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She did not sit, but merely said, “You must know why I am here.” Caillaux, standing behind his desk, replied, “But I do not. Please sit down.” 27 Instead, she removed her hand from her muff to reveal the pistol and fired six shots at him. Four of them struck their target, and when several employees rushed into the office, they found the editor lying on the floor, blood spurting from his wounds. Several people went to his assistance, and others looked at Henriette, who still held the smoking gun. “Do not touch me!” she told them. “I am a lady. I have my car outside to ride in to the police station.” 28 She went downstairs and directed the chauffeur accordingly. Another vehicle took Calmette to a hospital, where he died six hours later. Henriette was quoted as explaining to the police: “There is no justice in France. There is only the revolver.” 29

viii

If Henriette had hoped to save her husband’s political career, she only partially succeeded. He was forced to resign his post as finance minister, though he continued to hold his seat in the legislature — indeed, he was re-elected a little more than a month after the murder. As for Henriette, bail was not granted in capital cases, and she was given the same cell in Saint-Lazare Prison where Meg Steinheil had been incarcerated. She enjoyed more amenities, however, including a new stove, a lamp, and a foot rug from the warden’s own office. She was also permitted to order meals from fine restaurants, and another female prisoner was actually assigned to be her maid.

Those were not the only signs of favoritism. The juge d’instruction in the case, Henri Boucard, conducted only a six-week investigation — very brief for a major crime. Of course, Henriette freely admitted killing Calmette, but Boucard uncritically accepted her explanation that she had feared the editor would publish the letters she had written to Caillaux five years earlier — a relevant point because that motive would make this case a crime passionnel and increase the likelihood that the jury would find Henriette not guilty. 30 Indeed, as many as one out of three defendants in murder trials claimed that theirs was a crime of passion in order to increase their odds of acquittal.

French jurors were not expected to fully understand the law; they were instructed to reach a verdict based on the “impressions” they received from observing the presentation of the case. 31 These impressions were very often influenced by sympathy, not only for the victim, but also for the perpetrator of the crime.

Louis Proal, one of the era’s most esteemed experts on the crime passionnel, published a seven-hundred-page book on the subject, in which he regretted the tendency for popular authors to glorify criminals, particularly those who acted out of a sense of honor. “Novels and plays,” he wrote, “have so extolled the nobility of crimes of passion and so eloquently justified revenge that juries, quite forgetting the duty they have been summoned to fulfill, fail entirely to defend society and pity, not the victims, but the authors of crimes of this nature.” 32 That was certainly what Mme. Caillaux was counting on.

ix

Her trial began on July 20, 1914. Three weeks earlier, far away in the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gavrilo Princip had shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The latter event would be the spark that ignited a world war, but the newspapers of Paris devoted most of the space on their front pages to Henriette.

Once more, requests for tickets to the visitors’ gallery far outnumbered the available seats. As the trial opened, Henriette entered, clothed in black and wearing a circular hat with tall plumes. It set off her blond hair and fair skin, as did a heavy coating of powder that made her look like a wraith.

Presiding judge Louis Albanel, a close friend of the Caillaux family, was inordinately deferential in his opening interrogation. He asked a few prompting questions and then let Henriette speak for nearly three hours,