. It is like a street in a nightmare. There are doors on either side which seem to leap out of the half darkness, and at long, long intervals a little flame of gas. It is only quite recently that there is any incandescent gas in St. Lazare and what there is, even now, is quite inadequate, merely serving, as a former prisoner expressed it, “to show us the darkness around.” The anticipatory mental torture of this first long journey down the interminable corridor must be terrific to a woman whose life, before her imprisonment, has run on easy lines. The doors are named and numbered. Cell No. 8, Cell No. 9, Workshop No. 2, Library, and so forth. All of them have huge and heavy locks, and bolts and bars. “Here,” said the soubrette. She produced a huge key which she fitted into the lock of a door on which in big white letters were painted the words “Pistole No. 12.” She had to use both hands to turn the key. The door creaked and opened inwards. Cell No. 12 is fairly large. As a rule there are six little beds in it, and it has held as many as eight beds. The walls are painted black, from the floor up to three quarters of the distance to the ceiling. The top quarter is white-washed, but the whitewash is grey, from age and want of care. They use extraordinarily little soap and water in the prison of Saint Lazare. The heavy beams across the ceiling have been decorated for many years by a network of spiders’ webs, and though there was a rumour in the Paris Press at the time of her imprisonment that Cell No. 12 had been cleaned for Madame Caillaux’s reception, I am told that the webs and the spiders are there still.

There were so many absurd stories in the Paris Press about the comforts which had been provided in Saint Lazare for Madame Caillaux that an impression became prevalent that she must be having rather a good time in prison. I need hardly say that there was very little, if any, foundation in fact for these stories. Monsieur Morand’s drawing of the “soubrette” does away with the mind-picture which newspaper readers may have formed of a smart maid waiting on this favoured prisoner, getting her bath for her, and bringing her a breakfast tray each morning. The soubrette of pistole No. 12, who looks after the pistole next door as well, where there are seven prisoners, and who therefore can have little time to devote to the prisoner in No. 12, is a woman called Jeanne (I do not know her surname), who murdered her husband with a penknife some months ago. She is a quiet, somewhat surly woman, and good conduct has obtained for her the privilege of acting as soubrette in two of the pistoles, for enforced idleness is one of the prison’s worst punishments. One of the favourite newspaper stories which were in circulation soon after Madame Caillaux’s imprisonment was one which told of the furnishing of the pistole in which she had been put. Journalists had seen a big motor lorry arrive with her furniture, we were told, and the cell had been made as comfortable as a room in her own house. This story gained a semblance of truth from the reproduction in the papers of the arrival of a big motor lorry at Saint Lazare. I reproduce this picture here. It looks conclusive, and convincing at first sight, for the group of journalists who saw the van drive in can, one might think, surely not have all been mistaken. However, I took the trouble to make some inquiries while my Paris colleagues, I fear, jumped to conclusions. I learned that the van which figures in the picture comes quite regularly to Saint Lazare. It contains linen in the rough sent by a contracting firm, for whom the prisoners turn the rough linen into sheets and pillow-cases. The contractors, the prison authorities, and the prisoners, all find their advantage in this arrangement—and the van did not contain even a chair for Madame Caillaux’s cell.

