Part 3
On Wednesday March 2, 1911, I was summoned by Monsieur Monis, the Prime Minister. He wished to talk to me about the Rochette affair. He told me that the Government did not wish the case to come before the courts on April 27, which date had been fixed a long time ago. He told me that it might create trouble for the Minister of Finance at a moment when he had already on hand the liquidation of the religious congregations, the Crédit Foncier case, and others of the same kind. The Prime Minister ordered me to induce the President of the Correctional Court (Judge Bidault de L’Isle) to adjourn this affair till the end of the legal vacation August-September. I protested with energy. I pointed out how painful it was for me to carry out such a mission. I begged (the Premier) to allow the Rochette case to follow its normal course. The Premier adhered to his order, and told me to see him again and give him news of my mission. I was deeply hurt and indignant. I had no doubt that Rochette’s friends had organized this incredible _coup_. On Friday March 24 Mr. M. B. ... (Rochette’s lawyer, Maître Maurice Bernard) came to my office. He stated that, yielding to the solicitations of his friend the Minister of Finance, (Monsieur Caillaux) he was going to plead illness and asked for the adjournment of his friend Rochette’s trial. I replied to that, that he looked perfectly well, but that it was no part of my duty to question a plea of personal ill-health made by a lawyer, and that I should simply refer the matter to the wisdom of the judge. He wrote to the judge. Judge Bidault de L’Isle, whom I had not seen and did not want to see, met his request with a refusal. Maître Maurice Bernard showed great irritation at this refusal. He called on me again, used recriminatory language, and made me understand by means of thinly veiled allusions that he was perfectly informed of everything. What could I do? After much self-communion, after a veritable crisis of mental agony of which the witness, in fact the only witness, was my friend and deputy, Bloch-Laroque, I decided that I must obey the moral pressure which had been brought to bear on me. I sent for Judge Bidault de L’Isle. I laid before him, with emotion, the situation in which I had been placed. Eventually Judge Bidault de L’Isle consented from affection for me to the adjournment which had been demanded. That same evening, that is to say, Thursday, March 30, I went to the Prime Minister and told him what I had done. He appeared very pleased. I was much less pleased. In the ante-chamber I had seen Monsieur Du Mesnil, the managing editor of the _Rappel_, a newspaper which was favourable to Rochette and was in the habit of attacking me frequently. He had come, no doubt, to ask the Prime Minister whether I had allowed myself to be coerced. I have never undergone such humiliation before.
_March 31, 1911._ V. FABRE.
_Annexe._
On the day of the meeting during a suspension the councillors (that is to say the two judges) who sat on the bench with Judge Bidault de L’Isle expressed themselves very vehemently against the pressure which had been brought to bear on them. Why were they not heard by the Commission of Inquiry? For instance it would have been easy to question Monsieur François-Poncet, who had taken no pains to conceal either his indignation or his disgust at the unqualifiable manœuvres which the Prime Minister had forced on the Public Prosecutor.
The reading of this statement from the rostrum of the Chamber was followed within forty-eight hours by the resignation of Monsieur Monis from the Cabinet, and its immediate result was the resumption of the work of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry which had sat on the Rochette case. This commission (over which of course Monsieur Jaurès presided, as he had presided over the others) conducted the inquiry, as all such inquiries invariably are conducted in France, on political lines. The sessions of the commission did not pass off without the resignation of some of its members, the public was inclined to shrug its shoulders at the leniency of its examination of past Ministers of the State, and the wording of its verdict when delivered was a farce, not altogether unworthy of the date on which the Paris morning papers published it, the first of April. The Parliamentary Commission could find no stronger words to stigmatize the situation described in Monsieur Fabre’s statement, which description the inquiry proved to be true, than “a deplorable abuse of influence.” The phrase has become a joke in Paris now, and is in popular use on the boulevards. The Chamber of Deputies, however, before the close of the Parliamentary session, found other words to express the nation’s displeasure, and after a session which lasted from two o’clock in the afternoon of April 3 till two o’clock in the morning of April 4, the Chamber of Deputies adjourned for the Easter holidays, having voted the following order of the day:
The Chamber,
Takes note of the statements and findings of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry.
