The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (41 page)

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.”
⁴⁶
The 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.

10

THE GREATEST CRIME

G
ermany declared war on France on August 3, 1914. Most French citizens were elated, feeling that at last they would take revenge for the humiliation inflicted by Germany in 1870. Misia Sert, the wife of a newspaper publisher, who was famous for her Paris salon, recalled thinking, “What luck! Oh God, let there be a war,”
¹
when she first heard that Austria had declared war on Serbia six days before. Now, with her wish granted, she took part in the celebration that swept the streets of Paris:

On the
grands boulevards,
in the midst of a rapturously enthusiastic crowd, I suddenly found myself perched on a white horse behind a cavalry officer. I wound some flowers around the neck of his gala uniform, and the general exaltation was so great that not for a moment did I think it strange. Nor were the officer, the horse, or the crowd around us in any way astonished, for the same sight could be seen all over Paris. Flowers were being sold at every street corner: wreaths, sheaves, bouquets, and loose bunches, which a minute later reappeared on soldiers’ caps, on the tips of their bayonets, or behind their ears. People fell into one another’s arms; it did not matter who embraced you; you wept, you laughed, you were crushed, you were moved to tears, you were almost suffocated, you sang, you trampled other people’s feet, and you felt that you had never been more generous, more noble, more prepared for sacrifice and, in short, more wonderfully happy!”
²

Within a month’s time, the mood had changed drastically. With astonishing speed, German troops had swept through neutral Belgium and into France. By August 26, they had reached the Marne, and an advance cavalry unit captured the racecourse at Chantilly, a few miles north of Paris. From the top of the Eiffel Tower, people could see the distant German units approaching. Refugees from the countryside poured into the city, and their presence added to the growing panic. On September 2, the government abandoned the capital to relocate in Bordeaux. Among the valuables taken along was the
Mona Lisa,
on its second major journey in two years.

General Joseph Gallieni, commander of the French forces, resolved to defend Paris. A map found on the body of a German cavalry officer revealed the enemy’s plan, and Gallieni organized his forces to hit the German flank. He commandeered the Parisian taxi fleet to transport his troops to the front, and thousands of cabs appeared to accomplish the enormous task of moving an army, in what was called “the miracle of the Marne.” The Germans fell back, and Paris was never again threatened.

The war, however, dragged on for four years, ultimately resulting in the deaths of eight and a half million soldiers and another twenty million wounded. An uncounted number of civilians died from disease, starvation, and other war-related causes. France alone lost one and a half million men in battle and its aftermath. The war dwarfed any crime, indeed any previous war. It destroyed a generation of young men and brought to an end the optimistic era known in France as “La Belle Époque.”

Among the technological advancements that made this war so terrible was the airplane. Used at first to scout enemy forces, planes then began to carry bombs. (Initially, bombs were merely dropped by pilots from open cockpits.) To counter attacks and observation from the air, military planners started to conceal potential targets with cloth. Later, special paint designs, called camouflage, were used. Naval warfare was affected by the widespread use of submarines that were equipped with periscopes to spot their targets. Ships were painted with geometric patterns in varying colors to create confusion about their size and direction of travel. The French officer credited with inventing camouflage, Guirand de Scevola, explained his inspiration: “In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them.”
³

i

The year 1914 also saw France lose its most prominent criminologist. For more than a year, Alphonse Bertillon had suffered from pernicious anemia, which his doctors told him would be fatal. He felt a chronic chill and stayed in a single room where he kept a stove burning day and night. Fatigue dogged him, and his vision began to fail.

Bertillon worried continually that his identification system would die with him. The news that countries around the world were replacing
bertillonage
with fingerprinting gnawed at his spirit and pride. The Argentine criminologist Juan Vucetich, who was the leading exponent of fingerprinting, had cruelly declared, “I can assure you that in all the years during which we applied the anthropometric system, in spite of all our care, we were unable to prove the identity of a single person by measurements.”
⁴
Later, when Vucetich came to Paris and tried to visit Bertillon, Bertillon kept him waiting for hours in the anteroom of his office, only to open the door, ignore Vucetich’s outstretched hand, and declare, “Sir, you have tried to do me a great deal of harm.”
⁵
He then slammed the door, and that was all Vucetich saw of Bertillon.

Aware that Bertillon was dying, the French government wished to honor his achievements. He had already received the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor for his work, but he desired the rosette of the Legion, which signified a higher distinction. The government offered the rosette on one condition: Bertillon had to acknowledge his error regarding the handwriting analysis of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, now reinstated as an officer. Bertillon is said to have shouted from the bed where he spent his final days: “No! Never! Never!”
⁶

Bertillon died on February 13, 1914. In his will he ordered that his brain be donated to the Laboratory of Anthropology. Afterward, his wife burned all the letters that he had exchanged with the mysterious Swedish woman with whom he had carried on a love affair years before. In doing so, she ensured that her husband, who had been known for his abhorrence of publicity, would retain his privacy even in death.

