9 
It was Alexandre Dumas père, in a book called Les Mohicans de Paris, who first coined the phrase cherchez la femme (“look for the woman”) to suggest that at the heart of every crime there was a woman. His dictum made its way into the consciousness of French criminologists, and even Bertillon, who strove for the objectivity of a scientist, when faced with a mystery nevertheless could not resist asking, “Where is the woman?” 1
The female criminal was the subject of considerable theorizing among social scientists during the Belle Époque. Cesare Lombroso, who argued that criminals were atavistic types — that is, degenerates who had regressed on the scale of evolution — believed that all women were biologically inferior to men and hence inherently atavistic. 2 This did not mean that all women would eventually become criminals, but that they were more susceptible than men to influences that could produce aberrant behavior. These influences were as varied as the menstrual cycle, the pressures of urban life, and even the faits divers crime stories found in the daily newspapers. Any of these might produce a passionate response that could drive women to criminal acts. So could feminism. In the words of Théodore Joran, a rabid antifeminist, emancipated women acquired “a taste for carnage” because they could no longer contain “the instincts of brutality and savagery that, in [women’s] proper state of subordination,” were kept under control. 3
Of course, one result of the belief that women could not control themselves was that courts and juries were frequently more tolerant, not to say forgiving, of women accused of crimes. Ann-Louise Shapiro, a modern feminist author, found that the acquittal rate for women in France was over 50 percent in the 1890s, while only about 30 percent for men. Women criminals sometimes became “celebrities as well as pariahs.” 4 The Cours d’Assises were popular places to go for entertainment, and society women were often spectators at the trials of other women. They were known to bring picnic baskets containing canapés, sandwiches, and champagne to consume during recesses. Furthering the trend, many theater companies found that audiences flocked to plays that imitated courtroom dramas.
Shapiro cites a famous case of the 1880s in which Marie Bière, a young actress, shot Robert Gentien, a young man-about-town who had fathered her child. Gentien refused to acknowledge the infant as his own and even when the child died did not attend its funeral. Bière shot him twice in the back as he was out walking with a new mistress. Though she failed to kill him, she was tried for attempted murder. Bière’s attorneys showed that Gentien was her first lover, that she resisted his suggestion to have an abortion because she wanted to be the mother of his child, and that she had even attempted suicide in his presence in a vain attempt to win his sympathy. Bière was acquitted by twelve male jurors who wept openly as their verdict was announced.
La Lanterne editorialized that “the jury, in acquitting Mlle. Bière, had performed a useful service.” 5 A wittier commentator, in Le Figaro, wrote that the defendant “be canonized as Sainte Marie, patron saint of gunsmiths, to whom abandoned women might make pilgrimages to have their revolvers blessed.” 6 Gentien himself was obliged to flee Paris to avoid public opprobrium.
i
The popularity of crime stories, not only the supposedly factual faits divers but also the fictional feuilletons, was often cited as a cause of female criminality. One social critic, Jules Langevin, stated that “the roman feuilleton performs the same ravages in women’s brains, perhaps does even graver damage, than does alcohol in the brains of men.” 7 Writing in 1902, a Dr. Séverin Icard cited the case of a young woman who regularly came to his office with a bewildering variety of symptoms. Finally, Dr. Icard noticed that the diseases these symptoms indicated were occurring in alphabetical order. Further investigation revealed that the patient had been receiving copies of a medical dictionary, issued in installments, and so developed hysterical symptoms of the disease described in that month’s reading.
The sexism went both ways. Two murder cases in the Belle Époque created enormous scandals, not only because the accused in both cases were women of good breeding, but also because they used their femininity to evade responsibility for what seemed like utterly ruthless crimes. Certainly what happened to these two murderers stood in stark contrast to the members of the Bande à Bonnot. And their trials showed that the search for truth — or the attempts to conceal it — could extend even into the courtroom.
ii
The first defendant was Marguerite Steinheil (“Meg” to the newspaper writers), who was already notorious for her role in the sudden death of President Faure in 1899. Long after the event, the story still circulated that Faure had died while in the throes of a passion so intense that his dead fingers were impossible to prize from the hair of the naked young woman whose head was in his lap.
The legend only added a certain piquancy to Meg’s reputation. Looking at her husband, who had been forty when he married her in 1890 (she was then twenty-one), one could understand why a woman as beautiful and vibrant as Meg might want to take a lover. Steinheil was timid, balding, and dull. The only reason Meg had married him in the first place was that her recently widowed mother feared that her headstrong young daughter would marry a handsome but penniless young officer she had fallen in love with.
Steinheil, a mediocre academic painter, had no fortune. All he had to offer Meg was a large house in a fashionable cul-de-sac called the impasse Ronsin, in the fifteenth arrondissement, where they settled down after honeymooning in Italy. In June 1891, Meg gave birth to a daughter, Marthe, and soon became bored. All around her she saw people living in luxury, but Steinheil could not afford to give her fine clothes and jewelry. Meg looked for excitement and luxuries outside marriage, using her youth and charm to attract wealthy lovers. Her first was a government prosecutor, Manuel Baudouin. She was with him for four years; during that time she explained the lavish gifts she received by telling Steinheil they were from an Aunt Lily. Meg went to visit her aunt frequently, and it seems likely that if Steinheil was unaware of what was really going on, it was a willful ignorance on his part. At some point, Meg had also made it clear to him that the sexual part of their marriage was over. From then on they slept in separate bedrooms.
Steinheil received fringe benefits from Meg’s liaisons when her lovers asked him to paint portraits or other works of art. When Meg became the mistress of President Faure in 1897, Steinheil received a government commission for a large historical painting. His rising income enabled Meg to hold the weekly salons where she presided over three or four hundred guests, including some of the leading social, artistic, and political figures of the time. Among them were Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty; Émile Zola; Hippolyte-François-Alfred Chauchard, the founder of the Louvre grand magasin (department store); and Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. It was said that even the Prince of Wales graced her drawing room while on a visit to France.