The cell has now two beds in it, one for the prisoner, one for Jeanne the soubrette. A great deal of nonsense has been written in the newspapers about “the maid” whom Madame Caillaux was allowed in prison. The simple fact, of course, is that the authorities consider it necessary that watch should be kept on her, and the “maid,” Jeanne the prison soubrette, is by no means a pleasant companion. The furniture is very primitive, though better than that of some of the other cells. There are a mattress on the bed of cast iron, a pillow but no bolster, two straw-bottomed chairs, a little white deal table, a jug and a basin which were once enamelled yellow but through which the rusty metal shows. On the bed is a brown rug with the word “Prison” written on it. Madame Caillaux has been allowed to cover this rug with an old quilt which Madame Steinheil brought into the prison. Above the bed is a shelf on which the prisoner’s linen can be put, behind the bed a little trap through which the wardresses can peep into the cell at any moment. The floor of No. 12 is tiled with rough red tiles, much worn, and broken. There is a stove, but it has never warmed the cell, and in cold weather the damp and cold are very bitter. No. 12 has three windows, strongly barred, and in addition to the bars there is wire netting. This wire netting has its reason. The windows of No. 12 look out on the courtyard in which, twice a day, the prisoners are allowed for exercise. This courtyard is quite pleasant in the summer, for there are several trees in it, but the prisoners have an unpleasant habit of attracting the attention of the inmates of pistole No. 12 by throwing stones at the windows, as a sign that chocolate or cakes would be acceptable. In this courtyard inside the old convent of Saint Lazare, which has the picturesque charm of great age, some of the most sensational scenes of the days of the Terror took place, for it was from that courtyard that the tumbrils left for the guillotine. The chapel opens into this courtyard too, and Madame Caillaux from the windows of her cell enjoys a very pretty view when the courtyard is empty. In the exercise hours the view is less pleasing. There is always war between the women prisoners of the other classes and those of the pistole class, and until the new inmate of No. 12 learned how to slip bits of chocolate, biscuit, or sugar out across the window-sill so that they fell into the courtyard she dared hardly show herself at the window. It is a peculiarity that, in the house of silence, everything of interest is known to all the prisoners immediately. Madame Caillaux had not been twelve hours in No. 12 before all her fellow prisoners knew all about the drama which had brought her there, and were curious to see her.

Curiously little is known by the outside world, though Paris is a gossip-loving and gossipy city, of the real facts of the life inside the house of correction of Saint Lazare. I never realized myself until quite recently the horrors of incarceration there. Chance then threw me into communication with a woman who had shot another woman dead, had spent some months in Saint Lazare, had been acquitted by the jury and is a free woman now. Her crime had been a crime of jealousy. The jury had refused to punish her more than she had been punished, and she got a verdict of “not guilty,” though she shot and killed her rival in the affections of her husband and pleaded guilty to so doing. This woman is a woman with literary tastes, a woman who is in the habit of observing, and who has the gift of describing what she sees. She has told me a great deal about the life in Saint Lazare, but far more eloquent than anything which she has told me is the present condition of the woman herself. We talk about “the prison taint” with very little real knowledge of what it means. Imagine a woman of your own world, a lady of refinement and of education, who waits to be spoken to before she opens her lips, who stands aside to let you pass if you open a door, who, if you beg her to take precedence, walks before you with bowed head and folded hands as though you were her gaoler. Her voice is always subdued, she never contradicts, she gives her opinion only when asked for it, and even then it is an opinion without emphasis. She has forgotten how to hurry. She has forgotten how to lie in bed late in the mornings. She never gives an order. When she wants something from a servant her tone and manner in asking for it are those of supplication. She is resigned—terribly resigned. Her whole attitude is one of resignation so pitiful that, unattractive woman though she is, a man’s heart fairly bleeds for her, and one feels a longing to try and comfort and console her as one would console a child who has been beaten. Morally and mentally the prisoner in Saint Lazare is being beaten all the time that she is in prison. There is no physical punishment, there is no active cruelty, there is only the terrible deadweight of the prison system; but this