Though
bertillonage
was abandoned soon afterward, it has been revived in a different form today. Computer programs have been devised to analyze faces and to compare them with those of known criminals. Called biometrics, this system was used in Massachusetts in 2006 to scan some nine million driver’s license photographs to locate a man wanted on rape charges.

Biometrics relies on the distinctive characteristics of what are called the nodal points of faces. These include the distance between the eyes, the width of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets, chin and jawline patterns—much the same as the system originally devised by Bertillon. Computers allow for the use of a much greater number of points than Bertillon employed, however. One computer program is said to use some eight thousand facial data points.
⁷

Facial identification systems have also been paired with television cameras to scan crowds at sporting events and at other venues in an attempt to identify terrorists, although it is not known how successful they have been. The use of such systems would be superior to fingerprinting in situations where it is impossible to take the fingerprints of every person present. Bertillon’s insistence that physical features are as definitive a means of identification as fingerprints may yet be confirmed.

ii

Guillaume Apollinaire, who had done so much to popularize and publicize the work of Picasso and others, knew that the war, like the art of his friends, was a profound break with the past. A poem he wrote about an automobile journey he had made just as the war clouds gathered reflected this sense of fracture:

The 31st of the month of July 1914
⁸

I left Deauville a little before midnight

In Rouveyre’s little auto…

We said farewell to an entire epoch

Furious giants were casting their shadows over Europe

And when after passing that afternoon

Through Fontainebleau

We arrived in Paris

At the moment the mobilization notices were being posted

We understood my friend and I

That the little auto had taken us into an epoch that was New

And then even though we were both grown men

We had nevertheless just been born
⁹

Apollinaire was essentially a man without a country. France, his adopted homeland, classified him as Russian. In a burst of patriotism, and out of a desire to be born again as a Frenchman, he enlisted in the French army (unlike Picasso, who sat out the war in Paris and Rome, finding new mistresses and finally a wife). Writing to a friend about his assignment, Apollinaire quipped, “I love art so much that I have joined the artillery.”
¹⁰

He did well in the army, winning promotion to sergeant and then, after a transfer to the infantry, becoming an officer. This new assignment brought him into the trenches, the worst of all places to be in the war. He wrote: “Nine days without washing, sleeping on the ground without straw, ground infested with vermin, not a drop of water except that used to vaporize the gas masks.… It is fantastic what one can stand.… One of the parapets of my trench is partly made of corpses.… There are no head lice, but swarms of body lice, pubic lice.… No writer will ever be able to tell the simple horror of the trenches, the mysterious life that is led there.”
¹¹

On March 18, 1916, while reading a copy of a literary magazine to which he regularly contributed, Apollinaire was wounded in the head when an artillery shell landed nearby. If he had not been wearing a helmet, he would have been killed outright, but even so the shrapnel pierced the helmet. Taken to an ambulance, he had pieces of metal (he called the wound “a splinter,” but it was more serious) removed from his skull. The doctor thought he would recover quickly, so, as was usual in trench warfare, Apollinaire was not immediately evacuated from the combat zone. A week later, however, his condition worsened, and he had to be transported to a hospital in Paris.

By May he was experiencing dizzy spells and paralysis in his left arm. The surgeons decided to do a trepanation—opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain. Technically, the procedure was a success, for the paralysis and dizziness disappeared. Friends, however, thought Apollinaire had changed. One of them described him as “irascible and self-absorbed, dull-eyed, heavy-browed—that is what the trepanation had produced. His mouth was distorted with suffering—the same mouth that only a short time before had smiled so broadly as it uttered learned observations, jokes, delightful comments of all kinds.”
¹²

Fearing that his “cure” would qualify him to be returned to the trenches, a friend found Apollinaire a job in the military offices in Paris—as, of all things, a censor. Given Apollinaire’s background, the officer in charge must have found it perfectly appropriate to assign him oversight of the literary magazines—a task that Apollinaire did, going so far as to censor some of his own work.

Germaine Albert-Birot, the editor of one such magazine, called
Sic,
persuaded Apollinaire to write a play with Cubist sets and costumes. Titled
Les Mamelles de Terésias
(“The Breasts of Terésias”), it is about a woman who becomes a man. Onstage, “Thérèse” performed this transformation when she opened her blouse and gas-filled balloons rose into the air. The most significant thing about the play was its subtitle,
Drame sur-réaliste.
Apollinaire intended
sur-réaliste
to be a synonym for
supernaturaliste,
but in the 1920s, the word was adopted by a group of artists whose work was characterized by fantasy and elements of the subconscious. Surrealists (as they became known), like many younger poets and painters, found Apollinaire’s work and spirit an inspiration.