Steinheil, however, was becoming more of a burden to her. He had begun to need opium to sleep at night, and now in his mid-fifties, he was less and less able to turn out canvases that Meg could “sell” to her lovers. Thus, in 1905, she took up with Émile Chouanard, a wealthy widower not much older than she. A man used to having his own way, he quickly tired of the game of meeting her furtively in hotel rooms. Instead, he offered to pay the rent for a villa where they could spend days (and nights) in privacy and comfort. Meg took him up on this and rented a place called the Vert-Logis, forty-five minutes by train from Paris, in the town of Bellevue. Meg signed the lease with the name of a friend but had to share her secret with her longtime maid, Mariette Wolff, who took on the duties of housekeeper at Vert-Logis.
Unfortunately, Chouanard broke off the liaison in November 1907, apparently because Meg had presumptuously tried to influence his choice of a fiancé for his daughter. Not long after, as if to console herself that she was still attractive, Meg fainted while riding the Métro — seemingly to entice a well-dressed young man standing nearby. She had a good eye for men, for he turned out to be the Count Emmanuel de Balincourt. He walked her home and was invited to dinner. Before long, he found himself in her bed at Vert-Logis, which she had kept after the breakup with Chouanard. However, while de Balincourt was posing for Steinheil to paint his portrait, he was overcome by guilt at cuckolding the man and broke off the relationship.
Meg was at an age when women who live off their beauty are fearful when they look into the mirror. She also had her daughter, now in her teens, to consider. A husband would one day have to be found for Marthe, and Meg wanted to be able to give her, not only a good dowry, but a respectable family background. Her next lover seemed chosen with those goals in mind. He was Maurice Borderel, a widower with three adolescent children of his own. Borderel, from the Ardennes region, was not a sophisticated Parisian like her other lovers, and soon fell in love with her, assuming the responsibility for paying the rent at Vert-Logis. (Meg was now using the villa as a country home for her family, including her husband, daughter, and mother.)
However, Borderel told Meg frankly that he could not marry her. He did not wish his children to have a stepmother, not even if Meg divorced her husband. He felt that it would dishonor his first wife’s memory to put a divorcée in her place. Things might be different when his children were older and on their own, another ten years, say. Or perhaps if Meg’s husband were to die… but Borderel promised nothing.
iii
On Sunday, May 31, 1908, precisely at 6:00 A.M., Rémy Couillard, the Steinheil family’s valet, started down from his bedroom on the top floor of the house in the impasse Ronsin. He heard muffled cries coming from the second-floor bedroom that belonged to the Steinheils’ daughter, Marthe. That seemed strange, for he knew Marthe was at Vert-Logis, where the rest of the family had planned to go that afternoon. Meg’s mother, Mme. Japy, had arrived two days earlier and was sleeping in one of the other bedrooms on the second floor. When Couillard investigated, he found Meg bound hand and foot to Marthe’s bed, with her nightgown pulled up around her face. Only twenty, Couillard was somewhat transfixed by the sight, until Meg screamed that there were burglars in the house and told him to go for help.
Afraid to leave the room, Couillard threw open the shutters and began to shout. Three people heard him — a neighbor, a night watchman, and a policeman. They rushed into the house and gingerly searched the ground floor for intruders. Finding none, they went upstairs, where Couillard was struggling to free Meg from her bonds. In the two bedrooms next to hers, they discovered more shocking sights: the bodies of Meg’s husband and mother, with cords tied around their necks indicating that they had been strangled.
Within hours, an impressive array of law enforcement figures had arrived at the Steinheil residence to investigate, among them Alphonse Bertillon, who personally took photographs of the crime scenes and dusted the house for fingerprints. Also present was Octave Hamard, head of the Sûreté, who arrived with seven assistants in tow to announce that he was taking personal charge of the case. Finally, Magistrate Joseph Leydet, a close friend of the family who was rumored to be one of Meg’s lovers, had requested assignment as juge d’instruction to assemble evidence and determine what charges should be brought. Clearly, the case was already regarded as more than an ordinary one.
Still distraught, Meg related that she had slept in her daughter’s bedroom because she had given her own bed to her mother, who had ailing legs. About midnight she had been awakened by the touch of a cloth on her face. Several people carrying shrouded lanterns were in the room. Three of them were men who wore long black coats; a fourth, carrying a pistol, was a red-haired woman. They demanded to know where Steinheil kept his money, referring to him as “your father,” indicating that they knew the layout of the house well enough to know this was normally Marthe’s room. After Meg told the intruders where her husband’s money was kept, they struck her on the head. When she awoke, she found herself tied and gagged. At last she had been able to spit out the cotton wad they had stuffed in her mouth, and began to call for help.
As word of the murders spread, reporters besieged the house. Hamard told them that it appeared Steinheil had surprised the burglars and been killed. Why Meg’s mother, Mme. Japy, had been strangled in her bed was still a mystery — nor was it clear why Meg had been spared, except that she recalled one of the burglars saying, “We don’t kill brats,” indicating that they had mistaken her for her daughter. The burglars had apparently expected to find the house empty, because the Steinheils had originally planned to go to Vert-Logis the day before. The family remained in Paris only because Mme. Japy’s legs were bothering her. As for suspects, Hamard mentioned that many of the male models Steinheil used for his historical paintings had been in the house and knew he kept money there.
iv
The police postponed their questioning of Meg until the following day, to allow her to recover somewhat from her shock. Now she embellished her story, reporting that everyone had gone to bed at 10:00 P.M. after drinking rum toddies that Meg had made to encourage her mother to sleep. She recalled hearing the clock strike midnight just before the burglars appeared in her room. As for the men in long black coats, she now told the police that all the men had beards — one long and black with silver streaks, another red, and the third brown. The man with the long black beard had thin, bony hands. Asked if she recognized any of them, she said that she could not be sure. She added that the woman with red hair appeared to be a souillon, a slut.
