John N. Raphael

“ 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, [Pg 302] 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. ”

“ Its very foundation is familiarity, and the French politician is not generally respected by his compatriots as one who knows more than themselves. He is admired as one who has more cunning. The French used to take pride in the familiarity with which they treat their politicians, for familiarity such as is the mainspring of France’s politics used to be called Egalité, and is still one of the words, in this disguise, with which the French politician loves to conjure, and succeeds in conjuring, votes out of an empty hat. ”

“ It is quite obvious to any reasonable person who considers the drama calmly and without prejudice that Madame Caillaux did not kill Monsieur Gaston Calmette for the mere pleasure of killing. It is equally obvious that Monsieur Calmette waged his campaign in the Figaro against Monsieur Caillaux because he thought it was the right thing to do, and that he thought the political downfall of Monsieur Caillaux, which he was attempting to bring about, would be a good thing for France. Nothing is to be gained, however, on either side by an attempt to vilify the other. ”

“ But the work which a French judge has to do at a criminal trial is more than any one man should be allowed to do, for no man can both judge and prosecute. To begin with, his own opinion has been prejudiced, must have been prejudiced, by the opinion of the examining magistrate, which, whether he will or not, has influenced him. He examines all the witnesses, he examines the prisoner, and he cross-examines them. ”

“ No conversation, no letters which have not been read first by strangers, visits hedged in with the severest of formality, no name, a number—in a word no life, merely existence, and existence without the sympathy which makes existence lovable. This is the mind-picture I have formed, and this is a true picture of Madame Caillaux’s daily life in pistole No. 12. Her principal distraction is her occasional drive with two plain clothes policemen to the Palace of Justice, and her examination there by the magistrate. ”

“ To anybody who has not lived among them, the ignorance of the French peasant in the country districts on the affairs of his country must be incredible. How crass this ignorance can be may be imagined from the absolute fact that in many parts of Monsieur Caillaux’s constituency the electors, who have returned him to the Chamber of Deputies again, are absolutely convinced that Monsieur Calmette is not dead at all, and that the story of his murder by Madame Caillaux has been put about by Paris journalists merely to do Monsieur Caillaux harm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The man who conducted the bitter campaign has been shot dead. Surely there is nothing to be gained by attempting to sully the dead man’s memory, or by attempting to overwhelm the woman whose victim he was. Madame Caillaux in prison is a victim of the political campaign of the Figaro in exactly the same degree as the editor of the Figaro is the victim of Madame Caillaux. The two will be judged. The wrong of one neither minimises nor magnifies the action of the other. ”

“ We have brought them back with us, and other people are [Pg 303] 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. ”

“ Parliament controls the marchand de vin nominally, perhaps, in France, but as the marchand de vin elects the members who form Parliament, as the marchand de vin controls and regulates the votes of the many-headed, the marchand de vin reigns, and will continue to reign supreme, for France will not stop drinking wine till England abjures beer.
To the observer who has the advantage of aloofness as his point of view, the thing which impresses more than anything else as the principal characteristic of French politics is their selfishness. ”

“ Rochette from the very beginning of his case did everything in his power, and his power was enormous, to hamper the course of legal proceedings, and to drag them out. Unfortunately the French criminal code plays into the hands of a man like this,” said Monsieur Fabre, “and it is not too much to say that when a rich man—for he must be rich—is accused and wishes to drag out legal proceedings so as not to be judged, it is perfectly possible for him to effect his object. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She has no privacy at all and knows that she is always under watch and that even when she is alone in her cell there is an eye at the little trapdoor which peeps into it over her bed. The prisoner in the pistole has not even the consolation of company during exercise hours, and she must sometimes envy the women whom she can see from her windows. She can talk to the nuns, but they answer as little as possible. She lives out her life in a whisper. The soubrette is a prisoner. ”

“ The greatest praise for anything in Paris is that it is very Parisian, and so peculiar is this national conceit that it finds an outlet in the inevitable claim which is invariably made for French initiative in any invention, scientific or otherwise, which has made its mark in the world, for any novelty of medical science, for anything inspired at all. The origin of anything worth having in the world is French. ”

“ As it is human nature for a man to shrink from the acknowledgment that he has been mistaken, it is obvious that a French examining magistrate who starts with the idea that his prisoner is a guilty man or woman will do everything in his power, and his power has no limit except his own conscience, to prove the guilt of his prisoner. ”

“ To the observer, to the lover of France the most deplorable, the most unhappy result of the Caillaux drama is the belittling of France in the eyes of the whole world by the inability of the French nation to put simple faith in its [Pg 74] own administrators of the justice of the country. And most unhappily of all, this want of faith is justified. The story of the Rochette case, like the story of the Dreyfus case, is undoubtedly a blot on France’s fair name, and every man or woman who loves France sincerely must deplore it. ”