_Disapproves and reprehends the abusive intervention of financial interests in politics, and of politics in the administration of justice._
Affirms the necessity of a law on parliamentary incompatibility,
And with the resolution to assure, more efficaciously, the separation of political and judicial power,
Passes to the order of the day.
The debate, of which this significant order of the day was the corollary, was not only an extremely interesting, but a very stormy one. In the course of it, a member of the Chamber challenged Monsieur Doumergue, the Prime Minister, to fight him, but the quarrel was smoothed over. Monsieur Briand, Monsieur Barthou, Monsieur Barrès, Monsieur Doumergue, and Monsieur Jaurès all took a very active part in the debate, and when the Chamber finally adjourned till June, in other words till after the general elections, the general impression was that the Doumergue Ministry would not return to power.
With this historic debate ends the first chapter of the Caillaux drama. The vibrations of a revolver shot in a newspaper office in the Rue Drouot have eddied and spread till France was set aquiver. The woman who fired the shot, the wife of the man who an hour before the shot was fired was the most powerful man in France, knew before she was taken to her cell in Saint Lazare that the first consequence of her act had been the headlong downfall of her husband. She must feel now like a child who has pulled up a little stone and caused an avalanche, and not only France but Europe and the whole world are wondering what may go to pieces in the wreckage.
[1] Copy of open letter sent by Monsieur Thalamas to Madame Caillaux:
MADAME,
Je n’ai pas l’honneur de vous connaître, mais je sais par expérience quelle est l’infamie de la presse immonde envers les sentiments les plus intimes et les plus sacrés, quelle guerre elle mène contre la famille, les choses privées les plus respectables, et ceux qui luttent contre les privilèges des riches et contre les menées cléricales. Vous en avez tué un. Bravo! Lorsqu’un homme en vient à se mettre ainsi en dehors de la loi morale, il n’est plus qu’un bandit. Et quand la Société ne vous fait pas justice, il n’y a plus qu’à se faire justice soi-même!
Faites de ma lettre l’usage que vous voudrez. Trouvez-y le cri de la conscience d’un honnête homme révolté, et d’un journaliste-député écœuré des procédés de ceux qui déshonorent la presse et le Parlement.
THALAMAS
P.S. Ma femme me prie de vous adresser l’expression de sa sympathie. Elle vient de faire sur votre acte un article pour la _Dépêche de Versailles_. Elle vous l’enverra demain.
_Translation_:
MADAME,
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. You have killed one of them. Well done! When a man puts himself in this way outside all moral laws he is nothing but an outlaw, and when society does not do justice to him the only thing to be done is to take the law into one’s own hands.
Make whatever use you like of my letter. It is the genuine expression of the feelings of revolt of an honourable man’s conscience, the expression of the conscience of a journalist who is a member of the Chamber, and who is disgusted by the methods of those who dishonour both Press and Parliament.
THALAMAS
P.S. My wife begs me to assure you of her sympathy. She has written an article on your act for the _Dépêche de Versailles_. She will send it you to-morrow.