Bertillon made a report on his findings at the crime scene, which tended to throw doubt on Meg’s story. Though rain had fallen heavily that night, there was no sign of water or tracks on the carpets, nor any indication of forced entry. The rope tied around the necks of the two victims had come from a supply of cord in the kitchen. As for the valuables in the house, most of Meg’s jewels were still in her room and the silver service in the dining room had been left behind. It was hard to tell how much money might have been taken, but given Steinheil’s finances, it hardly seemed enough to justify two murders.
Some evidence was harder to explain. The grandfather clock that Meg heard striking midnight had been stopped at 12:10, and there was a fingerprint on the pendulum that did not seem to match the prints of anyone who lived there. Moreover, two interesting pieces of information turned up that seemed to confirm Meg’s story. First, the management of the Hebrew Theater, where actors from eastern Europe presented plays in Hebrew and Yiddish, reported that on the night of May 30, three long black vestments intended for use in a play were found to be missing. Newspapers noted that these matched the description Meg had given of the clothes worn by the male burglars.
A second possible clue turned up the day after the crime, when an employee of the Paris Métro found on the floor of a subway car an invitation to an exhibition of Steinheil’s paintings at the impasse Ronsin in April, the month before the murders. On the back of the invitation, someone had written “Guibert, costumier pour théâtres.” Inside was the card of Jane Mazeline, an artist in her sixties. Investigation showed that the handwriting on the back did not match Mazeline’s, so the Sûreté decided that someone had stolen her invitation to gain entrance to the house, making himself familiar with the layout.
Following up on the Hebrew Theater theft, a detective showed Meg photographs of some of its patrons. One did indeed have a shaggy beard, and she promptly identified him as one of the burglars. It was an American poet and painter, Frederic Harrisson Burlingham, a well-known figure who wandered about the city in sandals. Detectives became excited when they learned he was said to have a red-haired mistress. But unfortunately, Burlingham had an ironclad alibi: he was in Burgundy at the time the murders were committed. Seeing how eagerly the Sûreté had responded to her accusation, however, Meg began casting about for more suspects.
She hired a lawyer, Anthony Aubin, who would make his reputation on this case. Aubin asked Magistrate Leydet to let him inspect the evidence that had been collected so far. This was so irregular a request that Leydet turned him down. Undaunted, Meg sent a letter to L’Echo de Parisdeclaring that she would conduct her own search for the murderers. Late in November, she found her first candidate: young Rémy Couillard, who had discovered her bound and naked on that fateful Sunday.
According to her, she first became suspicious of him when she needed the address of his parents at a time when he was out on an errand. She looked inside a leather case he had left in his coat, and found a letter he was supposed to have mailed for her. It was addressed to Marthe’s fiancé, and shockingly, Couillard seemed to have opened and read it. She reported this to the Sûreté, which didn’t think it suspicious. Meg then enlisted the aid of Henri Barby, an editor at Le Matin who had become her confidant. At her urging, Barby searched the leather case again and this time found a pearl wrapped in silk paper. Meg claimed that it was from an art nouveau ring that the burglars had taken.
The Sûreté brought Couillard in for questioning, and he admitted stealing the letter but denied ever having seen the pearl before. If he had been one of the burglars, he said, he could have stolen much more, for he knew secret hiding places that the family used for their valuables.
Meg also claimed that she had received anonymous letters saying that Couillard was in love with her daughter and wanted to break up the engagement. Furthermore, on the morning when he discovered her, she had felt he was tempted to strangle her instead of calling for help.
The police went to search Couillard’s room. Meg accompanied them and triumphantly picked up a small diamond from the floor. Here, she announced, was proof he had been in league with the burglars. The police took the hapless valet into custody.
Two days later, on November 25, Meg was called to the Sûreté, where Hamard and Magistrate Leydet were waiting for her. With them were two jewelers and a gemologist. One of the jewelers declared that the pearl Meg had said was in a ring stolen on May 30 had in fact been brought to his shop on June 12 — by Meg herself. At her request, he had removed it from the art nouveau ring where it had been mounted. When a picture of the pearl found in Couillard’s case appeared in the newspapers, the jeweler recognized it. It had an unusual shape and a distinctively placed hole used to attach it to the ring. The other jeweler, who had made the ring in the first place, confirmed that this was the pearl he had mounted.
It was clear that Meg had deliberately made a false accusation against Couillard and that she now had to be considered a suspect in the murders. Meg called her lawyer, Aubin, who persuaded Leydet to release her. Nonetheless, seven policemen now surrounded her house to keep her from fleeing.
That evening, Meg invited to her home two journalists whose friendship she had cultivated. Supposedly she wanted their advice, but in reality she was preparing a startling new accusation. In tears, she admitted lying about Couillard but then claimed she had done so because she had been threatened by the real culprit — -Alexander Wolff, the son of her trusted chambermaid. Wolff, she said, had long resented the Steinheils because he felt they exploited his mother. The only reason Meg had escaped was that he had tied her up with the intention of raping her but had been thwarted from doing so when he heard Couillard approaching. Nevertheless, he had threatened Meg that he would kill her, or tell the Sûreté that she had been his accomplice, if she revealed his name.
