The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  The foreigner, who Locard later revealed was “a grand-duke, a close relative of the Tsar,” 18 has to be protected from scandal. Meg calls “a very high official, who arrives, duly organizes the staging of the scene, and discreetly leaves.” 19 He was the person that a neighbor saw leaving the impasse Ronsin, hurrying to a waiting car. Benjamin F. Martin, a modern interpreter of the case, suggests that the high French official was none other than Magistrate Leydet, who then requested appointment as the juge d’instruction in the case so that he could manage the investigation to avoid incriminating the foreigner.

  In this scenario, Meg had to be willing to endure imprisonment and risk conviction at trial in order to protect this powerful man. Just as she had earlier been discreet about the death of President Faure, so she repeated the performance this time. Had she resisted, the wheels of justice would have ground her up. Locard suggested that she was rewarded by a deliberately botched investigation that left too much doubt in the jurors’ minds to convict her.

  Corroboration for Locard’s explanation of the case had to wait until eighteen months after Meg’s death in 1954. Armand Lanoux, a French writer and biographer of Zola, revealed “confidential information” that he had received from someone in a position to know the truth. This may have been Roger de Chateleux, the ghostwriter Meg had employed in writing her memoirs. The informant quoted a “Dr. D” who had assisted during the first autopsy of the two bodies. He admitted that Steinheil, without doubt, had been manually strangled and died from a fractured larynx. Mme. Japy had actually expired from a heart attack. Both had ropes placed around their necks to conceal the true causes of death, and the autopsy doctor was part of the cover-up, writing a false report, “not upon what he knew, but upon instructions he had to follow.” 20 The mystery would remain.

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  The second spectacular Belle Époque murder case in which a woman was the central figure required no detection at all. The facts were clear and the defendant admitted them, but the case held a surprise all the same. Was it a crime to march into a man’s office and coolly shoot him four times? During the Belle Époque, an age that splintered notions of objectivity in art and science, that all depended on one’s point of view.

  Henriette Caillaux, née Rainouard, was the second wife of the ambitious politician who had been premier of France at the time the Mona Lisa was stolen. A multimillionaire through inheritance, Joseph Caillaux dressed fastidiously, sporting a monocle and spats. Nonetheless, many of his colleagues despised him, not least for his success with women, which he flaunted. He and Henriette had been lovers even while Caillaux was married to his first wife, Berthe. Pressed by Henriette to get a divorce, Caillaux had made it clear that nothing took precedence over his political career. He wrote her frankly that though he hoped “to regain my liberty [through divorce], in no case will I move before the elections.” 21 He had also commented indiscreetly on his political policies in other letters to Henriette, and he eventually asked her to return them. When she did, he put them in a desk where his wife later found them. Berthe threatened to divorce him, which would have damaged his chances of re-election to the national legislature. Caillaux wrote her an abject letter of apology, and she relented, giving him back the letters, which he burned. However, without his knowledge, she had made photographic copies.

  True to his word to Henriette, Caillaux divorced his wife after the elections of 1910. By the following year, he was once more a happily married man and was able to gain the post of premier.

  Caillaux’s term as the head of government was controversial. Overriding his own foreign minister, he personally negotiated with German diplomats to defuse what was known as the Agadir Incident. By relinquishing a small part of the French Congo, he obtained Germany’s agreement to allow France a protectorate over Morocco. This was a triumph for French diplomacy, yet it made Caillaux unpopular because the French public hated the thought of giving up any territory to the despised Germans, who still occupied the formerly French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been taken after the war of 1870. It even gave rise to the rumor that the Mona Lisa had been stolen by German spies, held hostage to gain an advantage in the negotiations. Caillaux lost his grip on power and was forced to step down as premier in January 1912.

  In October 1913, Caillaux’s party, the Radicals, elected him as its leader, and two months later he formed a coalition that brought down the current center-right government. Ordinarily, the president of the republic, Raymond Poincaré, would then have asked Caillaux to form a new government as premier, but Poincaré instead turned to Gaston Doumergue, another member of the Radical Party. Doumergue became premier but appointed Caillaux minister of finance, a position that Caillaux used to dominate the government. That was another reason Caillaux was so despised by his colleagues. Although his competence at finance was undisputed, he made it clear that he thought others’ abilities could not compare with his own.

  Nor were his policies popular, though in hindsight it can be seen that France would have done better to follow them. France was in a militaristic mood, and the government had recently increased the required term of military service for young men from two years to three. Generally more cautious about preparing the country for war, Caillaux was considered likely to try to scale back the new law. In addition, he was a strong backer of instituting a graduated income tax, something that was anathema to wealthy Frenchmen and those who served their interests.

  Among the latter was Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, and that newspaper began a campaign to discredit and destroy Caillaux. From December 10, when Caillaux became finance minister, until the middle of March 1914, Le Figaro published more than one hundred articles, anecdotes, and cartoons attacking Caillaux. Many leveled accusations of financial impropriety — fraud, conflicts of interests, even embezzlement.