II
CELL NO. 12
It is a very short drive from the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre to the prison of Saint Lazare, where Madame Caillaux was taken from the police-station. She had been taken from the office of the _Figaro_ to the police-station in her own luxurious car. She drove to Saint Lazare in one of the horrible red taxicabs which have rattled for too many years about the streets of Paris, with a member of the police force in plain clothes seated beside her, another on the uncomfortable little seat opposite, and a third on the box by the driver. The prison authorities had been advised by telephone of her arrival at the prison, and arrangements had been made to put her into _pistole_ No. 12, the cell in which Louise Michel, Valentine Merelli, Madame Humbert, Madame Steinheil and many other Parisian celebrities awaited their trials. The cab drove into the courtyard of the prison and the gates closed behind it. The police handed their prisoner over, with the usual formalities, to the prison authorities, she was kept waiting while she was inscribed on the prison books, she was searched—for no prisoner escapes this formality—and was told to walk forward to a large open space between two staircases. The house of correction of Saint Lazare is a very old building, which dates from the beginning of the twelfth century. It was a hospital for lepers in 1110, and remained one till 1515, when the monks of the Order of Saint Victor took it over, and abolished the lepers’ hospital. In 1632 Saint Vincent de Paul and the priests of the order became the inmates of Saint Lazare, and in 1779 it became a house of correction and provisional and permanent detention for men. On July 13, 1789, when famine raged in Paris, the mob broke into Saint Lazare, and looted the enormous stock of food which the Lazarists were known to be keeping there. The monks were driven out, the building sacked and the store houses gutted by fire. The convent of Saint Lazare then became a State prison in which suspects were kept. It is now a prison for women. There is room for about twelve hundred prisoners, but at a pinch the old building would hold 1600. The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first consists of women who are awaiting trial, or who have been sentenced to less than a year’s imprisonment. The second division consists of girls under age who have been sentenced to confinement in a house of correction till they are twenty-one, the third division is that of unfortunates whose sentences of imprisonment are short ones. Saint Lazare prison, though of course under State control, is in practice ruled by a body of nuns who, while responsible to the authorities, have really the entire management of the enormous prison in their hands and hold the real power. It is a huge bleak wilderness of stone with echoing corridors and haunting silences, and has been sentenced to demolition for sanitary reasons for many years. But threatened buildings live long in France when they belong to the State. A modern prison, such as Fresnes in France or any of the English prisons, is a pleasure resort compared with Saint Lazare, and there is less difference between Fresnes and a cheap hydropathic than there is between the prison of Saint Lazare and the prison of Fresnes. The silence, the darkness, the cold, damp, and dirt are perhaps the worst of its discomforts, but I have been told by women who have been imprisoned there that the mental and physical torture of the months in which they waited trial surpassed anything that could be imagined. Within an hour after her arrival Madame Caillaux ceased to wear her name and became a number—No. 12. The number she received is considered a favour, for cell No. 12 is the most spacious of all the cells in Saint Lazare.
In the large open space between the two stairways is a high chair, almost a throne, on which sits Sister Léonide, the chief superintendent of the prison nuns. She is a woman of about forty. A handsome woman with a stern set face. The drawing of her in this volume was done specially for me by the well-known artist of St. Lazare, Monsieur Albert Morand. Monsieur Morand is one of the few men who have been authorized to make drawings of St. Lazare, and his work has the honour of a special place in the Carnavalet Museum. His drawings which are reproduced in this volume are probably unique. The nickname which the prisoners give Sœur Léonide is “Bostock,” after the famous American lion tamer, who, in his day, was a celebrity in Paris. Her severity is not more remarkable than is her power of quelling the first signs of mutiny among the prisoners by a mere glance, and it was the quick-witted appreciation of this power of the eye which gave her her name. Sister Léonide made a sign to one of the two women who stood by her. The woman, a prison attendant who goes by the ironically prison-given name of a _soubrette_, opened a door and motioned to No. 12 to walk straight on down a half-lighted misty corridor, painted a muddy brown. This corridor seems endless. It is like a street in a nightmare. There are doors on either side which seem to leap out of the half darkness, and at long, long intervals a little flame of gas. It is only quite recently that there is any incandescent gas in St. Lazare and what there is, even now, is quite inadequate, merely serving, as a former prisoner expressed it, “to show us the darkness around.” The anticipatory mental torture of this first long journey down the interminable corridor must be terrific to a woman whose life, before her imprisonment, has run on easy lines. The doors are named and numbered. Cell No. 8, Cell No. 9, Workshop No. 2, Library, and so forth. All of them have huge and heavy locks, and bolts and bars. “Here,” said the _soubrette_. She produced a huge key which she fitted into the lock of a door on which in big white letters were painted the words “Pistole No. 12.” She had to use both hands to turn the key. The door creaked and opened inwards. Cell No. 12 is fairly large. As a rule there are six little beds in it, and it has held as many as eight beds. The walls are painted black, from the floor up to three quarters of the distance to the ceiling. The top quarter is white-washed, but the whitewash is grey, from age and want of care. They use extraordinarily little soap and water in the prison of Saint Lazare. The heavy beams across the ceiling have been decorated for many years by a network of spiders’ webs, and though there was a rumour in the Paris Press at the time of her imprisonment that Cell No. 12 had been cleaned for Madame Caillaux’s reception, I am told that the webs and the spiders are there still.
