Beyond Revanche, page 37
“He is the perfect whipping boy. He is able, but chooses at times to appear limited in his capacity to think for himself. He was active with Action française, and most likely he still is, and has powerful allies because of that. He has kept his secrets for five years and will not be broken now. His official records have been altered. And he is a beacon. With the war won, with victory on our side, he can be hailed as a hero. We all heard the judge. He will be declared a patriot by the right-wing parties. They have a champion. In five years’ time he will be forgotten…and so will Jaurès.”
“Why do we bother? Why do we spend our lives trying to bring criminals to justice when the system is corrupt?” Mathieu felt personally aggrieved; so too did Dubois.
“Because without us there would be anarchy. We have to make do in the knowledge that we do what we can…but we cannot always reach the real criminals.”
“Like the men who made the war?” Jacques’s question was unexpected but welcome.
“Like the men who made the war.” Bernard Roux swallowed his Cognac and set his glass on the table with sufficient emphasis to indicate that he wanted another. Jacques rose to oblige.
Mathieu and Dubois turned to the chief. One question hung heavily over the table. It had to be answered.
“Guy Simon,” Roux whispered. “You want to know why I said what I did about poor Guy.” Neither flinched.
“Yes, Sir, we do,” Dubois admitted.
He paused to seek comfort in a Gauloises and spoke in a quiet voice which confirmed the confidentiality of what he was about to impart.
“If I can take you back to the night Raoul Villain was arrested and brought to the precinct at Montmartre for a first interrogation. We were interrupted unceremoniously by the then Assistant Prefect Guichard who took him off our hands and bundled him into the back of a police wagon.”
They nodded.
“You will remember that Guichard took everything from the table with him, but Mathieu’s notes were on his lap and he kept them where they were. Guy was in the room, but had not been previously involved. Indeed I recall that he came in after we had begun. Next day Guichard knew all about it. Someone had informed on us. The assistant prefect wanted to have us disciplined for disobeying his instructions, but I had a friend at the prefecture at Ile de la Cite. A very high ranking friend who told me later that Guy Simon kept Guichard informed behind my back. Apparently they were both in the same branch of the masonic order. I didn’t pursue the connection. But I knew then whose side Guy was on.”
Jacques had started to put four glasses of fine Cognac on a tray at the café bar.
“But he kept the pistols, did he not? He could have handed them over.”
“True, and that worried me. It worries me still. Just how many pistols were there that night? Did we ever establish that as a fact?”
“No,” Mathieu conceded. “A world war got in the way and Guy never said goodbye.”
“Bastard.” Dubois gave the word real feeling. Then relented. “Poor bastard.”
Jacques unloaded the tray onto the table, but the fact that his colleagues had suddenly stopped their conversation was not lost on him. He stood to attention and raised his glass.
“A toast, I think. To Guy Simon … because, gentlemen, he died for the France he believed in.”
Simple words which cut across the pain they had unlocked. Clever Jacques. Intuitive genius. They rose as one and raised their swirling Cognacs. The amber nectar, darkened by its years encased in Limousin oak took on a lighter hue. Jacques looked ‘round, waiting for someone to give a lead but they yielded place to him, the youngest, the only man who had not served with Guy.
“To Guy Simon, remembered by his friends for the good he did.”
It wasn’t Shakespeare; he wasn’t Mark Antony, but the perfect simplicity of his sentiment moved them.
“Guy,” they toasted in unison.
Raoul’s Story
Day of Justice
I’m delighted with the first day of the trial. I gave a good account of myself. Of course I was nervous. All of those bearded faces watching my every move.
Have you ever wondered if everyone else in the room can read your mind and you’re the only person who can’t reciprocate? That everyone else knows what you’re thinking? That’s how it felt coming through the door into the chamber, dressed down like an apprentice accountant without two sous to rub together. Honestly, when I saw the suit they brought me, I was stunned. Henri Giraud explained that I mustn’t appear wealthy or supported in any way. They wanted me to act as though I was in fear and trembling. That wasn’t difficult. In fact at the start I was dumbstruck. Couldn’t remember any of the cues I had been taught, but the President of the Court came to the rescue. He was wonderful. He looked at me encouragingly and nodded his head as if to say “trust me I’m on your side. I know what I’m doing.”
And he did. Whenever I got tongue tied, he found the right phrase. At one point I stood like an elementary student under examination, hands clasped over my midriff, invited to explain how I felt on the night I blew Jaures’ head off. I couldn’t speak. My silence almost defeated me but the president stepped in.
“Let me rephrase that, did you act in a fit of patriotic anger?”
Perfect. I remembered my cue and replied, “That was exactly it, Monsieur, a blinding fit of patriotic anger.” He provided my motive for slaying Jaures on a plate. Salome would have relished the moment. Patriotic anger. Amazing. What a man. He found the very words I had forgotten to explain my motive to the jury.