She persuaded the police guarding the house to take her to the Sûreté, where Hamard was summoned to hear her latest accusation. Alexander Wolff was arrested and brought in for questioning. Facing Meg, he flatly denied everything she had said, and now she began to waver. Perhaps, she said, the person who had threatened her was only someone who looked like Wolff. Since this was patently absurd, Hamard now began to pressure Meg, bringing Couillard and then Mariette Wolff in to confront her. Finally, Meg was placed under arrest, and everyone else was set free. Magistrate Leydet, presented with the new developments, told her that “by your lies and your concealment of evidence, you have misled justice and placed obstacles in the way of the seizure of the murderers.” 8 She was sent to the Santé.
v
Remarkably, at this point the Ministry of Justice took the case away from Leydet and replaced him as juge d’instruction with another prosecutor, Louis André. This seemed to be a baffling move, for Leydet had either solved, or was on the brink of solving, the case. André, for his part, acted as if he were starting a new investigation. He ordered the bodies of Steinheil and Mme. Japy exhumed so that they could be autopsied a second time. Bertillon and his assistants were sent back to the house and ordered to check again for fingerprints — something that would seem to have been pointless, considering how many regular residents of the house had been there since the murders.
Mariette Wolff now began to talk to the authorities about Meg’s many lovers. To the Sûreté, the most interesting of them was Borderel, who had told Meg he could not marry her if she was a divorced woman. That suggested a motive for her to murder her husband but of course still left the death of her mother an enigma. Here, André’s exhumation paid off with a valuable clue: the second autopsy found that Mme. Japy had not died of strangulation, despite the rope around her neck. The cause of death was asphyxiation: she had swallowed her dental plate. Because she would not have gone to bed with it in, she must have been placed in her bed by the killers. And of course that gave the lie to Meg’s story that everyone had fallen asleep before the crime.
A new witness stepped forward: an attorney who lived on the rue de Vaugirard, which intersects the impasse Ronsin. He had looked out his window around midnight on the night of the murder and saw a car parked at the corner. A man dressed in elegant clothing was standing next to it, smoking a cigar and holding an umbrella. The attorney watched until another man ran out of the impasse. The two got into the car and drove off.
On March 13, 1909, Magistrate André formally charged Meg with the premeditated murder of her husband and mother. Legal maneuvering delayed the start of the trial to November 3. There were only one hundred seats allotted for spectators in the Cour d’Assises de la Seine, making it the hottest ticket in town. Women were particularly interested in the trial; wives of foreign ambassadors, countesses, and the mistresses of politicians all pulled strings to obtain places in the courtroom. Marcel Proust astonished his friends by appearing before noon to attend.
The presiding judge, Charles-Bernard de Valles, sat on a raised platform, flanked by two associate judges; all three were clothed in red robes and, with gray beards and solemn faces, looked determined to maintain the dignity of justice. The prosecutor, Paul Trouard-Riolle, also wore a red robe, which did little to conceal his massive girth. Meg’s attorney, Aubin, and a colleague wore black robes. Aubin looked every centimeter the well-turned-out barrister, with curly black hair, mustache, and beard. Twelve men were admitted as jurors, ranging from middle-class “proprietors” to a musician, a bricklayer, and a baker. After they were seated, the spectators craned their necks to look at the doorway through which the defendant would be escorted.
A gasp went up at the sight of Meg, dramatically clothed in a black mourning dress and hat. Eleven months in prison had seemed to age her and turn the renowned peach glow of her skin to an unhealthy pallor. Many thought that her features looked harder, coarser than they had been in earlier newspaper pictures. Still, throughout the trial, Meg would become the mistress of the courtroom, skillfully battling the judge and the prosecutor.
Following French judicial practice, the trial began with the presiding judge interrogating the defendant. In theory this procedure was designed to determine the facts, but in this case it was clear that de Valles was going to serve as a prosecutor. He led Meg through a catalog of her lovers. (The scandalous episode with President Faure was not mentioned.) Hadn’t she been happy with Steinheil, who had enabled her to create a salon in his house in Paris? He was “a simple man,” Meg replied. “Too simple.” 9 Hadn’t Meg humiliated him? de Valles asked. Meg realized this was a trap and retorted that her husband had known nothing of her extramarital affairs. Nonetheless, she was sorry she had not been a good wife to him. When he fell in love with her, she had been merely a child. As she grew, she wanted lovers — friends — who understood her intellectual needs.
De Valles asked about money. Wasn’t that her real reason for taking lovers? Meg denied it, saying that she had never sold herself. Chouanard, who had rented the country villa, was the only one to give her large sums, and that was his choice, not hers.
Meg still insisted that the three black-clad men and the red-haired woman, never found, had committed the crimes. She also tried to excuse the false accusations she had made in the case. She had not been thinking clearly, she said, because the press had persecuted her, making it appear as if she were the murderer. Finding the unmailed letter in Couillard’s wallet had made her think he had deceived her on other matters.
After the first day, the newspapers generally gave Meg high marks for successfully parrying de Valles’s questions, more by theatrics than by the veracity of her answers. One reporter dubbed her “the Sarah Bernhardt of the Assises.” 10
The examination resumed on the following day, and Meg seemed to have gained confidence. De Valles had discovered that a detective novel, Les cing doigts de Birouk (The Five Fingers of Birouk), described a crime very similar to the one in Meg’s account of the murders — black-robed burglars and all. The police had found several books by the same author, Louis Ulback, in the Steinheils’ library. Did Meg enjoy those novels? She replied that she did, but had never read that particular one.
Various inconsistencies in Meg’s story were noted, and she attributed them all to police incompetence. The cotton gag that she said she had spit out to cry for help was found to have no traces of saliva on it. Meg responded that the police had probably picked up the wrong piece of cotton. Why would the burglars strangle Meg’s mother and husband with pieces of cord they had cut from a supply in the kitchen? “They told you all of this?” Meg responded as if surprised, drawing laughter from the spectators. 11 Irritated at Meg’s riposte, de Valles suggested that she was indeed a cold-hearted killer, for she had murdered her own mother to cover up the fact that her intended victim was her husband. Meg was waiting for this and launched into an extended soliloquy about the love she had for her mother.