  Caillaux’s enemies provided Calmette with plenty of ammunition. President Poincaré gave the editor copies of documents verts (so called because they were marked with a green bar) that described Caillaux’s confidential negotiations with German intermediaries during the Agadir Incident. These were highly secret materials, and Poincaré could not allow Calmette to quote from them because it would be clear who the source was. But Calmette used the information to argue that Caillaux had betrayed France’s interests.

  In addition, Jean Louis Barthou, the premier who had been turned out of office by Caillaux’s party, gave Calmette a document written by a public prosecutor, Victor Fabre. Later known as the Fabre memo, it described how Caillaux, during his term as premier in 1911, had pressured Fabre to postpone the trial of a man who had been accused of selling worthless stock in nonexistent companies. Caillaux’s purpose had been to quietly delay the trial till the statute of limitations had passed. Once again, to protect his source, Calmette could not quote from the memo but could merely write about its contents.

  Le Figaro’s incredible barrage of editorials and articles, vituperative though they were, did little to erode Caillaux’s popularity among the voters, so Calmette stepped up his attacks. On March 13, 1914, Le Figaro published a letter that Caillaux had written to his first wife, Berthe, back in 1901 when they were carrying on an affair while she was still married to another man. This letter was particularly damaging because Caillaux had won favor with his constituents by backing an income tax bill, yet here he confided to Berthe that behind the scenes he had earlier “crushed” the bill while defending it in public. The letter, signed “Ton Jo” (“Your Jo”) appeared on the front page of Le Figaro. Calmette had removed the date to give the impression that it was current, and for good measure he printed beside it a campaign picture that Caillaux had autographed, to show that the handwriting was the same. 22

  The letter was a sensation and became the talk of Paris. Caillaux lamely explained that he had written it thirteen years earlier and that it did not reflect his true sentiments, but the damage was done, and worse might be yet to come. Caillaux assumed, despite Calmette’s disavowal, that Berthe was the so
urce of the letter. Now he worried that even though she had promised to turn over all copies of his letters to Henriette, she might have been lying. If the editor published some of those, it would do further damage to Caillaux’s career.

  This possibility was particularly alarming to Henriette, who thought she was gaining respectability and a position in society by becoming the wife of a man as powerful as Caillaux. Thirty-nine years old and still beautiful, she had already had to endure the many attacks Le Figaro had made on her husband; now she feared her own name was about to be dragged through the mud. At the time she had begun her affair with Caillaux, she was married to another man, by whom she had two daughters. She liked to play the role of a gracious hostess, and the revelations in these letters would make her an object of cruel gossip. “To publish these letters or any part of them,” she recalled, “would have been to lay out all that was most intimate to me, my most intimate secrets, the secrets I hold most dear and keep most hidden. It would have been to strip me of my honor as a woman.” 23 She even claimed to have considered suicide.

  On Monday, March 16, Le Figaro, now routinely referring to Caillaux as “Jo,” continued its relentless campaign, and the editor promised new revelations the following day. At breakfast, Henriette suggested to her husband that he take legal action to stop Calmette. He went off to plead for help from President Poincaré. The president was unsympathetic; he told Caillaux that the editor was a gentleman who would not print personal letters — -something that had just been proven untrue.

  Meanwhile, at Caillaux’s request, the chief justice of the Tribunal de la Seine came to see Henriette. He told her that it was impossible to sue someone for libel before the libel had been published, and in any case a trial would only publicize any scurrilous charges that Calmette made.

  When Caillaux returned home, Henriette reported what the chief justice had said. Angry, Caillaux responded, “Since there is nothing else to do, I will take on the responsibility [of dealing with Calmette]. I’ll smash his face!” 24 Henriette later testified that “at that moment a cinematographic film… flashed before my eyes” 25 in which her husband killed Calmette and was arrested. She began to make the decision to take his place.

  After Caillaux left, Henriette called their chauffeur and told him to drive her to Gastinne-Renette, a well-known gunsmith’s shop. Henriette was familiar with handguns; her father had insisted that she carry one in her handbag, which she had continued to do after marrying Caillaux. A few months earlier, she had lost it, and now she wanted to find a replacement. The salesman showed her a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson, but Henriette found it hard to pull the trigger. She found more to her liking a Browning automatic, the weapon of choice of the Bonnot Gang and of Picasso. She tried it out at the shooting range in the basement of the store — hitting a cutout figure of a man three out of five times — and decided to purchase it. Back upstairs, she asked the salesman to load the gun for her, but he explained that it was against the law for him to do so. At his direction she loaded it herself, and he cautioned her that to prepare it for firing, she must pull back the slide that would put a bullet into the chamber. A few minutes later, in the backseat of her automobile, she did just that.

  After a stop at her bank, where she removed some papers from a safe-deposit box, she returned home. It was around 4:00 P.M. and she was supposed to dress for a reception at the Italian Embassy. Instead, she wrote her husband a note:

  This morning, when I told you about my meeting with Chief Justice Monier, who had explained to me that in France we have no law to protect us against the calumnies of the press, you replied only that one day you would smash the face of the ignoble Calmette. I understood that your decision was irrevocable. My decision was then taken; it would be I who would render justice. France and the Republic have need of you. I will commit the act. If this letter reaches you, I will have carried out, or tried to carry out, justice. Pardon me, but my patience is at an end. I love you, and I embrace you from the depths of my heart.