Then I had to suffer the indignity of hearing what three doctors thought of my mental health. The nerve of them. Doctors Claude, Briand, and Dupre. If their names suggest three clowns from Pinder’s Circus, then nothing could’ve been more apt. I was described as…wait for it… “An incomplete human being…unbalanced and unfinished…”At which my trusty lawyers entered the fray. They jumped to their feet and shouted, “It was a crime of passion!”
Where had that come from? Brilliant, all the same.
“It was a noble passion…because what motivated him was a passion for his country…a passion for France. He did it for France.” Giraud swirled his black cape like an ancient Senator of Rome might wrap himself in his toga to emphasize his family’s importance.
Noble passion?
Magnificent.
I almost cheered myself.
One of the jury members clapped, as did a number of the lawyers and journalists.
“Noble in principle and disastrous in its consequences,” added the advocate general, pursuing the theme as if the thought had just come to him. I kid you not. The advocate general weighed in on my side. In two short phrases he captured the case of the defense and the summed up the prosecution’s line of attack. Incredibly, they did it without me. I knew at that moment it was all over for Jaures’ apologists.
I enjoyed the summing up, which they eventually began on the fifth day of the trial. At last Maîtres Giraud and Bourson earned their coin, whomsoever paid for it. I confess there was a heart-stopping moment when a letter was read out in court which I had no recollection of writing. I must have, or was it written by my lawyers? Anyway, according to that letter it appeared that I was the person who requested the postponement of the original trial whose date was set for December 1914. As I remember it, in December 1914, we had only just stopped the Germans at the gates of Paris. Apparently, I suggested that the trial should be postponed on the grounds that national unity, the sacred union between political parties and unions, had to be protected at all costs, and that my trial would have dredged up old wounds between the right and left which would then have damaged the unity of France. In other words, I sacrificed my own chances of liberty in order to maintain the unity of the French people…
Magnificent. I really wish I had written it.
I mean, does that sound like me? Well, yes and no. Yes, if I am to be acknowledged as an important figure and no if you think that I am an imbecile…a lesser being…not a whole man…. incomplete, the bastards.
The prosecution had the damned cheek to raise the question of Emile Cottin who had been very properly condemned to death for the attempted assassination of the prime minister. I laughed internally when Maitre Bourson dismissed the name Cottin and reminded the court that in 1914, Madame Caillaux was found not guilty of murdering the editor of Figaro. He reminded the jury that there were two major differences between Cottin and myself. The doctors agreed that he was fully cognizant of all that he planned to do. There was no doubt about his mental health, whereas I had been described as unbalanced, a victim to a noble passion. He, in contrast, was motivated by anarchy and Bolshevism. Fantastic stuff.
Bourson turned directly to the men of the jury and spoke from his well-rehearsed script. It was a tour de force.
“Gentlemen, we know that Raoul’s actions were legally wrong. But I appeal to you to find kindness in your hearts after all the years of death and destruction we have suffered together, to reach into your souls and find that precious word. Forgiveness. Pardon the boy. He has erred, but he did so for France.”
Where is that little woman with the handkerchiefs when you need her? But the final line was mine. We’d rehearsed it many times over. As soon as Maitre Bourson had finished he bowed to me and I stood, straight-faced, and completed the charade.
“I humbly ask pardon for what I did to Jaurès and his family and for the shame I have brought on my own father and brother. I will never be able to shed the guilt of the misery I have caused a widow and her fatherless daughter. I will carry this with me always.”
I don’t know how many times they warned me not to mention the son who was killed at the front last year. Unlucky, that.
And then the verdict. I was lead into an anteroom and joined by Maîtres Giraud and Bourson. By that time they had earned my utmost respect, and we had coffee together. I was rambling on about their dramatic performances but they were keen to insist that I should take nothing for granted in case something went wrong and we had to go to appeal. That took me aback. No one had mentioned appeal at any stage over the last five years. Within minutes, and I mean within barely ten minutes, for the coffee was still hot, there was a knock on the door and we were summoned back into the chamber. The President of the Counsel asked the foreman of the jury, twelve honest Parisian gentlemen, if they had come to a conclusion and I began to shake.
“Is Villain guilty of voluntary homicide on the person of Jean Jaurès? Was this homicide committed with premeditation?” To each question he answered, “No.” Loudly and proudly. The initial reaction from the Jaures camp was disbelief and their protests were slammed down by the judge. The court began to empty. I felt my legs give way and sat in the dock waiting; drawing breath. I waited for the hand of congratulation, the flow of praise to which I was surely due, the back-slapping and the shared euphoria of judicial victory, but no one rushed to shake my hand. The jury kept their eyes firmly rooted to the floor as they filed out. The chamber took on the mantle of guilt, as if a great wrong had been condoned by everyone in the court, but no one wanted to acknowledge it, be associated with it, or even see it.