So it went for three days of examination. Questions from the judge were answered by passionate speeches from Meg. Even the fact that Meg had placed the incriminating pearl in Couillard’s case, something she could hardly deny, was brushed aside. “I have been punished enough for that!” she said. “I have been in prison a year for having placed Couillard there for a day.” 12
The prosecutor, Trouard-Riolle, now took command of the case. He was to call some eighty witnesses to testify, most of them experts of various sorts reporting on the physical evidence. Bertillon, for instance, said that he had found ninety-one fingerprints at the crime scene, but that only a fraction of these were clear enough to identify. Much of this testimony was tedious for the jury to sit through.
When the prosecutor summoned young Couillard, however, the jurors sat up to listen. Now serving his required military service and hence decked out in a handsome uniform, Couillard had become a minor celebrity. Vendors outside the court sold postcards with his picture. Nevertheless he made a crucial error describing the scene when he discovered Meg in bed, recalling now that she had been covered by a blanket. This differed from the deposition he had originally given the police, in which he stated that she had been nearly naked. The defense attorney made much of the discrepancy, and Couillard merely replied that his original deposition had been wrong.
He added that Meg had at first told him not to talk about the crime to anyone. In the lively procedure of the French judicial system, Meg was permitted to respond immediately that he was lying. She further demanded to know about the letter he had stolen. Couillard responded that he had forgotten to mail it and countered with the accusation that Meg had instructed him to claim, falsely, that the thieves had stolen some draperies — draperies that never existed. Meg again hotly denied it. On this indecisive note, Couillard was excused.
Three days later, with little testimony of note in the interim, Mariette Wolff came to the stand. There were great expectations: she was privy to all Meg’s secrets and, since Meg had accused Mariette’s son, had no reason to be discreet. But Mariette disappointed the prosecutor by suddenly developing a shockingly poor memory.
De Valles once more took over the questioning, leading Mariette through the events leading up to the night of the murders. Nearly all of his questions drew the answer, “I don’t remember.” Even the night of November 25–26, when Meg had accused Mariette’s son of murder, had now become serene in the housekeeper’s recollection. Astonishingly, she claimed no one had told her that Meg had accused her son of the murders. Frustrated, the prosecutor dismissed her.
Following her to the stand was Alexander Wolff, the very person who had been the object of Meg’s reckless accusations. Did he feel resentment toward her? Not at all, he responded, for it had been an exciting time for him. Clinging to straws, the prosecutor asked if it was true that his sister had provided a watchdog to protect the Steinheil house, and that Meg had sent it away just before the murders. Actually, Alexander said, it was he who had taken the dog back to his sister’s: it was a very poor watchdog and would have been of no use. Clearly, for some reason, Meg’s housekeeper and her son were not going to incriminate her.
Thwarted, the prosecutor began to call some of Meg’s lovers. Chouanard, the most generous of them, had gone on a long trip to avoid testifying. De Balincourt, who had helped Meg home from the Métro, was reluctant to say how deep their involvement had been. Finally, Borderel, the man Meg had supposedly killed her husband in order to marry, came to the stand. As he entered, he turned to Meg and gave her a look that told the spectators he still loved her. He was a sympathetic figure, neither an aristocrat nor a wealthy businessman using power to attract young women, but instead a respectable middle-aged widower who was in search of someone to console him for the loss of his wife. He described an idyllic affair, but one that he had told Meg from the start could not end in marriage. She had seemed content with that. After the murder, when the newspapers had revealed Borderel as Meg’s lover, it had shocked his family and neighbors (he was the mayor of a village in the Ardennes), but he had come now to tell the truth as a matter of honor.
He was the last witness for the prosecution and could easily have been the first for the defense, because the impression he left was completely sympathetic to Meg. Her attorney, Aubin, added to that by immediately presenting character witnesses. Relatives testified to Meg’s love for her mother and said that she had never tried to get an advance on her inheritance, indicating that she was not in need of money. Aubin then called André Paisant, an attorney who had been a good friend of the Steinheils. He gave a portrait of their marriage that moved many of the spectators to tears. Adolphe Steinheil was an “almost childlike” man, a dreamer, “melancholic, disappointed, beaten, sitting in his big armchair, watching the fall of night.” Meg brought joy into his life, “gave him courage, was his inspiration, pawned her jewelry to pay for his extravagances.” 13 When Paisant first learned about Meg’s lovers, his initial response was to condemn her, but over time his disapproval turned to pity. Hoping to leave the jury with that emotion in mind, Aubin closed his presentation.
The prosecutor, Trouard-Riolle, began his summation with a detailed recounting of the evidence. To most observers, the jury appeared bored and unimpressed. However, as Trouard-Riolle reached the end of a long day, he hinted at spectacular revelations to come. Some of the technical testimony had indicated that it was nearly impossible for one person to have committed the murders. Meg must have had an accomplice, and the prosecutor implied that he would indicate who that person had been on the following day.
The next morning, Trouard-Riolle never specifically named his suspect, but as he gradually filled in the description of her, everyone realized it was Mariette Wolff. As he took the jury through the supposed events of the night of the murder, the prosecutor said that Meg and “this woman” planned to catch Mme. Japy asleep in her bed, tie and gag her, strangle Steinheil, and then tie Meg to the bed. Meg’s mother would then be able to confirm Meg’s story of burglars. Unfortunately, the gag forced her dentures down her throat and killed her. Trouard-Riolle left the jury with a powerful argument: If there really had been burglar-murderers in the house, why did they not murder Meg and eliminate any possible witness? And why had the clock stopped? Meg had stopped it herself because, Trouard-Riolle declared, like the tell-tale heart of the murder victim in Poe’s famous story, it made a noise in the silent house that she could not bear to listen to.