is quite enough to unsettle and to dull the most active brain. There is no doubt that the active brains suffer the most. The whole atmosphere of the place, as this woman told me, is the atmosphere of a convent from which all love and sympathy are banished. Imagine, if you can, a hospital in which, while everything is done to ease the physical distress of the patients, their moral distress is ignored. Imagine a hospital in which the nurses are stern and unsmiling, in which complaint of mental distress is met with silence, in which no unnecessary word is ever spoken, in which no woman ever puts her cool hand on another woman’s forehead because she has a headache, or kisses her because she is unhappy. Imagine long dreary days with no brightness in them. Imagine the horrid rattle of big keys in heavy locks. Form your own mind-picture of Cell No. 12, with its broken red-tiled floor, its bare black walls topped with dirty grey whitewash, its furniture of a straw-bottomed chair, a plain white deal table, a battered metal basin and water jug, its windows with their bars and wire netting, the cruel silence and soul-deadening simplicity. No flowers, no ribbons, no armchair, no cushions, very little light after sundown, none of the thousand and one trifles which brighten the poorest room of the poorest woman. No conversation, no letters which have not been read first by strangers, visits hedged in with the severest of formality, no name, a number—in a word no life, merely existence, and existence without the sympathy which makes existence lovable. This is the mind-picture I have formed, and this is a true picture of Madame Caillaux’s daily life in pistole No. 12. Her principal distraction is her occasional drive with two plain clothes policemen to the Palace of Justice, and her examination there by the magistrate. And yesterday this woman was fêted and cherished by society, had a large circle of friends, was busy every moment of the day. Now she has nothing to do but to think. She may write, she may read, but she may only exist. Her existence has become a backwater without a ripple in it, a dark cul-de-sac into which no sunshine penetrates. Is it surprising that the constant presence of a soubrette of the prison should be considered necessary? A man smashed a water-bottle and cut his throat in Paris the other day to avoid six months imprisonment. He had been in prison before, awaiting trial, and he knew what it meant. And he was a rough man with no refined tastes, and no need of refinement. In Italy the other day a brigand went mad after solitary confinement. The prisoner in Saint Lazare is not even allowed to go mad. A great deal of nonsense has appeared in the English newspapers about Madame Caillaux’s life in Saint Lazare. Paris papers have printed stories (the authorities have always contradicted them) drawing a picture of a comfortable room with carpet on the floor and curtains to the windows. The woman who described to me the real life in Saint Lazare assures me that the “carpet” is merely a strip of rug to keep the tiled floor, with the dangers of the broken tiles, from the prisoner’s bare feet when she steps out of bed, and that it is a physical impossibility that any curtains should be hung. Madame Steinheil was allowed to hang sheets in front of the windows. Perhaps Madame Caillaux has obtained this permission too. The prisoner is allowed to get her food from outside, but this food is of the plainest and simplest. She is allowed to receive visits, but the visits are rare ones, and she is never alone with her visitor. She may write, but what she writes is always read. She may receive letters but she knows that all her letters pass through other hands and are subject to careful scrutiny before she gets them. She has no privacy at all and knows that she is always under watch and that even when she is alone in her cell there is an eye at the little trapdoor which peeps into it over her bed. The prisoner in the pistole has not even the consolation of company during exercise hours, and she must sometimes envy the women whom she can see from her windows. She can talk to the nuns, but they answer as little as possible. She lives out her life in a whisper. The soubrette is a prisoner. She talks a little sometimes—prison talk. She brings the pistolière her cup of soup at seven in the morning, and tells her all the prison news, but she is not allowed to remain long, for she has other work to do and it is the hour of the canteen. If the pistolière wants coffee she must go to the canteen and buy it. She is allowed a large mugful every morning, for which she pays twopence. She walks down the long dreary corridor with her mug in her hand, and waits in a large hall where the pistolières stand in a row against the wall. Numbers are called in turn, and each woman is given her coffee and the permitted trifles she has ordered the day before, such as butter, milk, white bread (the prison bread is grey), herrings, dried figs or letter paper. Then