The customs of a Paris newspaper differ considerably from those of
newspapers in London. They are, if I may put it so, more social. In a
London newspaper office nearly all the business of the day with the
outside world is transacted by express letter, by telegram, or over the
telephone. The editor and his collaborators see fewer members of the
public in a week in the offices of a London newspaper than the editor
and collaborators of a Paris newspaper of the same importance see in an
afternoon. The difference in the hours of newspaper work in Paris and
in London, the difference in the characteristics of Frenchmen and of
Englishmen have a great deal to do with this difference in newspaper
methods. To begin with, the London newspaper goes to press much earlier
than does the newspaper in Paris, for Paris papers have fewer and later
trains to catch, and “copy” is therefore finished much later in Paris.
The principal London editors are invariably in their offices at latest
at noon every day, and prefer to see their visitors between the hours
of twelve and four o’clock. In Paris practically every newspaper editor
receives between five and seven in the evening, and it is very rare
to find heads of newspaper departments (the business side of course
excepted) in their offices before five P.M. In other words the
business of the day begins at about five o’clock in a Paris newspaper
office, when the business of the evening begins in London and the
business of the day is finished, and the real hard work of the night
staff hardly begins until ten. The hour at which Madame Caillaux called
therefore, to see Monsieur Calmette, was a perfectly normal one. She
was told that he would certainly come in before long, and was asked
for her name. She did not give it, said that she would wait, and was
shown into a waiting-room where curiously enough she sat down directly
beneath a large framed portrait of the King of Greece, who met his
death at the hands of a murderer not very long ago. Madame Caillaux
waited over an hour. We learned, afterwards, that in her muff, during
this long period of waiting, she carried the little revolver which she
had bought that day, and with which she was presently to shoot Monsieur
Calmette to death. She grew impatient at length, made inquiries of
one of the men in uniform whose duty it is to announce visitors, and
learned that Monsieur Calmette, who had just arrived, was now in his
office with his friend Monsieur Paul Bourget, the well-known novelist.
“If Madame will give me her card,” said the man. Madame Caillaux took a
card from her case, slipped it into an envelope which was on the table
by her side, and gave it to the man in uniform, who took it to Monsieur
Calmette’s office. Monsieur Calmette and Monsieur Bourget were on the
point of leaving the _Figaro_ office together for dinner. Monsieur
Calmette showed his friend the visiting card which had just been handed
to him. “Surely you will not see her?” Monsieur Bourget said. “Oh yes,”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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