The Cleopatra’s Nose of 1914
....MUCH MOREI said to myself, “Shall I go to the Figaro offices?”…It was then the idea came to me to cause a scandal…I should explain I was accustomed to carrying a small pistol.From a muff linking the sleeves of her fur coat, the lady pulled an automatic pistol and fired. The editor who was her target sought cover beneath his desk. Witnesses heard a gap between the last two shots, suggesting she had pursued the man and shot him while he cowered under the desk. “When I fired the first shot, I had only one thought at the moment—to aim low, at the floor, to cause a scandal,” she said at her trial. The editor just happened to occupy the patch of floor where she pointed. When asked, “And the other five shots, Madame?” she answered, “They went off by themselves.”
—Henriette Caillaux, testifying at her trial
The shots were fired on March 16, 1914. The shooter was Henriette Caillaux, the second wife of Joseph Caillaux, who had been the prime minister of France from June 1911 to January 1912. She believed her target, Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, was about to expose the intimate secrets of her marriage.
Venomous politics lay behind l’affaire Caillaux. During the spring 1914 elections, held between December 1913 and March 1914, Calmette had published 110 articles, anecdotes, and cartoons attacking Joseph Caillaux as a thief and traitor—the former for abusing his power when he was finance minister to benefit himself and his friends, the latter for pursuing secret negotiations with Germany as premier during the Morocco crisis of 1911. In the climax to the series, Le Figaro made use of a letter that Caillaux had sent to a former mistress, printing a photographic reproduction on the paper’s front page on March 13, 1914. It was three days later that Henriette, certain her husband’s letters to her were about to receive the same treatment, killed Calmette.
Politics and conviction probably formed the basis for the bulk of Calmette’s editorial animosity toward Joseph Caillaux, but rumors swirled that Calmette also targeted Caillaux over a woman. The day after Calmette’s murder, the Swiss ambassador wrote his government that “from the very beginning of Calmette’s campaign in Le Figaro against M. Caillaux, everyone in Parisian high society has been saying that the campaign owed its origins to an histoire de femme.” According to the gossip, Caillaux wanted to divorce Henriette to marry a woman whom he wanted to divorce her husband. Caillaux specialized in such marital musical chairs, having left his first wife, Berthe Gueydan, for Henriette, both of whom had left their husbands for him. The new element was Gaston Calmette, said to be “equally interested in this lady.” While the Swiss ambassador did not credit these “slanderous” rumors, Madame Caillaux was whispered to have “lost her head” over them. But as Edward Berenson asks in his fascinating book The Trial of Madame Caillaux, why would Henriette “have wanted to eliminate her husband’s rival for possession of this other woman”? Why not eliminate her husband instead?....
Also from Lapham's Quarterly, Samuel Johnson Sells the Sizzle, not the Steak
Miscellany
James Boswell recorded that during the sale of Henry Thrale’s brewery, Samuel Johnson—an executor of the business—“appeared bustling about, with an inkhorn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman,” and was asked what he considered to be the true value of the property. “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson responded, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