the long morning drags on until post time. The letters are distributed by Sister Léonide herself, and the letters are always open. The pistolière does not take her exercise in the large courtyard with the trees in it. The yard in which she is allowed to walk, and which Monsieur Moran has drawn for me, is small and has a high wall round it. The windows of cells look down on it, and as the prisoner walks up and down she knows that she is being watched and feels that there are eyes behind the bars of every window. Every now and again a big rat runs across her path. These rats of Saint Lazare are fat and of huge size. They run about quite freely and are almost tame, for no one ever interferes with them. The nuns of Saint Lazare keep cats, but they and the rats made friends long ago, and the cats and rats feed amicably together. At least a hundred rats a day are killed in the kitchens and corridors, but there are so many rats that the others hardly miss them. You hear them at night scampering over the beams of the ceilings, you see them in the corridors, the kitchens, the cells, everywhere. For some reason they are most playful about dusk, and there are stories in the prison of women who have had fits of hysteria and have even gone out of their minds because of sudden fear of these rats of the prison. There is a sickness common to all prisoners in Saint Lazare which is known there as “the six o’clock sickness” (le mal de six heures). It attacks all newcomers, and none escape it. It comes on after the walk in the courtyard, when night begins to close in, and the prison settles into silence till the morning. It is an attack of a kind of malarial fever, a shivering fit and a violent headache with a feeling of lassitude and nausea afterwards. When it comes on, the prisoners are given a cachet of quinine from the prison pharmacy. It does very little good. After dark the pistolière is allowed two candles which she fixes in a piece of bread or fastens by means of their own wax to her wooden table. No lamps are allowed. I have seen it stated in the newspapers that Madame Caillaux is allowed a lamp, but I do not know whether the statement is true. The last ceremony of the day is “the roll call.” This, like most of the other ceremonies in Saint Lazare, is conducted in absolute silence. The door of the pistole is opened, and Sœur Léonide appears with the big Book of Hours which she carries in her two hands. On either side of her is a soubrette, one of whom carries a big bunch of keys. Sister Léonide stands in the doorway of the pistole for a moment, looks at the prisoner to make certain that she is there, bends her head, turns and goes. Not a word is spoken. And then comes the night.

The one bright spot in this terrible life of monotony in the prison of Saint Lazare, the one relief from these never-ending days of the same food, the same walk, the same rats, the same silence, is Mass in the chapel. Here the pistolière sits, silent, it is true, but with other women near her and round her. But even here she sits apart, and Madame Caillaux, I am told, has not attended mass. “There is only one hope in Saint Lazare,” said the former prisoner who gave me most of this information, “we all hope for our day of trial.” “All of you?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she said. “No matter what we fear, nothing can be worse than the terrible monotony of life in the pistole. Our lives are those of prisoners in a dark gallery. The trial and the open law courts are the one glimpse of light and life at the end of the passage.”

III
THE CRIME AND THE PUBLIC

Whenever anything sensational occurs to disturb the serenity of daily life in Paris, the vortex of politics promptly sucks it in. The Parisians—Frenchmen in general, in fact—are insatiable politicians, and no matter what the happening, discussion of it becomes immediately a party matter. It is of little consequence whether the item which is talked about in clubs, in cafés, in the newspapers, in the theatre lobbies, at dinner-parties, and at supper after the theatre is green hair, the Caillaux Drama, or a new play, the people who discuss it usually take sides in accordance with their political views. You may laugh at the idea that green hair or a non-political play has any bearing on politics, but in Paris this is curiously true. Green hair, for instance, became a dogma of the Opposition. It was adopted by ladies of the aristocracy, therefore Socialists and Radicals jeered at it. The sensible man who ventured to laugh at green hair was immediately stigmatized by those who upheld the new fashion as a supporter of the parliamentary system and the bloc, not because parliamentary Radicals and green hair have any real connexion, not because Monsieur Jaurès prevents the ladies of his family from wearing it, but because the Duchesse de Y. and the Comtesse de Z., who are “bien pensants,” have become votaries of the fashion. A new play is judged not so much on its merits as on political grounds. If