On Monday, March 16, 1914, around five o'clock, Henriette Caillaux had herself driven to the offices of Le Figaro on Rue Drouot. The editor, Gaston Calmette, was out; she chose to await his return. John N. Raphael relates that she remained for more than an hour in the antechamber, a revolver concealed within her muff. When Calmette returned, he was preparing to dine with Paul Bourget. According to Raphael's account, he agreed to receive Henriette, whom he had recognized, before departing. When he showed her into his private office, she fired six times. Two bullets inflicted mortal wounds. The staff overpowered her and summoned the police. A physician attached to the newspaper bent over Calmette; before being conveyed to Neuilly, the editor entrusted his keys and wallet to a colleague and bade him farewell, Raphael reports. He expired before midnight. At the police station, Henriette acknowledged the shooting and declared, according to words recorded by the commissioner, that she had harbored no intention of killing Calmette. This was her initial deposition, not a judicial finding upon premeditation.
For several weeks, Le Figaro had been assailing Joseph Caillaux, the Minister of Finance, over his political and fiscal measures. Then the journal shifted its campaign toward his private life: on March 13, Calmette published a letter Joseph had written thirteen years earlier to Berthe Gueydan, who had in the interim become his first wife, then his former wife. Henriette dreaded the publication of further correspondence—letters that touched her personally. The correspondence became public matter three days before the homicide. The conflict between political criticism and the exposure of intimacy no longer remained within the columns of the gazette: it crossed the threshold of the office where Calmette received the minister's wife.
Henriette had sought counsel prior to her visit. On the morning of March 16, she met with Monier, the president of the civil tribunal; she named him to Commissioner Carpin as the man who had informed her that the campaign could not be halted by law. The earliest recorded account of her interrogation also stated that she had purchased a revolver that very morning, before repairing to the newspaper. Raphael, writing prior to the trial, records these declarations without being able to present them as the final word of the inquiry. He also sets down a later chronology that places the purchase in the afternoon. This discrepancy is of moment: between the first utterances at the station and the narrative unfolded before the magistrate, the hours had shifted.
At Gastinne-Renette on Avenue d’Antin, Henriette explained that she wished to protect herself during the motor journeys occasioned by her husband’s electoral campaign. According to the deposition reported by Raphael, she first tried a weapon whose trigger pained her finger, then settled upon a Browning. In the shooting gallery beneath the shop, she fired six rounds at the target. She then loaded the weapon. To the magistrate who questioned her regarding these preparations, she replied that she had contemplated wounding Calmette should he refuse to cease his campaign. This was already something other than a visit intended for parley; it was not yet the confession of an intent to kill.
Before proceeding to Rue Drouot, she returned home. There she left a letter addressed to Joseph, which the English governess was instructed to deliver at seven o'clock should she fail to return. Raphael reports its contents from the press: Henriette wished to act in her husband’s stead and spare him self-sacrifice. For the evening, a dinner at the Italian embassy had been arranged. She had even requested that her hairdresser attend her to prepare her coiffure. These ordinary appointments persisted upon the timetable of a woman carrying a loaded firearm.
Within the room, the words that followed the shots were not recorded as an unbroken, verified dialogue. Raphael reports that as the staff wrenched the weapon from her grasp, she cried out that there was no longer any justice in France, and then that there had been no other means of halting the campaign. At the station, before Carpin, she asserted on the contrary that she had not wished to kill Calmette, expressing remorse for her deed. These versions—the one shouted in confusion, the other delivered to the commissioner—do not efface the six shots; they lay bare the chasm between immediate fury and the intent that the jurors would be called upon to weigh.
The newspapers immediately transformed Calmette’s death into a political event. Within minutes, a crowd gathered on Rue Drouot; evening editions were snatched from the vendors' hands, and theaters emptied during intermissions as patrons sought the latest intelligence. At the station, some fifteen minutes into the interrogation, Joseph Caillaux arrived in a cab. The crowd jeered him; the sentry barred his entry, having received strict orders to admit no one. Joseph had not been in the office, yet his office, his marriage, and the published letters bound him irrevocably to every debate. The couple's renown revealed nothing of criminal intent; it merely governed the clamor to which every piece of evidence would be subjected.
The judicial inquiry occupied several months. Investigators questioned Henriette, the employees of Le Figaro, the chauffeur, and the individuals she had met prior to her visit. An agency clerk and the chauffeur differed in their recollections of the afternoon's movements, as well as the hour at which the weapon had been procured. These discrepancies were followed closely by the press, for the hours might weigh heavily upon the question of premeditation.
The trial opened before the Seine Assize Court on July 20, 1914. At the bar, the novelist Paul Bourget rose in defense of his departed friend. He justified Calmette’s conduct in exposing Caillaux’s private affairs. Maître Labori then countered by confronting him with his own novel, Le Démon de midi, wherein characters condemn the publication of love letters. The cabled dispatch from Paris on July 24, published the following day by the Auckland Star, records this singular confrontation: an advocate employing the witness’s own fiction to test his judgment upon a real act. Bourget, with whom Calmette had been due to dine on the evening of the tragedy, found himself confronted with the question of the letters, posed this time through his own prose. The printed pages had changed venues: they had entered the forum of judicial debate.
The preparation of the act remained the crux of the proceedings: the purchase, the testing of the pistol, the loading, and the wait in the antechamber. Henriette had offered an explanation of these acts that severed the desire to halt the campaign from the desire to take life. The jurors were required to weigh this construction against the deeds and the testimony. Nothing in the celebrity of the figures seated before them could render the gunfire any less real.
On July 28, Henriette was acquitted. She had not denied the shooting; the jury did not find her guilty of the charge laid before them. The following day, Le Figaro violently denounced the acquittal, attributing it to Joseph’s political influence. This editorial, penned by the journal of which Calmette had been the director, bears witness to the indignation of its editors; it does not constitute a second verdict of the law.
On the very day of the verdict, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The international conflagration soon commandeered the front pages where the trial had loomed so large. Calmette himself had known none of these hearings. On the evening of March 16, before he was carried away, he had entrusted his keys and his wallet to a colleague. His dinner with Bourget was never to take place.