The Caillaux Drama

by John N. Raphael

Agence Nouvelle—Photo, Paris

MME. CAILLAUX IN THE DRESS SHE WAS TO WEAR AT THE ITALIAN EMBASSY ON THE EVENING OF THE MURDER

The mass of work which the preliminary examination in a big criminal trial entails may be gathered from the fact that the examining magistrate’s opinion on the case when written out and handed into court to be read at the beginning of the trial is frequently of such length that it forms a volume by itself and takes many hours in the reading. The judge who presides over the case has of course read the examining magistrate’s opinion, and digested it very carefully before the case comes into court, and in France it is the judge who conducts a trial rather than counsel for the defence and for the prosecution.

During the preliminary examination of the Caillaux case, which finished just before this volume went to press, several unanticipated points arose. The reader, who has studied with any care the employment, given in the first chapter of this book, of Madame Caillaux’s time on March 16, 1914, will have noticed that some hours of the afternoon were unaccounted for. A very bitter discussion on the employment of those hours, a discussion in which Monsieur Caillaux, Madame Caillaux, Monsieur Caillaux’s friends, the Figaro, the public bank clerks, the keeper of the registry office where Madame Caillaux engaged a cook, the cook herself, Madame Caillaux’s servants, her English governess Miss Baxter—in which all kinds of people were allowed to take a hand, raged for several days. It came about in the simplest manner. Madame Caillaux said that she went to the registry office and engaged a cook early in the afternoon. The keeper of the registry office said that Madame Caillaux had engaged a cook late in the afternoon. The cook herself didn’t remember exactly at what time she was engaged. Madame Caillaux’s chauffeur remembered when he drove her to the registry office, but his evidence is not considered incontrovertible because he is in Madame Caillaux’s employ. Matters were complicated by the fact that Madame Caillaux had been to the Crédit Lyonnais and to her safe there. The strong room of the Crédit Lyonnais is officered by certain clerks who hand each person who goes down to the strong boxes a ticket, duly numbered, which is stamped with a mechanical dating stamp marking the hour and minutes at which it is issued. Madame Caillaux’s ticket was marked five o’clock. She maintained that she had been to the Crédit Lyonnais an hour earlier, between four and five minutes past, and that she had been home before she went there. For several days, argument went on in the papers, in which all sorts of people took part, to show that Madame Caillaux had told the truth or had lied about the employment of her afternoon before the murder. This argument was mainly for the purpose of proving or of disproving premeditation or its absence. After several days’ newspaper discussion, an examination of the mechanical stamp at the Crédit Lyonnais proved that it was very unreliable and its use has now been discontinued by the bank.

One of the great difficulties in the task of the examining magistrate in securing really relevant and really useful evidence in a crime of this kind, is the French insistence on the need of and the right to professional secrecy. As I have pointed out in another chapter, while professional secrecy is in some cases a necessity, it is often distinctly antagonistic to the search for the truth. It is not unlikely that there might never have been any Caillaux drama at all if professional secrecy had not been invoked on another occasion. During Monsieur Boucard’s examination he was informed by two members of Parliament that each of them had been told that Monsieur Calmette had been in possession of the letters, the publication of which Madame Caillaux feared so much. The examining magistrate very naturally wanted to know who had supplied this information, and very naturally wanted to question the informant. One of the two honourable deputies had given his word of honour as a lawyer, the other had given his word of honour pure and simple not to disclose the source of his information, with the result that their evidence is no evidence at all, and that on the other hand even if it be valueless the public and everybody interested has been led to believe that there may be a good deal in it. But what impresses the impartial observer more than anything else in connexion with the preliminaries for a criminal trial in France is their unfairness—the unfairness of the system—to the person who is to be tried. For instance, after Monsieur Calmette’s death, the report of the autopsy made by the two medical officers of health usually charged with this duty, Doctor Socquet and Doctor Charles Paul, was handed by them to the examining magistrate and was, immediately afterwards, published in extenso in the public press. The examining magistrate had also received the evidence of the armourer, Monsieur Gastinne-Renette, and his employees on Madame Caillaux’s visit to the shooting gallery, and her trial of the revolver she bought there. An enterprising newspaper secured a figure from the shooting gallery, marked it with the trial shots as Madame Caillaux had shot them, and published this picture opposite another one representing Monsieur Calmette, which was marked with the wounds inflicted according to the autopsy. Does it not seem an unheard of and unallowable crime against common sense and common decency that the public should be offered such evidence of premeditation by a newspaper while the case is still unheard?