the author be of aristocratic sympathies, Monsieur Lavedan, for instance, the anti-aristocrats promptly run down his play, and if he be one of the class from which Dreyfusards were drawn during the Dreyfus case and afterwards, the reactionaries have no good word to say for his work. How curiously true this is in Paris, and how difficult it is for any foreigner who has not lived many years in Paris to understand it, was proved by the tumult and bloodshed over a play of Monsieur Henry Bernstein’s which was produced some years ago at the Comédie Française. The reactionary party actually contrived to wreck the play because they disliked Monsieur Bernstein, because he was a Jew, and because his play was produced in the national theatre. The principal difficulty for a foreigner in understanding the extraordinary hold of politics in France on matters which appear and which are really entirely outside the scope of politics is increased by the Frenchman’s attitude in argument. When a foreigner disagrees with a Frenchman on any question whatsoever, the Frenchman, should he happen to be getting the worse of the discussion, puts an end to it by remarking, smilingly and politely, “But you are a foreigner, my friend, and therefore cannot possibly understand this matter, which is essentially French.” There is no answer to such a statement. Frenchmen believe, quaintly enough, that the hand of every foreigner is always against them. The national conceit in France, an excellent asset, of course, for the nation, but singularly aggravating sometimes, is enormous, unfathomable, and entirely impervious to argument or logic. The greatest praise for anything in France is that it is French. The greatest praise for anything in Paris is that it is very Parisian, and so peculiar is this national conceit that it finds an outlet in the inevitable claim which is invariably made for French initiative in any invention, scientific or otherwise, which has made its mark in the world, for any novelty of medical science, for anything inspired at all. The origin of anything worth having in the world is French. This is dogma, and quite indisputable. Your Frenchman will admit the marvels of Marconi, but he will always add that Branly, a Frenchman, was the real inventor of wireless telegraphy, and will ignore Hertz as far as he dares. There was an argument in the French Press, not long ago, for instance, to prove that Columbus was a Frenchman. I do not know whether his famous egg was also a French egg, and I do not remember exactly how Columbus was proved to be French. I do know, however, that Frenchmen are quite sure that, although Edison and Bell had something to do with the invention of the telephone, a Frenchman was the real inventor of it, and quite recently, when Mr. Westinghouse died, the newspapers proved, to their own satisfaction, that a Frenchman was the inventor of the Westinghouse brake.

Now the reactionary nationalist party in France makes more noise than all the others put together. The reactionary newspapers are more violent in tone than any of the others, and have a knack of making a statement on Monday, reaffirming it on Tuesday, and alluding to it as an absolute and admitted fact on Wednesday. They have therefore the grip on public opinion which noise and reiteration always secure, and it is very natural that public opinion abroad, which has necessarily less opportunity for discrimination, should finish by accepting the reiterated outcry of the noisiest portion of the French Press as the real French opinion. In a drama like the Caillaux drama, in a case where a respected man, the editor of a flourishing Paris newspaper, has been done to death, it is obvious that those who feel that the woman who has killed him has any claim to sympathy at all will find themselves in the minority. It is no less a fact that unfair methods have been in use ever since the death of Monsieur Calmette to rouse the opinion of the world against the wretched woman who is in prison for killing him. The law courts will decide how much or how little sympathy is due to her. In the meanwhile the French Press is pursuing its inevitable method of judging the case in advance, and everything is being done for political reasons to increase the public feeling of natural horror for the deed which resulted in the death of the editor of the Figaro. It is difficult to exaggerate the bitter tone of the daily howl for punishment: Already the Action Française has begun to throw mud at Monsieur Boucard, the examining magistrate, in case his report on the case should be too lenient, and to suggest that he has been bought over. I have not seen in any French paper a suggestion that Madame Caillaux is already being punished by the political downfall of her husband and her own incarceration. There is no sign anywhere in the French newspapers of an attempt to be fair, and the very worst side of the French character has come to the surface in this chorus of bitter cruelty to a woman who is down, on