I don’t know that I have ever heard of a case in which a member or members of the jury have been known to have talked to witnesses, but I do not know, either, that there is anything to prevent any member of the jury discussing the case at night during the progress of the trial with a witness outside the precincts of the court. No man is infallible, but justice ought to be. Jean Richepin put the whole case against the French criminal trial in a nutshell when he sang “Quel homme est assez Dieu pour rendre la Justice?” The conclusions of a juge d’instruction, however capable the man may be, need not of necessity be infallible. As he has the power to let the prisoner go, the power to say that there is no case for the jury, it stands to reason that, unless he states a doubt, the mere fact that he has sent the prisoner for trial means that he believes in the prisoner’s guilt.
The judge therefore starts a trial with the conviction that the examining magistrate thinks that the prisoner is guilty. This conviction must influence his conduct of the case. “Quel homme est assez Dieu pour rendre la Justice” under these conditions? Many Frenchmen have been of the opinion for a long time that the procedure of a French criminal trial needs reformation. Many consider that the judge’s preliminary interrogatory of the prisoner and of the witnesses should be entirely suppressed, and should give place to examination and cross-examination by prosecuting counsel and the counsel for the defence. Many people think too that the juge d’instruction should be made to justify his dossier in open court and on oath, that he should be called to justify it at the witness bar instead of the present system of a formal reading by a clerk of the court which takes a long time and is always so gabbled that it is merely a formality.
Another reform in French criminal procedure which many Frenchmen think necessary is the suppression of the freedom of the jury during the trial. There is a curious disregard of rules and regulations during the details of a big criminal trial in France. There are witnesses who, in response to the judge’s remark after he has asked the witness to swear to tell the truth without fear and without hatred, and to state name, address, and age, in response to the three words “Make your deposition” which give the witness a free head, behave just like racehorses when the starting gate goes up. Lawyer witnesses particularly have been known to make long speeches for the defence or for the prosecution on the plea of giving evidence, and there are many other similar abuses. It often happens, too, that evidence which the examining magistrate has collected is never sifted at the trial itself. When the trial is over, when the Public Prosecutor, the counsel for the defence, and, if the prisoner has anything to say, the prisoner, have addressed the court, the jury retires to consider the verdict. There is something oddly, picturesquely, emphatic and impressive in the mechanism of this retirement.
Somehow or another the French have a peculiar knack of stage-managing anything and everything. No visitor on his first visit to Paris fails to remark the wonderful stage-management (I suppose I ought to call it landscape gardening) of the city. Look at the Tuileries Gardens when dusk is just closing in towards the end of a fine day. The whole place breathes the history of the last days of the Empire, and has the gentle melancholy of a Turner picture. Stop in the Avenue des Champs Elysées where the Avenue Nicholas II. intersects it. Look up the Avenue and down it. The Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde, which, when it ceased to be the Place Royale, held the scaffold of a king of France. Look out across the Seine, then turn and look behind you. The bridge which is named after a murdered Czar of Russia and the Invalides beyond it. Behind you the Palace of the Elysée, the home of the President of the third Republic, facing Napoleon’s Tomb. At every turn in Paris, north, east, west, or south, you get signs of this half-unconscious national gift of staging effects.
The jury in a criminal trial in Paris does not, as a London jury does, melt into disappearance before the final verdict. There are a few solemn words from the judge, there is a rustle as the lawyers gather up papers and sit back, and then fourteen very ordinary, very weary good men and true, whose faces we had only seen in profile until then, rise in their places. Their white and tired faces shine suddenly a pasty yellow in the electric lamplight. The good men of the jury show us their backs and walk slowly behind the desk of the Public Prosecutor to a little door which we had not noticed till then, and which has just been opened. Through this freshly opened door we stare across the court up a flight of narrow stairs with red and grey carpets on them. The verdict will come, presently, down that flight of narrow stairs. The small door closes, and we wait.
