The Caillaux Drama

Late on Monday afternoon, March 16, 1914, a rumour fired imaginations, like a train of gunpowder, all over Paris. In newspaper offices, in cafés, in clubs, people asked one another whether they had heard the news and whether the news were true. It seemed incredible. The wife of the Minister of Finance, said rumour, Madame Joseph Caillaux, one of the spoiled children of Paris society, had gone to the office of the Figaro, had waited there an hour or more for the managing editor, Monsieur Gaston Calmette, had been received by him, and had shot him dead in his own office. Nobody believed the story at first.