Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  On the sixth day of the trial, Henriette gave visible evidence of her own excessive lability. The terrible moment had come when the letters – obtained from Caillaux’s first wife – that she had so feared Calmette would publish in Le Figaro, were to be read out in open court. They would thus be available to every newspaper and every reader in France as well as abroad, where the trial was much reported. These letters detail the early days of Henriette’s affair with Joseph, their very physical love: they show him asking her to wait for his divorce because of the impending election. As her own lawyer, reading out two of the letters, reached a point where Joseph landed ‘a thousand million kisses all over your adored little body’, Henriette fainted in her chair.

  In his summing up, the Calmettes’ family lawyer, Maître Chenu, tried to paint Henriette as an ogre of deliberate and calm calculation, propelled into her deed by a debauched husband whose ambition reached the skies and which she shared in an utterly unwomanly way. During his peroration, Henriette fainted once more.

  Maître Labori countered by talking, amongst much else, of his admiration and friendship for the editor of the Figaro. Without wanting to blame him in any way, it was clear to Labori that where Caillaux was concerned Le Figaro had allowed its politics to outstrip the bounds of an otherwise estimable free press. Labori also instanced prior crimes of passion, in particular that of Jeanne Clovis-Hugues, the wife of a radical member of the Assemblée. Falsely accused of fornication by a private investigator, she had in 1884 shot him six times as he was leaving the Palace of Justice, despite the fact that the court had just convicted him of defamation. She was acquitted, and her husband was proud that she had redeemed her honour in this way.

  In order to make sure that the jury was convinced Henriette fell within the same passionate rubric, Labori reminded the good men and true of her uncontrollable, irrational, sexually fearful and very feminine emotional volatility. She was a fragile woman who had been driven over the edge to breakdown by the public revelation of an intimate letter that scandalously compromised her virtue and her honour. Labori even introduced new evidence: he cited a psychiatrist he had consulted, a specialist from the faculty of medicine, who had provided him with an expert opinion. This stated that on the afternoon of 16 March 1914, Madame Caillaux had been guided by ‘a subconscious impulse that resulted in a dédoublement de personnalité – a splitting into two, so that two beings and two wills inhabited her. Her own “automatism”, her trance state, was an echo of her Browning automatic.’ It was a statement which the Figaro would treat with mocking hilarity the next day, but which Le Matin quoted with perfect respect.

  But then, Le Figaro could hardly allow itself to be generous to the Caillaux couple, whom it continued to libel in a manner far more emphatic than most editors would allow even today, and certainly never in Britain while a trial was still in progress. It didn’t cite Maitre Labori’s final plea for a good ending to the trial: this would entail an acquittal for Madame Caillaux, who would inevitably evermore bear the scars of her act. But the good outcome would also entail a purified press. Le Figaro did, however, cite with just a smidgen of approval Labori’s concluding words: a plea for concord between opposing factions in the greater conflict that was around the corner: ‘Let us preserve our rage for our external enemies,’ he urged, ‘and proceed united ... towards the dangers that now threaten.’

  The issue of Le Matin on the day after the verdict, 29 July, carried a front page divided in half. On the left the headline read: ‘Austro-Serb WAR declared: Europe-wide War may still be averted’; on the right, ‘Madame Caillaux Acquitted’.

  The jury had been out for just over an hour before it delivered its verdict to a rowdy and divided public. The vast numbers present spilled out into the streets, where a large crowd had long been gathered. According to Le Figaro, cries of ‘Assassin!’ greeted Caillaux, as he emerged from the court. For a while, they were to plague him wherever he went. In the rage that erupted against her husband, Henriette was all but forgotten, as if whatever the jury had declared, she was a mere female pawn in a male political game – and Caillaux himself the murderer, not only of Calmette but of all the patriotic values the Figaro editor had liked to associate himself with. When the socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated on 31 July, political allies urged Caillaux to leave Paris. His initials were on the murderer’s second gun.