As a rule a big criminal trial finishes late in the evening. Everybody is sick of it. For the sake of the prisoner, for the sake of the judge, for the sake of the jury, for the sake of the lawyers, for the sake of the public, every one wants to get it over. Nobody wants yet another adjournment. So it is usually at night that one sits and waits for the verdict in a big Paris criminal trial, and although I have seen exactly the same scene, and endured exactly the same sensations many times, the scene has never lost its dramatic force, and the sensations are always new. A sense of relief comes first. We have seen the prisoner, in a state of semi-collapse as a rule, going out through the door of the dock to the room behind it, where, on this last evening of the trial, the prisoner is allowed to wait for the verdict which is to be rendered before her return. We feel the relief that one feels when the fighting is over, mingled with suspense and with pity for the wretched creature who is waiting and is wondering. We realize that we are hungry, and rush off to get a little food. We dare not stay to eat it, and return with it to court again. The appearance of the court-room has changed during the few minutes of our scamper to the buffet down below for sandwiches. We have brought them back with us, and other people are munching food, too, in the dust, the heat, the squalor of this room from which the majesty of justice has departed with the red robed tribunal, the jury, and the prisoner. There is a hubbub of excited talk and much discussion. Municipal guards forget to keep order and chat with us and with the barristers of the probabilities and possibilities of the verdict. Every now and then there is a hubbub of excitement and a sudden deathly stillness. The little door, beyond which we can see those red and grey carpeted stairs, has opened. The jury are returning! No, it is a false alarm. They are not quite clear on some formal point or other, and they have sent for the judge. After one or more of these alarms, suddenly, when nobody has expected it, the little door opens and remains open. The jury really are returning this time. We see them walk slowly down those narrow red and grey stairs, and file slowly into the box. Their faces tell us nothing, but we all try to read them. The presiding judge and his two assistant judges walk slowly in and take their seats, at the long table. On their right, the red robed Public Prosecutor who has followed them, stands at his desk, on their left the lawyers for the defence stand in their seats in front of the empty dock. The stillness which was broken for a moment while the court came in becomes something tangible, something quite painful now. It has a quality of the sensation one feels in a diving bell. Our eardrums tingle with it. Then the judge’s voice breaks the strain. “There must be not the least noise,” he says. “I will allow no demonstration of any kind, whatever the verdict may be.” Somebody laughs, and is hushed down with indignant sibilance. We know that there will be a demonstration whatever the judge may say. There has never yet been a French trial without one.
“Mr. Foreman of the Jury,” says the judge, “Be kind enough to let us know the result of your deliberations.” If possible the silence becomes greater yet. Then: “On my honour and on my conscience,” says the foreman of the jury “before God and before men, the answer is ... to all questions.” And pandemonium breaks forth. The answer to the questions has to be “Yes” or “No”. The jury may not amplify it. They will be asked, in the trial of Madame Caillaux, to decide whether there was murder, whether there was murder with premeditation or without it. They will be asked to state whether there are extenuating circumstances, or whether there are none. On these answers, on this simple “Yes” or “No” depends the fate of the prisoner. We see the judge’s mouth open and shut, we see his hand rise and fall, but we have heard no sound of his voice in the hubbub which the declaration of the verdict has let loose. Then there is silence again. The judge has ordered the prisoner to be brought in. The verdict is told her, and the sentence, if there is a sentence, is rendered.
This is the way in which the curtain will fall on the last act of the Caillaux Drama. Will it be a final curtain? And what will the jury’s answer be to the questions which will be put to them? That, no man can answer now. Madame Caillaux may of course be acquitted, though public opinion in Paris considers this exceedingly unlikely. She may be found guilty of murder with premeditation. The sentence decreed by the Code for this is death, and nobody believes in or anticipates the likelihood of such a verdict. If the verdict be “Murder without premeditation,” if the jury finds extenuating circumstances, the Code decrees a minimum of five years, either hard labour or confinement in a prison, and a maximum of ten years. There is also the possibility that a sentence may be passed of hard labour or imprisonment for life.
And beyond the verdict, beyond the sentence, what will the future of this woman and her husband be? That no man can answer either, but we all know that whatever happens, whatever the court decides, those shots from a revolver in the office of the Figaro on the afternoon of March 16, 1914, will never cease to echo in the lives of Joseph and Henriette Caillaux.
And in the echo, lurks the tragic essence of the Caillaux drama.