the one side, and libels on the dead man on the other. As much harm is being done to Madame Caillaux’s case by her friends as by her enemies. While her enemies are clamouring against her, her friends are losing any public sympathy which might have arisen, by attacking the memory of Gaston Calmette. It is quite obvious to any reasonable person who considers the drama calmly and without prejudice that Madame Caillaux did not kill Monsieur Gaston Calmette for the mere pleasure of killing. It is equally obvious that Monsieur Calmette waged his campaign in the Figaro against Monsieur Caillaux because he thought it was the right thing to do, and that he thought the political downfall of Monsieur Caillaux, which he was attempting to bring about, would be a good thing for France. Nothing is to be gained, however, on either side by an attempt to vilify the other. The facts speak for themselves, and can be chronicled in a very few lines. Monsieur Calmette considered the political downfall of Joseph Caillaux a necessity for his country. Monsieur Caillaux, rightly or wrongly, feared that to procure his downfall Monsieur Calmette intended to publish certain private letters. Monsieur Calmette’s daily attacks on Monsieur Caillaux naturally enraged both Monsieur Caillaux and his wife. The fear of an attack in print on their private lives may or may not have been justified, but it certainly was the direct cause of the murder. This murder is deplored by everybody. Nobody will deny that Madame Caillaux deserves punishment, but if those who are working every day to embitter public feeling against her would only pause to think, and would leave political considerations on one side for a moment, they would realize that their campaign is an insult to their own judges, their own juries, and their own legal system. France boasts of its liberty. Whenever a sensational case occurs, and public feelings are stirred, that liberty is allowed to degenerate into licence, and to disagree with the howl of the reactionary Press is to ask for abuse. Everybody who says a word of pity for Madame Caillaux in France nowadays is accused of trying to make the course of justice deviate. The examining magistrate whose duty it is to try and find the truth out and report on it is insulted if he dares to be impartial. Everybody who dares to suggest that the very bitterness of the Caillaux campaign was largely responsible for its deplorable climax is held up to obloquy as an enemy of France. I hold no brief either for Madame Caillaux and her husband or for the campaign in the Figaro. Both the murder and the bitterness of the campaign of which it was the climax are to be deplored. The campaign, as I shall show in this book, was a necessary evil. The bitterness and insistency with which it was conducted were perhaps unnecessary evils. The woman has killed, and will undoubtedly be punished. She is being punished already. The man who conducted the bitter campaign has been shot dead. Surely there is nothing to be gained by attempting to sully the dead man’s memory, or by attempting to overwhelm the woman whose victim he was. Madame Caillaux in prison is a victim of the political campaign of the Figaro in exactly the same degree as the editor of the Figaro is the victim of Madame Caillaux. The two will be judged. The wrong of one neither minimises nor magnifies the action of the other. I am as certain that Madame Caillaux believed, she had a right to shoot as I am certain that she was wrong to kill. I am as certain that Monsieur Calmette believed in the justice of his campaign as I am certain that Monsieur and Madame Caillaux believed that it was being conducted unjustly.

What neither of them or Monsieur Calmette realized was the harm that all three would do to the country which I am certain all three loved.

The terrible, the brutal fact remains that Gaston Calmette is in his coffin and that Madame Caillaux killed him. Unhappily, there is no doubt that if Monsieur Calmette had been wounded merely, the outcry of the anti-Caillaux party would have been nearly as loud, and the dignity of French justice would have been considered as little or less than it is to-day by Monsieur Caillaux and his friends on the one side and Monsieur Calmette and his on the other. If the Caillaux drama had not a death in it the disinclination to allow the courts to judge without interference would have been as great as it is now, in spite of the lesson which the Fabre incident should teach. To the observer, to the lover of France the most deplorable, the most unhappy result of the Caillaux drama is the belittling of France in the eyes of the whole world by the inability of the French nation to put simple faith in its own administrators of the justice of the country. And most unhappily of all, this want of faith is justified. The story of the Rochette case, like the story of the Dreyfus case, is undoubtedly a blot on France’s fair name, and every man or woman who loves France sincerely must deplore it.