“ The principal difficulty for a foreigner in understanding the extraordinary hold of politics in France on matters which appear and which are really entirely outside the scope of politics is increased by the Frenchman’s attitude in argument. When a foreigner disagrees with a Frenchman on any question whatsoever, the Frenchman, should he happen to be getting the worse of the discussion, puts an end to it by remarking, smilingly and politely, “But you are a foreigner, my friend, and therefore cannot possibly understand this matter, which is essentially French.” ”

“ Here the pistolière sits, silent, it is true, but with other women near her and round her. But even here she sits apart, and Madame Caillaux, I am told, has not attended mass. “There is only one hope in Saint Lazare,” said the former prisoner who gave me most of this information, “we all hope for our day of trial.” “All of you?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she said. “No matter what we fear, nothing can be worse than the terrible monotony of life in the pistole. Our lives are those of prisoners in a dark gallery. ”

“ When, to his amazement, a new suit was commenced under the Cabinet of which Monsieur Poincaré was Prime Minister, Rochette took flight. He is a free man to-day, freer and better protected than all of us. He will smile as he reads this indiscreet account of his troubles which are over, and in his gratitude he will send from overseas a gracious greeting to the Minister of Finance, his saviour and his friend. Monsieur Caillaux it was who demanded, who obtained, who insisted on, the various postponements which allowed Rochette to thieve with impunity. ”

“ So wide are the powers of an examining magistrate, that he may if he wishes arrest not only presumable accomplices but any unwilling witness. It has happened before now that a witness has preferred to remain away from the room of a French examining magistrate and has been sent for by him and brought under arrest to him to give evidence, and a witness who has signed an untrue statement in the examining magistrate’s office is not unfrequently, when convicted of perjury at the trial, where he has repeated this evidence on oath, arrested in court. ”

“ It is not the halfpenny that is important, it is the mentality which underlies the theft. It may seem a far cry from the theft of a halfpenny to the Rochette scandal, but you can trace the connexion very easily if you care to think the matter out. And if you think it out with care, you cannot fail to see that this basis of selfishness, permeating upwards through every vein of French private, public, and political life, has been directly responsible for the Caillaux drama and for the results which that drama has had and will have on the life of France in the future. ”

“ In many ways the examination of Rochette by the Parliamentary Commission was an eye-opener to the public. Accusations of venality on the part of public men are so common in France, owing to the licence allowed in the Press, that such words as “corruption,” “theft,” “lying” and the like have almost lost their force when applied to men in the van of politics. But the details of the manner in which Rochette conducted his business impressed and alarmed the public by their unpleasant likeness to the unsavoury details of the Panama case. ”

“ I have not the honour of your acquaintance, but I know by experience the infamy of the unclean Press towards the most intimate and most sacred sentiments, I know the war which it wages against home and family, against the intimacies of life most worthy of respect, against those who oppose the privileges of the rich, and the influence of the priests. ”

“ The sensible man who ventured to laugh at green hair was immediately stigmatized by those who upheld the new fashion as a supporter of the parliamentary system and the bloc, not because parliamentary Radicals and green hair have any real connexion, not because Monsieur Jaurès prevents the ladies of his family from wearing it, but because the Duchesse de Y. and the Comtesse de Z., who are “bien pensants,” have become votaries of the fashion. A new play is judged not so much on its merits as on political grounds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These were the reasons which caused Monsieur Caillaux’s re-election, and these are the reasons which militate above all others in France at election times. The natural result of elections conducted on the narrow-minded basis of selfish advantage is that the deputies, when they are elected, are as selfish as their constituents’ reasons for electing them have been. I suppose every country has the government which it deserves. The French are very certainly governed by a body of men who do not neglect their own interests. ”

“ Imagine a woman of your own world, a lady of refinement and of education, who waits to be spoken to before she opens her lips, who stands aside to let you pass if you open a door, who, if you beg her to take precedence, walks before you with bowed head and folded hands as though you were her gaoler. ”

“ It is difficult to exaggerate the bitter tone of the daily howl for punishment: Already the Action Française has begun to throw mud at Monsieur Boucard, the examining magistrate, in case his report on the case should be too lenient, and to suggest that he has been bought over. I have not seen in any French paper a suggestion that Madame Caillaux is already being punished by the political downfall of her husband and her own incarceration. ”

“ Of course the arrest of Rochette created an immense sensation, and equally of course it occasioned the downfall of the shares of the companies in which he was interested. But while these shares tumbled headlong, an immense wave of public indignation swelled against the financier’s arrest, for so far from finding empty coffers at the offices of the Crédit Minier, the authorities admitted that there were, in cash, £240,000 at this office, and £160,000 more at the Banque Franco-Espagnole, a sister enterprise of Rochette’s. ”