Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [140]
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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