There were so many absurd stories in the Paris Press about the comforts which had been provided in Saint Lazare for Madame Caillaux that an impression became prevalent that she must be having rather a good time in prison. I need hardly say that there was very little, if any, foundation in fact for these stories. Monsieur Morand’s drawing of the “soubrette” does away with the mind-picture which newspaper readers may have formed of a smart maid waiting on this favoured prisoner, getting her bath for her, and bringing her a breakfast tray each morning. The _soubrette_ of _pistole_ No. 12, who looks after the _pistole_ next door as well, where there are seven prisoners, and who therefore can have little time to devote to the prisoner in No. 12, is a woman called Jeanne (I do not know her surname), who murdered her husband with a penknife some months ago. She is a quiet, somewhat surly woman, and good conduct has obtained for her the privilege of acting as _soubrette_ in two of the _pistoles_, for enforced idleness is one of the prison’s worst punishments. One of the favourite newspaper stories which were in circulation soon after Madame Caillaux’s imprisonment was one which told of the furnishing of the _pistole_ in which she had been put. Journalists had seen a big motor lorry arrive with her furniture, we were told, and the cell had been made as comfortable as a room in her own house. This story gained a semblance of truth from the reproduction in the papers of the arrival of a big motor lorry at Saint Lazare. I reproduce this picture here. It looks conclusive, and convincing at first sight, for the group of journalists who saw the van drive in can, one might think, surely not have all been mistaken. However, I took the trouble to make some inquiries while my Paris colleagues, I fear, jumped to conclusions. I learned that the van which figures in the picture comes quite regularly to Saint Lazare. It contains linen in the rough sent by a contracting firm, for whom the prisoners turn the rough linen into sheets and pillow-cases. The contractors, the prison authorities, and the prisoners, all find their advantage in this arrangement—and the van did not contain even a chair for Madame Caillaux’s cell.
The cell has now two beds in it, one for the prisoner, one for Jeanne the _soubrette_. A great deal of nonsense has been written in the newspapers about “the maid” whom Madame Caillaux was allowed in prison. The simple fact, of course, is that the authorities consider it necessary that watch should be kept on her, and the “maid,” Jeanne the prison _soubrette_, is by no means a pleasant companion. The furniture is very primitive, though better than that of some of the other cells. There are a mattress on the bed of cast iron, a pillow but no bolster, two straw-bottomed chairs, a little white deal table, a jug and a basin which were once enamelled yellow but through which the rusty metal shows. On the bed is a brown rug with the word “Prison” written on it. Madame Caillaux has been allowed to cover this rug with an old quilt which Madame Steinheil brought into the prison. Above the bed is a shelf on which the prisoner’s linen can be put, behind the bed a little trap through which the wardresses can peep into the cell at any moment. The floor of No. 12 is tiled with rough red tiles, much worn, and broken. There is a stove, but it has never warmed the cell, and in cold weather the damp and cold are very bitter. No. 12 has three windows, strongly barred, and in addition to the bars there is wire netting. This wire netting has its reason. The windows of No. 12 look out on the courtyard in which, twice a day, the prisoners are allowed for exercise. This courtyard is quite pleasant in the summer, for there are several trees in it, but the prisoners have an unpleasant habit of attracting the attention of the inmates of _pistole_ No. 12 by throwing stones at the windows, as a sign that chocolate or cakes would be acceptable. In this courtyard inside the old convent of Saint Lazare, which has the picturesque charm of great age, some of the most sensational scenes of the days of the Terror took place, for it was from that courtyard that the tumbrils left for the guillotine. The chapel opens into this courtyard too, and Madame Caillaux from the windows of her cell enjoys a very pretty view when the courtyard is empty. In the exercise hours the view is less pleasing. There is always war between the women prisoners of the other classes and those of the _pistole_ class, and until the new inmate of No. 12 learned how to slip bits of chocolate, biscuit, or sugar out across the window-sill so that they fell into the courtyard she dared hardly show herself at the window. It is a peculiarity that, in the house of silence, everything of interest is known to all the prisoners immediately. Madame Caillaux had not been twelve hours in No. 12 before all her fellow prisoners knew all about the drama which had brought her there, and were curious to see her.