It is a regrettable thing that Frenchmen find it so difficult, find it, indeed, well nigh impossible to fight fairly. The case of Madame Caillaux is surely bad enough as it stands without the need for unfair comment before it comes on for trial. If you say this to a Frenchman he will probably answer that there is very little hope of a fair trial. This I do not believe, and if I did believe it and were a Frenchman I should hate to say it. I could fill this volume with extracts from the Paris newspapers, of almost any day since Gaston Calmette was killed in his office, to prove how unfair comments have been on the case while it is still sub judice. I will not weary my readers with long extracts, however. They would be unpleasant reading, and they would answer no more purpose than this little but characteristic extract from the Patrie of the 8th of April. When Madame Caillaux was first put in prison there was, as I have said, an outcry in the Opposition Press against the “undue favours which were being shown to her in Saint Lazare.” The reports of these undue favours were flatly contradicted by the prison authorities, but the lawyers of another prisoner, a Madame Vitz, were clever enough to take advantage of the outcry to secure the comparative comforts of the pistole for their client. Madame Vitz was already in a weak state of health when she was moved, and she has now gone mad. This is what the Patrie (a reactionary paper) has to say about her case: “Madame Caillaux, who enjoys the little and the great favours of the prison administration, must be satisfied to-day. Another wish which she recently expressed has just been carried out. Calmette’s murderess had a neighbour in the cell next to hers, Madame Vitz. Her counsel, Maître Desbons, obtained, with a great deal of trouble, some alleviation of her fate, and she was put in the pistole class in the cell next door to the one occupied by Madame Caillaux. Owing to her constant annoyance at the extraordinary favours with which Madame Caillaux was treated Madame Vitz has gone mad. In her cell she was always calling out ‘Madame Caillaux! Madame Caillaux!’ and screaming. The wife of the ex-Minister of Finance complained of her neighbourhood. The director of the prison bowed to her wishes, and had Madame Vitz removed to the prison infirmary.” Can anything be more grossly, more stupidly, and childishly unfair than this attempt to alienate sympathy from Madame Vitz’s neighbour? I have quoted it because it is short, but any Paris paper of the Patrie type unfortunately provides more material of the same kind daily than I should care to translate or my readers would care to read. I should not be surprised if many of the comments in the London newspapers suffered considerably and indirectly from the unfairness of many of the newspapers in Paris while the case has been sub judice. The reason for this is very simple. In Paris there are six evening papers of any importance. These are the Patrie, which appears early in the afternoon, the Temps, the Liberté, and the Journal des Débâts, which appear at about five o’clock, the Intransigeant and the Presse, which appear just about dinner time. Of these six papers five are Opposition papers, and only one of these five, the Journal des Débâts, makes the slightest attempt to be impartial. The only really impartial evening paper is the Temps, which gives the news of the day and comments on it, but comments without bias. The Patrie and the Presse are under the same directorate, the Intransigeant, while perhaps not quite so rabid as the Presse and the Patrie, is openly unfair whenever politics call for unfairness, as they usually do, and the Liberté, while it prints the news, is always invariably and openly in such frank opposition to the Government that nothing done by any member of the Government is ever anything but wrong, and news which has the slightest reference to politics of any kind is invariably coloured. It follows that the local correspondent without a very wide knowledge and experience of French peculiarities and French methods must find it very difficult to form an opinion (in time for transmission to London the same evening) sufficiently without bias to be really valuable. Every journalist in Paris is obliged to read the evening papers; the evening papers, with two honourable exceptions above mentioned, always present the news of the day with the colouring of their political convictions, and the correspondent of an English paper may therefore frequently have found it impossible during the Caillaux drama, as he often found it impossible during the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus case, and other of the periodic convulsions of modern France, to separate the wheat of fact from the chaff of political colouring. In saying this I intend no reflection whatever on the honesty, the brilliance, or the intelligence of the Paris correspondents of the London Press, all of whom are my acquaintances, and most of whom I am proud to number among my personal friends. I feel sure that if any of them happen to read what I have just written they will not only admit its truth, but be inclined to think that I have spoken with even less emphasis than I might.

Whatever may be the result of the trial of Madame Caillaux there is no question of the immediate result of the murder of Monsieur Calmette, on public opinion in France. Men and women alike, all consider that Madame Caillaux should be treated with the utmost severity, and men and women alike, all are anxious to see whatever punishment is possible meted out to her husband. So real is this feeling—and I am talking now of the general public and not of journalists or politicians—that Monsieur Caillaux has found it necessary to go about, when it has been needful for him to show himself in public, with a strong bodyguard of police in plain clothes. He has allowed himself to be persuaded, contrary to his first intention, to remain a candidate for re-election in his constituency, but he is so well aware of the feeling against him everywhere that, although lack of personal courage is certainly not one of the faults of the ex-Minister of Finance, he is conducting his canvass by deputy, and remains in Paris under constant guard.