Some idea of the evidence which is inflicted on the examining magistrate in a case of this kind may be formed from that given voluntarily by a young man named Robert Philippeau. Monsieur Philippeau stated with some solemnity that he knew nothing about the drama, that he did not know Monsieur Caillaux and that he had not known Monsieur Calmette. He had been in the Nord Sud (a branch of the Paris Tube) in a first-class carriage, one afternoon in the course of last winter. Two ladies sat on the seat immediately behind him. One of them said in his hearing, “She browbeat me, she laughed at me, she took him from me, but I have four of his letters, and one of them is one which he does not know I possess. I have shown these letters to Barthou, I have told him that I am going to use them. He neither advised me to do so, nor advised me not to. I will wait till they get to the top of the tree and then I will pull them down headlong.” Monsieur Philippeau said that he looked at the lady who had spoken. He did not know her by sight, but when he saw the picture of Madame Gueydan-Dupré in the newspapers he had no further doubt that it was she who had spoken, and that she alluded to the letters of which we have heard so much.

To anyone who has ever seen in a Paris daily newspaper the reproduction of the photograph of anyone he knows, the value of this “evidence” is obvious. Madame Gueydan had no difficulty whatever in proving by the evidence of several intimate friends that she had never been in the Nord Sud in her life. And even if Madame Gueydan had travelled every afternoon all through the winter in the first-class carriages of the Nord Sud she would hardly have been likely to talk to a friend in a loud voice of private affairs of such importance, or to mention Monsieur Barthou’s name in connexion with them.

With regard to these letters, it is not yet certain that they will be read in court, but it is to be hoped that the examining magistrate may succeed in obtaining possession of them for this purpose, for on the probability of their publication in the Figaro, and on Madame Caillaux’s belief that their publication might occur, rests one of the principal pleas for the defence. In her examination on the motive for her crime before the examining magistrate, Monsieur Boucard, the prisoner was asked why she was so afraid at the idea of the publication of the two letters which Monsieur Caillaux had written to her in 1909 when he was still the husband of Madame Gueydan, as Madame Caillaux at that time was already divorced from her first husband, Monsieur Léo Claretie. “These letters,” said the prisoner, “were intimate in nature, and I resented and feared the possibility of their publication. My situation and my reputation could be attacked by the help of these letters.” “That being so,” said Monsieur Boucard, “why did you give them back to Monsieur Caillaux?” “When he wrote them to me,” said the prisoner, “I was staying in the country with friends. So that I shouldn’t lose them, Monsieur Caillaux asked me to send them back to him, addressed to him ‘Poste Restante’ at Le Mans. I did this, and that is how Madame Gueydan was able to steal them from the drawer of his writing-table. Now that the scandal has burst,” she added, “I should wish these two letters to be put in with the other evidence on my case.” Monsieur Boucard told her (it should be understood that the whole of this conversation in the magistrate’s private room at the Palais of Justice was reproduced in full, immediately after it took place, in the Paris newspapers of April 22) that he had asked Madame Gueydan on three separate occasions to give him the photographs of these letters—which photographs had been taken and which she had, she admitted, deposited in a safe place—and that she had refused to let him have them. “I hope you will be able to get them,” said Madame Caillaux to Monsieur Boucard. “Their publication will show that they are not the improper letters they have been described to be, and I wish to renew my statement that in going to the Figaro office I had no intention of killing Monsieur Calmette. My object was to obtain from him the promise that he would not make use of the letters which Monsieur Caillaux had written to me, and I had intended making a scandal in case Monsieur Calmette refused.” The magistrate’s answer to this statement was published, with the statement itself, by the Paris newspapers of April 22.