The following day, November 13, Aubin gave the summary for the defense. He pointed out the holes in the prosecution’s case, notably that there had been no motive at all for Meg to kill her mother. Nor, he added, was there any convincing reason for her to murder her husband. Meg “was his idol — alas, the idol also of others… she was radiant and adorned with all the charms, a bouquet of smiles. Everyone wanted to pluck from the bouquet. So, she was unfaithful.” 14 But she was not a murderess.
Aubin pointed out that Mme. Japy would surely have been aware of it if Meg and her female accomplice had bound her. How then could she provide an alibi for them? What really happened, he suggested, was that thieves broke into the house, expecting to find it empty, and then killed Steinheil when he discovered them. Leaving Meg alive, they thought, would throw suspicion on her — and it did.
As his trump card, Aubin brought Meg’s daughter, Marthe, to the courtroom for the first time in the trial, seating her behind her mother. Aubin signaled for her to rise: “I call to my side,” he said, “this pure and noble child. I want her close to me, stretching her arms appealingly toward you and defending her mother! These two unfortunate beings, how many tears they have already shed, how many tears they will still shed! Ah, gentlemen of the jury, give them the means to console one another and to forget together.” 15
Meg responded to the judge’s invitation to make a final statement by dissolving into tears. That was probably her best argument.
In the French system of justice, a unanimous verdict was not required. Seven to five would be enough to convict; six to six would mean acquittal. However, when the jury deliberated till midnight without reaching a verdict, courtroom observers felt it a bad sign for Meg. De Valles asked them to continue their discussions. On three occasions they asked him to explain the penalties for different kinds of verdicts.
At last, at 1:30 in the morning of November 14, the jurors filed into the courtroom. Despite the hour, many spectators had remained to hear the denouement of the drama, and they were not disappointed: the jury announced that it had found Meg not guilty of all charges. Amid the cheers, she fainted.
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Meg escaped her notoriety by moving to England, but those who believed in her innocence, as well as those who argued for her guilt, continued to speculate on what really happened at the impasse Ronsin that murderous Saturday night in 1908. Her own memoirs, published in 1912, shed no further light on the crime.
In 1925, however, a man whose credentials as a criminologist could not be questioned published his own reconstruction of the case. This was Dr. Edmond Locard, now director of the forensic laboratory at Lyons. His book Le crime et les criminels had a chapter on methods of strangulation, and he used the Steinheil case to show how one method (manual) might be mistaken for a second (using a cord). In doing so, Locard went much further than simply describing the causes of death of Steinheil and Mme. Japy — he reconstructed the case in such detail that people assumed he had access to hitherto secret sources.
Locard portrayed Meg, in that phase of her life, as little better than a high-class streetwalker, saying that she picked up lovers at the Métro exits regularly, pretending to twist “her too-delicate ankle” when a wealthy-looking man came near. Accepting his gallant offer to see her home, she would lead him to the impasse Ronsin, where she made it clear that her husband would look the other way if a romance began. De Balincourt had testified at the trial that this was how he met Meg, and certainly she might have repeated the performance with others.
Locard asked rhetorically, “Is it in this way, or by some intermediary, that one day she makes the acquaintance of an aristocratic foreigner?” 16 He suggested that Meg cultivated this mysterious figure and from time to time obtained money from him. One day, in need of more, Meg calls him to come to the house, but she is not “able to comply with his passionate demands. He feels that he has been duped. Fury. Clamour.” Then Steinheil “makes the mistake of poking his worried nose into the business,” 17 further arousing the suspicions of the aristocratic foreigner that this is a blackmail scheme. There is a scuffle, and the foreigner takes Steinheil by the throat, only to discover that the artist is even weaker than he looks. His larynx crushed, Steinheil falls to the floor, where the police find him later. As for Meg’s unfortunate mother, she investigates the noises she hears, and on seeing Steinheil’s body, she swallows her dentures, choking to death.
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 source 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.” 23She 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 Henriette 26
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 would 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
She denied that her actions on the day of the murder showed premeditation. When she bought the pistol, she was only replacing the one she had lost. The note she had written to her husband, in which she said, “It would be I who would render justice,” meant nothing. “I attached no importance to it,” 35 she said, but it is doubtful that anyone in the courtroom believed her.
The most gripping part of her testimony promised to be her account of the murder, but it was surprisingly dry. Describing how she sat for an hour waiting for Calmette to arrive, she said she thought she heard all around her the newspaper’s employees telling jokes about her husband. As she entered the editor’s office, “the gun went off all by itself.” Henriette paused and said, “I regret it infinitely.” With that, she stopped, and Magistrate Albanel had to prompt her to show more remorse, but she merely added, “It was fate. I regret infinitely the unhappiness I have caused.” 36
If the spectators were a little disappointed at her low-key performance, they would be gratified by the rest of the proceedings, in which the trial became a contest between Joseph Caillaux and the murder victim. External events in Serbia, Austria, and Germany were ominously leading toward a general war in Europe, a war that Caillaux had tried to avoid but many other French politicians were willing, even eager, to fight. Nonetheless, all the major Parisian newspapers printed the full transcript of each day’s proceedings at the trial — requiring them to add extra pages and often to devote as much as 60 percent of their entire contents to the trial.
Caillaux himself took the stand on the second day, preening and looking as if he were in charge of the proceedings. (Because he was a member of the legislature, he had special privileges: he was allowed to use notes while testifying and did not have to be sworn in.) He began by describing the unhappiness he felt in his first marriage and how he sought relief in the arms of Henriette. In the divorce settlement, Berthe had promised to destroy the letters she had stolen from his desk, but clearly she had not, and when his love letter to her (the “Ton Jo” letter) had appeared in Le Figaro, he concluded that his letters to Henriette would be next.