  Your Henriette26

  Around five o’clock that afternoon, Henriette arrived at the offices of Le Figaro and asked to see the editor. She wore a fur coat and carried a large muff that concealed her hands. After being told that Calmette was out of the office but was expected back within the hour, she handed his secretary a sealed envelope containing her card and said that she would wait. Evidently the staff did not recognize her, and she sat in the anteroom for nearly an hour, speaking to no one.

  Calmette finally arrived with his friend the novelist Paul Bourget. He had intended only to pick up some papers and leave, but when he opened the envelope handed to him by his secretary, he showed it to Bourget, who advised him not to see her. Calmette responded that he could not refuse a woman. He entered his office and asked his secretary to send Mme. Caillaux in.

  She did not sit, but merely said, “You must know why I am here.” Caillaux, standing behind his desk, replied, “But I do not. Please sit down.” 27 Instead, she removed her hand from her muff to reveal the pistol and fired six shots at him. Four of them struck their target, and when several employees rushed into the office, they found the editor lying on the floor, blood spurting from his wounds. Several people went to his assistance, and others looked at Henriette, who still held the smoking gun. “Do not touch me!” she told them. “I am a lady. I have my car outside to ride in to the police station.” 28 She went downstairs and directed the chauffeur accordingly. Another vehicle took Calmette to a hospital, where he died six hours later. Henriette was quoted as explaining to the police: “There is no justice in France. There is only the revolver.” 29

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  If Henriette had hoped to save her husband’s political career, she only partially succeeded. He was forced to resign his post as finance minister, though he continued to hold his seat in the legislature — indeed, he was re-elected a little more than a month after the murder. As for Henriette, bail was not granted in capital cases, and she was given the same cell in Saint-Lazare Prison where Meg Steinheil had been incarcerated. She enjoyed more amenities, however, including a new stove, a lamp, and a foot rug from the warden’s own office. She was also permitted to order meals from fine restaurants, and another female prisoner was actually assigned to be her maid.

  Those were not the only signs of favoritism. The juge d’instruction in the case, Henri Boucard, conducted only a six-week investigation — very brief for a major crime. Of course, Henriette freely admitted killing Calmette, but Boucard uncritically accepted her explanation that she had feared the editor would publish the letters she had written to Caillaux five years earlier — a relevant point because that motive would make this case a crime passionnel and increase the likelihood that the jury would find Henriette not guilty. 30 Indeed, as many as one out of three defendants in murder trials claimed that theirs was a crime of passion in order to increase their odds of acquittal.

  French jurors were not expected to fully understand the law; they were instructed to reach a verdict based on the “impressions” they received from observing the presentation of the case. 31 These impressions were very often influenced by sympathy, not only for the victim, but also for the perpetrator of the crime.

  Louis Proal, one of the era’s most esteemed experts on the crime passionnel, published a seven-hundred-page book on the subject, in which he regretted the tendency for popular authors to glorify criminals, particularly those who acted out of a sense of honor. “Novels and plays,” he wrote, “have so extolled the nobility of crimes of passion and so eloquently justified revenge that juries, quite forgetting the duty they have been summoned to fulfill, fail entirely to defend society and pity, not the victims, but the authors of crimes of this nature.” 32 That was certainly what Mme. Caillaux was counting on.

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  Her trial began on July 20, 1914. Three weeks earlier, far away in the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gavrilo Princip had shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The latter event wou
ld be the spark that ignited a world war, but the newspapers of Paris devoted most of the space on their front pages to Henriette.

  Once more, requests for tickets to the visitors’ gallery far outnumbered the available seats. As the trial opened, Henriette entered, clothed in black and wearing a circular hat with tall plumes. It set off her blond hair and fair skin, as did a heavy coating of powder that made her look like a wraith.

  Presiding judge Louis Albanel, a close friend of the Caillaux family, was inordinately deferential in his opening interrogation. He asked a few prompting questions and then let Henriette speak for nearly three hours, telling about her life with Caillaux and the anguish that Calmette had brought to her. In contrast to Meg Steinheil, she was dignified rather than emotional. She stressed that as the wife of a minister, she endured along with him the attacks of political enemies. “One day,” she testified, “I visited a fashionable couturier’s establishment where there were a great many people. One of two ladies seated nearby… leaned over to the other and said: ‘You see the lady beside me dressed in black? She is the wife of that thief Caillaux.’” 33

  Henriette’s greatest fear was that Calmette would print the letters she had written her husband before their marriage. Her father had told her that a woman who took a lover “is a woman without honor,” and she dreaded the public disgrace such revelations would bring. Now, of course, everyone knew about the letters, including her nineteen-year-old daughter: “I am obliged to blush in front of her,” Henriette said. 34