One of the great difficulties in the task of the examining magistrate in securing really relevant and really useful evidence in a crime of this kind, is the French insistence on the need of and the right to professional secrecy. As I have pointed out in another chapter, while professional secrecy is in some cases a necessity, it is often distinctly antagonistic to the search for the truth. It is not unlikely that there might never have been any Caillaux drama at all if professional secrecy had not been invoked on another occasion. During Monsieur Boucard’s examination he was informed by two members of Parliament that each of them had been told that Monsieur Calmette had been in possession of the letters, the publication of which Madame Caillaux feared so much. The examining magistrate very naturally wanted to know who had supplied this information, and very naturally wanted to question the informant. One of the two honourable deputies had given his word of honour as a lawyer, the other had given his word of honour pure and simple not to disclose the source of his information, with the result that their evidence is no evidence at all, and that on the other hand even if it be valueless the public and everybody interested has been led to believe that there may be a good deal in it. But what impresses the impartial observer more than anything else in connexion with the preliminaries for a criminal trial in France is their unfairness—the unfairness of the system—to the person who is to be tried. For instance, after Monsieur Calmette’s death, the report of the autopsy made by the two medical officers of health usually charged with this duty, Doctor Socquet and Doctor Charles Paul, was handed by them to the examining magistrate and was, immediately afterwards, published _in extenso_ in the public press. The examining magistrate had also received the evidence of the armourer, Monsieur Gastinne-Renette, and his employees on Madame Caillaux’s visit to the shooting gallery, and her trial of the revolver she bought there. An enterprising newspaper secured a figure from the shooting gallery, marked it with the trial shots as Madame Caillaux had shot them, and published this picture opposite another one representing Monsieur Calmette, which was marked with the wounds inflicted according to the autopsy. Does it not seem an unheard of and unallowable crime against common sense and common decency that the public should be offered such evidence of premeditation by a newspaper while the case is still unheard?