Good morning. Jack Beatty revisits the trial of Henriette Caillaux in Lapham’s Quarterly:

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.’

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?

In other news: Kevin Canfield reviews Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Love: “Two old buddies meet up in a Dublin pub. They have a couple pints. And a couple more. They rarely get together anymore, and this is supposed to be fun. Instead, they spend most of the night talking past each other. There are some veiled insults. One monopolizes the conversation. The other wishes he hadn’t left home. Narrowly focused but deceptively complex, Roddy Doyle’s new novel is called Love. At first, given the obvious resentment between his co-leads, the title feels inapt. In time, though, when it becomes clear that the Irish author has much more on his mind than a single strained friendship, it’s a perfect fit.”

Jane Austen’s piety: “Tom Keymer’s Jane Austen is, at once, a very well-written and engaging introduction to Austen, a brilliantly economically effective guide to her novels, a contribution to the debate about the writer, and a book that does not quite work for me, but then I approach Jane, her novels, and their reception, as an historian. In particular, I would make much more than does Keymer, a distinguished Professor of English at the University of Toronto, of the profound piety of Jane, her religious morality, and the strong sense of the real presence of evil that can be found in her ‘mindset.’”

Revisiting Gore Vidal’s 1964 political drama The Best Man: “In 2016, First Lady Michelle Obama was widely praised for her memorable insistence that ‘when they go low, we go high.’ It’s genuinely classy and idealistic advice, but the urgent question remains: Will it work in November? The Best Man, an overlooked 1964 movie with a screenplay by Gore Vidal based on his widely acclaimed Broadway play, uses this urgent question to fuel a witty, incisive, and subtly idealistic look at what it means to win or lose in Washington. Two vastly different but very recognizable political archetypes battle for the Presidential nomination of an unnamed party, implied to be the Democrats. Henry Fonda plays Secretary of State William Russell, a genteel, witty, Adlai Stevenson-like candidate with hidden marital and psychiatric problems. Tall, with chiseled features and pensive eyes, Fonda was known for playing noble characters like Tom Joad and Abe Lincoln, as well as the lone voice of reason in 12 Angry Men. Watching him effortlessly toss off Shakespeare quotes to a hungry press can make you nostalgic for the days when politicians could still do that sort of thing. Russell is up against a brusque Southern populist and gung-ho Cold Warrior Senator named Joe Cantwell, who is a kind of cross between Nixon and Joe McCarthy, but today might summon thoughts of a Tea Party demagogue. The lame duck President is an earthy, avuncular fellow named Art Hockstader, who doesn’t let his advanced age and secret diagnosis of stomach cancer get in the way of downing plenty of bourbon, toasting each glass with the Prohibition-era slogan ‘here’s to striking another blow for liberty!’ Veteran actor Lee Tracy perfectly captures the folksy realpolitik of the legendary smoke-filled back rooms and earned an Academy Award nomination for the role. Wily Hockstader knows perfectly well that he is on his way out and that the two candidates vying for his blessing need to prove to him that they are cunning enough to handle Washington.”

Jimmy Quinn reports on the attempt to stop a new nook on China’s global influence from being published: “The release of a forthcoming book on the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Western democracies was put on hold in Canada last week following a British trade association’s threat to sue for what it says are defamatory allegations. The book in question, Hidden Hand, is a comprehensive account of the CCP’s ‘global program of subversion, and the threat it poses to democracy,’ according to the London-based Oneworld Publications, which owns the book’s English-language rights in the Northern Hemisphere. Last week, Oneworld received a notice from lawyers representing the 48 Group Club, a British trade association, and its chairman, Stephen Perry.”

The delicious foreignness of Japanese travel writing: “Something happens when we hoist ourselves out of our usual surroundings. Our senses are sharpened by unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. Some people are inspired by the experience to write about it. Whether intended to record our impressions as keepsakes or to enlighten those left behind, this is ‘travel writing’. Classical Japanese literary renditions of travel are quite different. They are in fact so different from our expectations of the genre that Western readers have difficulty relating to these works without guidance. One could not wish for a more helpful guide than Meredith McKinney, who in Travels with a Writing Brush provides an anthology of Japanese travel writing through the ages and keen insight into what is needed to appreciate it.”

Photo: Gruyère

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