A Famous Trial.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 76, 21 July 1914, Page 5

A Famous Trial.

THE MURDER OF CALMETTE WOMEN IN THE COURT. [Br Electric Telegraph—Copyright] [United Press Association. J Paris, July 20. Madame Caillaux has been transported to the Conciergerie, and is quartered near Marie Antoinette's dungeon. She will be conveyed to the court-room daily by a subterranean passage. It has now been decided to admit a few privileged women to the trial, but they will be behind an iron railing and out of sight of the prisoner, the examiner and the magistrate.

MADAME'S DISCURSIVE SPEECH THE VOICE: "TAKE A REVOLVER!" "DID NOT WANT TO KILL." (Received 11.15 a.m.) Paris, July 20. There is intense interest in the trial. M. Lahore is defending Madame Caillaux, who gave evidence throughout the day—practically a long discursive speech. The President was almost unable to ask questions. She described how she and her husband expected other letters after the publication of the "Thy Joe" letter, and she then would be the object of innuendos in society. She suffered so much that she lost her head. She did not want to kill M. Calmette, but to give him a lesson. "If I had not gone," she said, "my husband would, as on the day before, have threatened to break M. Calmette's head. As I went, a voice seemed to tell me: 'Take a revolver.'" She added: "Monsieur le President, you cannot realise how terrible revolvers are—they go off without being pressed."

On March 16, Mme. Caillaux, wife of the Minister of Finance, fired several shots, wounding M. Calmette, editor of the newspaper Figaro, as he was in his office. When Madame Caillaux fired the first shot, M. Calmette rose. Other shots were fired, and as M. Calmette fell, Madame Caillaux said: "I only did my duty." M. Caillaux heard the news at the Senate, and he hastened to the police station, where his wife told the story to the magistrate without any emotion. She was then conveyed to the St. Lazare Prison.

The attacks by the late M. Calmette onM. Caillaux have recently attracted much attention. The Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph wrote in January: "M. Calmette's animus against M. Caillaux has always been marked. It was he 'who mentioned in the French press first an incident between M. Caillaux and the British Ambassador in Paris in 1911, and, secondly, one between M. Caillaux and the Spanish Ambassador in Paris at about the same time. When M. Caillaux came into power again, and took over the Ministry of Finance about a month ago, the Figaro started a daily campaign against him, at first accusing him merely in a general way of ruining French finance and driving France to bankruptcy." Then came a direct attack, spread over several days, M. Calmotte concluding each article with "to be continued to-morrow." Ho accused M. Caillaux of making an offer to the claimants of an estate alleged to have been appropriated by the Government; that he would obtain £200,000 from the public funds to settle the claim if they would hand over 80 por cent, of the amount for the funds of the Radical Party. Another charge was that M. Caillaux, using his authority as Minister of Finance, compelled the well-known bank, the Comptoir d'Escompte, to advance a sura of £16,000 to M. Caillaux for the party funds. M. Caillaux made a daily denial of the charges, and persons mentioned by M. Calmette as implicated also gave denials. "Pars looked on amused," said the correspondent. "In practice there is no libel law hero, the result being that such newspaper warfare in the end does little moro than provide entertainment."

A few days after this, M. Calmetfce went off on another tack. He said: "To-morrow we shall begin the publication of a series of well-documented notes which establish the fatal rolo played by M. Caillaux in the events that preceded the despatch of the German gunboat to Agadir. Our readers will realise, along with all the statesmen and diplomatists long since well informed on this question, that the German demonstration was the result of the accumulated mistakes of our present Minister of Finance. The mutilation of our colonics was consequently his direct and personal work. It is my hope that the teaching of history may save us from the stih graver consequences to which we aro exposed by M. Caillaux, who has returned to power at a still more troublous hour."