Having been accused in Le Figaro of “infamy and treason,” Caillaux felt entitled to respond, and the judge did not stop him as he launched into a defense of his political career, including the negotiations with Germany during the Agadir Incident. For good measure, he virtually accused Calmette of treason, alleging that Le Figaro had ties to German banking interests and had received funds from political parties in Austria-Hungary. As everyone was aware, both these countries were now threatening war against Serbia, an action that would bring a declaration of war by France in a week’s time.
The following day, the president of the board of directors of Le Figaro contradicted Caillaux’s charges against the newspaper and its murdered editor. Pointedly, he said, “The lion attacks the living, the jackal attacks the corpse.” One of the lawyers representing the Calmette family 37added, “I know of no enterprise more shameful than coming before a public audience to profane the tomb one’s wife has opened!” 38
Returning to matters that would seem more relevant to the trial, the court heard a series of witnesses testify about Henriette’s emotional state leading up to the murder. The salesman from the gun store said that she was quite calm and, for a woman, showed good marksmanship on the test-firing range. Friends of hers, however, stated that they could see that Le Figaro’s campaign was affecting her deeply.
The next day, the prosecutor called Caillaux’s first wife, Berthe, to the stand. Except for a pair of white gloves, she was dressed in mourning clothes, even though Calmette was no relation to her. Berthe admitted that she had photographic copies made of the eight letters between her husband and Henriette. Labori, the defense attorney, pointed out that the divorce agreement had obliged her to destroy any correspondence, and that Caillaux had paid her generous alimony to ensure her compliance. She denied that, saying that Caillaux had asked for her word of honor that she would destroy the correspondence, and she had refused because his word of honor was worthless. She launched into a catalog of grievances against him.
Yet Berthe still insisted that she had not given Calmette the copy of the “Ton Jo” letter that he published, although she admitted that her sister (who had arranged for the photographing of the letters) might have done it. And what, she was asked, of the other letters? Berthe astonished the court by taking a sheaf of photographs from her purse and announcing that she had them right here.
Their appearance set off extended sparring among the lawyers and judge as to whether Berthe should be permitted — or compelled? — to read the letters aloud. Since no one was quite sure how the jury would react to them, only the lawyers for the Calmettes urged that their contents be made public. Finally it was agreed that the defense attorney should read them privately and determine if they were relevant.
Caillaux asked for and was granted permission to respond to Berthe’s charges, as if he were the person on trial. He said it had been a mistake for him to marry her, because she was not of the same “stock” as he, even though they had been “perfect friends.” Still in the courtroom, Berthe began to shout back at him, “Be quiet! You dishonor yourself!” Caillaux added that he left her because his “dignity” had not permitted him to continue living with her. “I will say nothing more,” he added, allowing his listeners to assume the worst about her conduct. 39
To that, Berthe stood and shouted, “No, I summon you to say everything. I demand it!” He needed no more prompting and, pointing, hit her with the allegation that when she entered his house, she had “not a single centime!” Now, out of concern for her welfare, he had given her nearly half his fortune. “I do not understand what protestations such a woman can raise,” he said. 40
Berthe announced she would no longer respond to Caillaux’s insults, and pardoned him. Not to be outdone, he in turn pardoned her. Throughout, the judge had made no move to stop their bickering. That was a mistake, because during the next three days, such outbursts became more common. Caillaux now stood next to his wife at the defendant’s rail, as if protecting her or perhaps acknowledging that the trial was as much about him as about her.
Labori returned on the following day and announced that he would read aloud only the three letters written from Caillaux to Henriette. This drew a protest from Charles Chenu, representing the Calmette family, who wanted the jury to hear Henriette’s letters as well. The prosecutor suggested that Chenu be allowed to read those letters privately. Berthe, who had returned to see what would happen, declared that all the letters should be read aloud. This set off a shouting match among the lawyers and Berthe, which finally roused Magistrate Albanel from his permissive mood. He proposed a recess, only to have one of the two assistant judges remark quietly, “Monsieur, you dishonor us!” 41 evidently prompted by Albanel’s apparent intention to save the defense attorney from embarrassment.
That became even more obvious with the testimony of the next witness. Postponing the reading of the letters, Magistrate Albanel allowed Caillaux’s closest friend in the legislature, Pascal Ceccaldi, to give testimony. It soon became clear that Ceccaldi’s only purpose was to smear poor Calmette, saying among other things that the editor had speculated in German stocks and slanted the news coverage in Le Figaro to ensure that his stocks would rise. These charges again led to a shouting match that the chief judge allowed to continue unabated.
Ceccaldi’s calumnies were interjected into the trial at Caillaux’s request. After he finished, the prosecution responded with two character witnesses for the dead man: Henry Bernstein, a young playwright, and Albert Calmette, the editor’s brother. Bernstein asked how Caillaux could attack the honor of a man his wife had murdered. It was a taunt Caillaux would not forget. Albert Calmette then related that he had been given the papers his brother carried in his coat. These included all the now-famous documents: the “Ton Jo” letter, the Fabre memorandum, and the documents verts.Reading the last of these, Albert realized they were secret state papers and gave them to President Poincaré, who thanked him for “doing his duty.” This was an embarrassing revelation, because the government, in order to avoid diplomatic repercussions, had already declared that the documents verts were forgeries. Albert Calmette concluded by saying that his brother was an honorable man who would have told Henriette — had she but asked before firing her pistol — that he would never publish her private letters. He turned to Labori, Henriette’s defense attorney, and asked if that was true. Embarrassed, because he had known Calmette for years, Labori merely nodded.
The excitement did not end when the court adjourned for the day. In chambers, Magistrate Albanel demanded an apology from the assistant judge who had criticized him. He received it, but in the next morning’s Le Figaro, Albanel read a report of the incident, along with a statement by the assistant judge saying that he had nothing to apologize for and that he felt Albanel was showing partiality to the defendant. Albanel responded by giving an interview to another newspaper in which he indicated he might have to require satisfaction for this insult. He would not rule out challenging his fellow judge to a duel — in those times, not an empty threat.