  Suspicion continued to hover over Henriette’s acquittal – and not only that suspicion linked to her determining plea of crime passionnel. Rumours persisted that Caillaux had called in favours. The president of the court, Louis Albanel, was one of his friends, and it may not have been by chance that he was presiding. Just before the trial, the prosecutor was elevated to a higher rank in the Legion of Honour. There were rumours, too, that the jury was chosen with an eye to their Republican sympathies: the urn from which the names were drawn was broken.

  Whatever the case – and with a viciously divided press, sifting fact from slander remained difficult – Caillaux was arrested in January 1918 for ‘intelligence with the enemy’. Despite lack of evidence, he was convicted in 1920 and served a three-year sentence and a five-year proscription from politics. Amnestied in 1924, he returned to the Ministry of Finance. But it was clear that politics in an era that was not only postwar but post-Russian Revolution had moved to the left of him, while he had moved to the right. He outlived many of his cohort, and heading up the Senate’s finance group in 1940, he even became a supporter of Maréchal Pétain.

  As for Henriette, if love for her husband may not have endured his continuing extramarital frolics, she did retain her domestic role. She also began to use that volatile mind of hers. She completed a degree in art history, lectured and wrote a book. But her reputation as the woman who had killed the editor of Le Figaro continued to haunt her. Restaurants and hotels on occasion refused to serve or admit her, and as late as 1934 when she was to give a lecture on Van Eyck, hecklers from the right-wing Action Franf aise stopped her in her tracks, shouting, ‘You belong in prison!’ Perhaps a part of her agreed that she did.

  27. Into the Sexual Century

  Much had changed during the years that had elapsed between Christiana Edmunds’s and Madame Caillaux’s ordeal before the gathered force of judge, jury, press and mind doctors. The public visibility of the doctors, and the diffusion of their ways of thinking, had introduced new arguments about how the mind and the emotions worked, and cast them into the public arena. Along the way, the psychiatrists had medicalized sexuality. In doing so they had brought the discourse about sex and love into the open, even if their views and emphases, whether on ‘perversion’ or on the disturbances of love, differed markedly. By the first decade of the twentieth century Christiana would arguably have been allowed to speak her love in an English court, even if the verdict of the jury in the end went against her.

  When, in 1902, lowly milliner’s assistant Kitty Byron stabbed her violent, alcoholic, cohabiting stockbroker lover after he threatened to desert her, the press were kind to her; and though she was convicted of murder, the jury called for mercy. Mass petitioning resulted in the Home Secretary’s clemency and what was a very brief seven-year sentence, with a final year off in a remedial centre. The press understood that the ‘cad’ could have driven the ‘waiflike’ Kitty mad; one of the petitions to the Home Secretary talked of how his repudiation of her had reduced her to shame and sorrow, ‘followed by a terrible loss of mental control so as to make it well nigh impossible that she in any sense could realise the serious result of [her] offence’.

  In a letter appended to the petition, a woman wrote that it was her ‘firm belief that the poor creature was temporarily insane when she killed Baker’. Another, that she had been driven mad for a short time. There was also a general insistence on her feminine frailty and her ‘hysteria’. Henry Maudsley, who alongside Dr J. J. Pitcairn had examined her on arrest, considered her legally sane but in ‘a transport of passion’. His younger colleague (who may also have doubled as the dete
ctive fiction writer of the same name) was more interested in her sexual behaviour, noting her precocious activity ‘for libidinous purposes with youthful and older men’ and her ‘unnatural practices with persons of her own sex’. These he considered to be signs of her precarious mental disposition. He may have been right. In the charity home where she spent the last year of her brief sentence, Kitty Byron fell madly in love with a nurse of whom she grew obsessively jealous: she proceeded to attempt to poison her ...

