The divorce was pronounced on
March 9, 1911 by agreement between the two parties. Very soon after,
in November of the same year, Monsieur Caillaux was married in Paris
to the divorced wife of Monsieur Léo Claretie, who is now in prison
for the murder of Monsieur Gaston Calmette. As a curious sidelight on
the mixture of intimate home details and of politics in the Caillaux
drama it is worth while remembering here, that in her evidence to the
examining magistrate Madame Gueydan, Monsieur Caillaux’s first wife,
stated the reasons, as she understood them, for this change of mind
on the part of Monsieur Caillaux. She declared that in November 1909
Monsieur Caillaux, being a candidate for re-election in the Sarthe
District feared that her possession of the letters and her antagonism
to himself might make trouble for him during the electoral campaign.
In April 1910 the election was over and he was elected, he feared her
no longer, wanted to marry his present wife, and instituted divorce
proceedings in consequence in July, forcing her to allow herself to be
divorced by the sheer deadweight of his influence, which if exercised
against her would, she knew, have prohibited her from obtaining the
services of the best counsel and have reduced her to absolute penury.
In October 1911 when Monsieur Caillaux was Prime Minister, his _chef
de cabinet_, Monsieur Desclaux, told him one day that a journalist,
Monsieur Vervoort, who was on the _Gil Blas_, had been offered by
Madame Gueydan, his former wife, the right to publish certain letters.
The details which Monsieur Vervoort gave about these letters, referred
exactly, Monsieur Caillaux said, to the two letters which his former
wife had burned in his presence, and to a letter which appeared in
the _Figaro_ of March 13, 1914, in facsimile. This letter was written
by Monsieur Caillaux to his first wife, Madame Gueydan, before he
married her. Like the others it was a love letter with long passages
about politics in it. It was written thirteen years ago, but it
contained Monsieur Caillaux’s statement: “I have crushed the income-tax
while appearing to defend it.” (J’ai écrasé l’impôt sur le revenu en
ayant l’air de le défendre.) It is this letter portions of which the
_Figaro_ published in facsimile. It was written in Monsieur Caillaux’s
well-known handwriting, and he had signed it “Ton Jo”. The intimacy
of the “Ton” was of course in itself something of an outrage when it
appeared in a newspaper, for the letter was written to another man’s
wife.
[Illustration: _Miroir, Photo, Paris_
M. PRIVAT-DESCHANEL WHO WITNESSED THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LETTERS
BY MME. GUEYDAN-CAILLAUX]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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