In fact when he read some of them in the interview which I took to the Ministry to show him before I had it telephoned to London, Monsieur Caillaux himself suggested their suppression. Madame Caillaux knew, she has said afterwards, that her husband’s anger and violence of temper were such that his threat was by no means a vague one. She has declared that it was this threat of Monsieur Caillaux’s which gave her the first idea of taking her husband’s place, and going to inflict personal chastisement on the editor of the _Figaro_. It is a truism that small occurrences often have results out of all proportion to their own importance. That morning Monsieur and Madame Caillaux made a very bad luncheon. Madame Caillaux, who has been under medical treatment for some time, ate nothing at all, and the bad luncheon threw her husband into another rage. He was so angry that they almost quarrelled, and Madame Caillaux, to pacify him, promised that she would dismiss the cook there and then, go to a registry office that afternoon, and secure another cook for the next day. Monsieur Caillaux went back to the Ministry of Finance immediately after luncheon, and his wife, who had an engagement for tea at the Hôtel Ritz in the afternoon, rang for her maid to put her into an afternoon dress. She says that she felt very ill while she was dressing, and very worried by her husband’s outburst with regard to the _Figaro_ campaign against him. She felt that she must do all she could, she has declared, to prevent the publication of certain letters which she believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was Monsieur Calmette’s intention to publish in the _Figaro_. At half-past two that afternoon, before going out, Madame Caillaux was, she has told the examining magistrate, taken ill in her room and obliged to lie down, and she described with great vividness a sort of vision which she declares passed like a picture on the cinematograph before her eyes. “I knew my husband to be a good swordsman, and a good pistol shot,” she said. “I saw him killing Monsieur Calmette, I saw his arrest, I saw him in the Assize Court standing in the dock. All the terrible consequences of the ghastly drama which I foresaw passed before my eyes, and little by little I made up my mind to take my husband’s place, and I decided to go and see Monsieur Calmette that same evening.”