  The influential Austrian forensic psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing begins his monumental Psychopathia Sexualis (1886–1912) by forefronting the importance of what Freud would call ‘libido’. ‘Sexual life no doubt is the one mighty factor in the individual and social relations of man ... Sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics and no doubt of aestheticism and religion.’ But while stressing the importance of the sexual instinct, Krafft-Ebing also wants to limit its expression in women: ‘If a woman’s mind is normally developed and if she has been brought up properly, then her sexuality is not very well developed. If this were otherwise, the entire world would just be one vast brothel, and marriage and family life would be impossible.’

  Women are part of society and, like men, including lawyers and judges, they buy into a prevailing ethos. Arguably one part of Madame Caillaux agreed with Krafft-Ebing. Exposure of her early sexual desires on the front page of Le Figaro would be an exhibition of a shaming abnormality, a perversity. Fear of the exposure of that secret past life toppled her into what the medics chose to call an ‘automatism’, an altered state in which she committed murder. According to the view that predominated at her trial, her mind, already doubly frail by virtue of its femininity and her earlier sexual excess, was temporarily overwhelmed.

  The turn of the century had brought with it hypotheses about the neurology of passion and its unbalancing sway. In a 1910 medico-legal treatise, for example, Helie Courtis linked passion to debilitating changes in circulation that produce physiological impulses, which in turn overwhelm moral and intellectual resistance and induce a temporary mental disorder in which consciousness is lost. And so passion had a physiological reason for leading to crime.

  Perceptions about the frailties of the female mind and its predisposition to be overwhelmed by passion were, of course, fiercely disputed by a growing body of vocal feminists. They pointed to social factors and double standards in love and marriage as the source of women’s ills: it was the resulting suffering that led to the need for revenge and justice. If love proved malignant for women, it was neither because they were fundamentally asexual or because their minds were frailer than men’s. It was more often because they were trapped in the conflicts created by their time. The virtue demanded of them, their idealized position as bearers of family honour, paid no heed to their desires, which really did exist. Then, too, there was the ill- treatment of lovers and husbands, the failure of the marriages, and their inability to earn their own keep.

  In effect, Madame Caillaux’s crime was the last to bring together all the belle époque’s contradictory understandings of madness, feminine psychology and sexual relations. Meanwhile, the place of the medicolegist in the legal system had become solidly entrenched. In the country of reason, the rule of law and its emphasis on the rational man had given way in certain instances to the power of passion and of pistol-bearing, vitriol-throwing women with which the era chose to incarnate itself... just as Marianne with her streaming hair and bared bosom had come to stand for revolution.

  When the mind doctors came to deal with male passions in the law courts, the clinical picture often looked substantively different. In the noisily antagonistic debating chamber that was the American courtroom, the varying views that the alienists took became headline news and served to educate the nation in the vagaries of the human mind.

  PART THREE: THE UNITED STATES

  THE PARANOIA OF MILLIONAIRE

  ‘Murder as a cure for insanity is a new thing in this jurisdiction, until with Dementia Americana, it was introduced by my learned friend.’

  DA William Travers Jerome

  V

  Brain Storm over Manhattan

  28. A Voluptuary’s Retreat

  In the early 1900s New York’s Madison Square Garden was located at Madison and 26th Street at the edge of the neighbourhood nicknamed the Tenderloin’. This was the raucous entertainment centre of America’s Gilded Age. Known to Manhattan’s anti-vice brigades as ‘Satan’s Circus’ or ‘Gomorrah’, the area teemed with brothels and casinos, theatres and music halls, bars, hotels and clubs. Here poverty jostled against wealth, and crime was rife. So too was corruption. Protection rackets thrived and the police fattened themselves on bribes. Indeed the area had got its name from ‘Clubber’ Williams’s comment on arriving at his new police precinct in 1876: he had thus far lived on chuck steak, he said, but now he’d be having a bit of tenderloin.

  There wasn’t much of that for the working class of the area, and as the century turned, organized strikes and protest grew – amongst newsboys, women in the garment industry and ‘rapid transit’ workers, to name just a few. Sometimes public protest spilled over into the Square after which the Garden was named. But with the years, that area grew increasingly affluent: Willa Cather in her My Mortal Enemy would evoke it as ‘an open-air drawing room’ – one where women’s virtue was ever an issue.