The tension only increased on the following day, July 25. The session began with a pointed declaration by Albanel: “More than anyone else in this room I take care to defend my own honor and the honor of the magistrature — despite what anyone may have said.” 42 Since many people knew that Albanel had met in his chambers with Émile Bruneau de Laborie, the author of a handbook on dueling, few doubted his words.
The matter of the letters was at last settled, with the agreement that Fernand Labori, the chief defense attorney, would read aloud two of them, from Caillaux to Henriette. They were flowery (“I threw myself toward you with passionate fervor”) and contained plans for deceiving Berthe, but they were nonpolitical, indicating that Calmette would not have chosen to publish them. Still, as Caillaux’s words became more specific, the letters had an effect. When Labori read the closing of the second letter, “A thousand million kisses all over your adored little body,” Henriette fainted. 43
It might have seemed anticlimactic at this point to bring on doctors to testify about the murder, but this was a trial involving constant diversions. The doctors who had treated Calmette testified that it had been impossible to save him — a conclusion that Labori questioned. Reading from a text, he asserted that it was dangerous to transport patients with severe wounds and argued that once at the clinic, the patient should have received better care. One of the doctors, a professor of surgery, said he had never seen an attorney try “to incriminate the surgeons.” 44
The medical testimony complete, the prosecution rested its case. The next day, before the defense could begin its presentation, Caillaux once more asked, and received, permission to make a statement. This one was truly startling. He flourished what he said was a copy of Calmette’s will — by law, a private document. When Magistrate Albanel asked how he had obtained it, Caillaux haughtily declared, “In the same manner by which M. Calmette obtained his copy of the ‘Ton Jo.’” 45 Despite heated objections by Chenu, Caillaux obtained permission to read it aloud — surely getting his revenge for the publication of the “Ton Jo” letter.
It appeared that Calmette’s estate totaled some thirteen million francs. Some of that had accrued from investments, but six million francs had been a gift from Calmette’s mistress. Caillaux mocked the memory of a man who would make a fortune in the bedroom. Then he asked rhetorically what kind of person would defend such a man, singling out Henry Bernstein, whose testimony had particularly stung Caillaux. Referring to the playwright, he said, “When one has not fulfilled one’s duty to the nation, one is ill-equipped to give certificates of morality to others.” 46The implication was clear — that Bernstein had been a draft dodger.
Chenu was finally able to ask what relevance all this had to the case (the question had seemingly not occurred to Magistrate Albanel). Caillaux responded that “there is something worse than to lose one’s life, and that is to save it when one, by turns, attacks women and enriches oneself at their expense.” 47 In other words, it was relevant only as character assassination of the man Caillaux’s wife had killed.
The defense was then allowed to present its case. It called Dr. Eugène Doyen, another surgeon, who used a diagram of the murder scene to argue that Henriette had aimed her first two shots at the floor, intending only to frighten Calmette. However, the recoil from the pistol tended to bring her arm up at the same time that Calmette was dropping to the floor to shield himself. Unfortunately this brought him into the path of Henriette’s fatal bullet.
Chenu was highly indignant at this reconstruction. Having tried to blame the physicians for Calmette’s death, the defense was now saying it was Calmette’s own fault for throwing himself into his murderer’s range of fire. Chenu demanded that the other physicians be recalled to the stand to refute Doyen’s testimony.
The doctors were conferring when the door of the courtroom burst open and Henry Bernstein strode in. He had been informed via telephone of Caillaux’s earlier comments. Shouting, “Caillaux! Are you there? Because I do not insult adversaries in their absence!” he marched to the front of the room. With no attempt from the judges’ bench to stop him, he began to denounce Caillaux as “a man climbing atop the coffin of his wife’s victim in order to speak to you more loudly.” 48
After saying that the documents verts — which officially still did not exist — proved that Caillaux was a traitor, Bernstein took up the charge of draft dodging that Caillaux had leveled against him. It was true, he admitted: as a young man serving in the army, he had fled to Belgium after five months of service and only returned to France after a general amnesty. It was, Bernstein said, a mistake of youth. But now he had enlisted in an artillery unit and would be sent into combat should France mobilize for war. “The mobilization may be tomorrow,” he pointed out, and he was only about a week too soon. Turning directly to Caillaux, he had a final riposte: “I do not know what day Caillaux leaves for the front, but I must warn him that during a war, he cannot have himself replaced by his wife; he will have to fire himself!” 49 The cheers from the spectators finally forced Albanel to call a recess.
The defense presentation was brief, concluding with testimony from a colonel in an artillery regiment who claimed expertise in ballistics. He was there to confirm Dr. Doyen’s analysis. Diagramming the pattern of the six bullets Henriette had fired, he claimed that they moved upward from the floor owing to the involuntary motion of her arm. This proved that she had not meant to kill Calmette and that had he not fallen to get out of her way, she would not have. The jury may have found more authority for this opinion, coming from a military man.
On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, setting in motion the treaty obligations of other allies on both sides. As France prepared for a war many now saw as inevitable, the lawyers made their final arguments. That evening, the jury began its deliberations, which didn’t take long. Five minutes short of an hour later, they announced that by a vote of eleven to one, they had found Henriette Caillaux not guilty of either charge. She and her husband embraced as their friends in the gallery cheered.
The couple’s triumph was short-lived. Three days later, on July 31, a student aptly named Raoul Villain shot and killed France’s leading pacifist politician, Jean Jaurès. The police feared that someone would make a similar attempt on Caillaux’s life because he too was known to prefer negotiations to war. The prefect of police advised him to leave Paris. He and Henriette fled the next morning. It was the first day of August, 1914, the month Europe plunged into the bloodiest war in its history, making the murder of one persistent editor pale into insignificance. The Belle Époque was coming to an end.