Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [141]
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.