  Built in 1890 to replace a prior sporting and entertainment complex, the new and gracious ‘Garden’ was in the latest European Beaux Arts style. It was topped by an elegant cupola modelled on the minaret-like bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville. The style expressed the aspirations of the city’s elite, those ‘four hundred’, as Mrs William Backhouse Astor’s mythical number had it, who could receive an invitation to her Patriarch Balls on the strength of being the crème de la crème of society, not just money-grubbing, newly rich arrivistes. Luckily, ‘new’ was a fluid term.

  At thirty-two storeys, the Garden was Manhattan’s second-tallest building, and it came in at a cost of three million dollars to the financial group that backed it – one that included America’s leading financiers: J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, W. W. Astor amongst them. The cost of such a building project today would probably be between $365 and $596 million. But this was America’s Gilded Age: for the rich of that era before income tax, money accumulated unstoppably. The Garden’s main auditorium seated eight thousand and had floor space for thousands more. It had a twelve-hundred-seat theatre, a larger concert hall, the city’s biggest restaurant, and a roof garden-cabaret where champagne flowed and chorus girls sang.

  The building’s architect was the time’s most eminent and the most beloved of its aristocracy of wealth. The name Stanford White (1853–1906) was a byword for taste and elegance. His firm McKim, Mead & White had designed Tiffany’s, the New York Herald Building modelled on the Doge’s Palace in Venice, the graceful Washington Square Memorial Arch and a host of plush restaurants, public buildings, churches and amenities, not to mention opulent mansions both on Fifth Avenue and in the country. Unlike other architects of his day, White also designed interiors and sumptuous parties, such as might transform a New York restaurant into Versailles’s Grand Trianon and feature lavish spectacles of music and ballet. Of course, he attended these as well.

  Many of White’s gracious buildings have now vanished, but two country establishments have been restored and give a flavour of the ‘American Renaissance’ style in architecture which he helped to shape. Astor Courts, on John Jacob Astor TV’s 2800-acre estate, Ferncliff, combined classical colonial with Beaux Arts to create a luxurious summer residence. It included the first indoor pool, as well as a bowling alley and shooting range. For the Vanderbilts, there was a columned limestone mansion on the banks of the Hudson River, now a historic building in which Stanford White’s interiors remain largely intact.

  Tall, rugged, mustachioed, his reddish hair brush-cut, his suits impeccable, White was a gentleman and an aesthete who knew Shakespeare by rote from his scholar fathe
r and was familiar with the museums of the world. He was charming and cultivated. He was also something of a voluptuary. A regular at the extravagant festivities the great hostesses of the day provided, White was a lover of the best cuisine and a collector of the most beautiful women. The cities of Europe were his regular haunts – shopping grounds for style as well as for objects to be shipped home to embellish the houses of rich clients and his own. He had a luxurious multi-gabled estate in Box Hill on Long Island, a three-hour journey away, a well connected wife, Betty Smith, and a much loved son. He also had a town house on East Twenty-first Street, a bachelor flat for private entertainment and an apartment for his own use at the very top of the Madison Square Garden.

  A lift brought you up the eighty-foot tower, where White’s rooms were built in horseshoe shape around the shaft. Blue and emerald- green Tiffany dragonfly sconces lit the space, their light reflected in a wall-sized gilt mirror. A moss-green tufted velvet sofa, an ebony grand piano on which a bronze Bacchante sculpture by a famous artist was poised, a rosewood table, exotic flowers, and bird-of-paradise plants brought from Florida ... All this is what met the large, waif-like eyes of fetching sixteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit when she first entered White’s sumptuous apartment in the autumn of 1901. A lauded recent addition to the chorus of the hit show Floradora, Evelyn was already a much sought-after artist’s and photographer’s model. She had been dubbed ‘the most beautiful specimen of the skylight world’.