I felt soiled. Used and abused by my co-conspirators. This was wrong. I ought to have been elated. Everyone associated with my struggle over the fifty-five month incarceration, ought to have headed to the Ritz for a champagne dinner. I should have been carried on their shoulders out of the Palais de Justice to fame and freedom. Maîtres Giraud and Bourson eventually realized that I had been left in splendid isolation and turned back to help me to my feet. No journalist waited for a comment; I felt … incomplete.
36
April 1919 – In Pursuit of Peace
Mathieu’s head was fit to burst. The world had surely spun off its axis. Cynicism had taken over a broken nation and twisted critical fact into ugly fiction. Artists had begun to experiment with nonsense such as irrational sculpture and painting. Nothing was real anymore. He was overwhelmed by emotional exhaustion, like the clergyman who discovers that there is no God. He was that man. The law enforcer who discovers that there is no law. The representative of justice who now knows there is no justice. He felt empty and useless.
Agnès was slowly recovering from the debilitating Spanish flu which almost took her life, but found herself in a much-changed world which expected women to retreat to subservient ways. She intended to return to nursing as soon as she was physically able. She had to be patient, but it was a lonely recovery because Mathieu seemed to hold himself responsible for every evil in the country. And that was dragging him down. He had been temporarily sidelined from responsibility for the prime minister’s security because of the trial, but hankered to return.
At no. 36, gloom pervaded the building. Raoul Villain’s verdict took the ridiculous to new levels of farce. Left-wing papers, the workers, unions, socialists, Republicans, and Democrats were outraged by the effrontery of the injustice to their former champion, Jean Jaurès. Few realized that it was also an effrontery to upholders of the law.
Chief Superintendent Roux anticipated the potential potholes in the road ahead.
“Before anyone else says it, I know that the consequences will reverberate around the nation and we will be expected to keep the city calm. I’ve been in touch with the prime minister’s office and he wants to stay well away from any association with the verdict. His advisors think they can ride this out by doing and saying nothing. The Tiger does not want his name associated with anyone in the courtroom.”
“It’s not going to go away.” Mathieu was convinced.
“I know, it’s the Caillaux affair all over again,” Roux agreed, “with no chance of an imminent war to make people forget. Everyone is consumed by it. If Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and President Wilson agreed to dance the can-can at the Moulin Rouge, no one would turn up except the right-wing press looking for an indiscreet photograph. It’s Villain they want to talk about.”
Jacques spluttered his coffee over his trousers. “The very thought. But you’re right, Chief. Trouble’s ahead and if it’s not a crime to blow Jaurès’ head clean off his shoulders then how safe are the world’s statesmen from all sorts of imbeciles who populate this city?”
“Precisely. We’ve alerted the embassies. I’ve asked that every incoming delegate and representative be advised of the likelihood of trouble on the streets.” Roux was both somber and worried.
“There are so many different agendas running around at the present moment that we can hardly keep up with them. We’re sitting on a powder keg in an arsenal and we don’t know the length of the fuse.”
Mathieu perked up and looked at them. “We’ve been here before, looking the wrong way when the real story is elsewhere. We may be missing something big. What else is going on?”
“Well, the so called peace talks, and some of the newspapers are beginning to ask if the war is really over. What if the Germans refuse to sign?” Dubois offered a worrying thought.
“Then they will probably starve to death, or Bolshevism takes over. I don’t think they will refuse to sign a treaty of sorts…but is that the issue?” Jacques was intrigued.
“No, it would have to be happening right in front of our eyes, but hidden by the Villain trial. If the people who pull the strings timed his court appearance to suit, this outrage will be covering something bigger.”
Jacques felt that his mentor was taking matters too far, was seeing conspiracy where none existed.
“You really believe that, Mathieu? That nameless people pull the strings? We would surely know, wouldn’t we? Nothing gets passed no.36.”
Whether Jacques believed that to be fact, Mathieu didn’t know, but his eyes rested on the man behind the table. Was he hiding behind his Gauloises?
“Chief, you know my suspicions, and you have your own. Have we been drawn to the Villain case like mosquitoes to a lamp? The outcome was fixed for sure and Paris is completely absorbed by what will happen next. Half the country is focused on the insult to Jaurès’ memory. Why now? Why not immediately the Armistice was signed? Why wait five months more?”
Roux scratched his ear, smoothed his moustache, and drew on his cigarette. “Answer your own question. What else is going on in public but forced off the front pages?”
Dubois, Jacques, and Mathieu had nothing to offer.
The chief superintendent was surprised. “What’s going on in the Assembly?”
“That stuff about the Comité des Forges? Those claims that they were working with the Germans?” Dubois asked.
“What!” Mathieu jumped to his feet. “How the hell did I miss that?” He was talking to himself, horrified that he had not picked this up. He had had Agnès, Clemenceau, and Villain on his mind. Little wonder it had passed him by. There was unfinished business there. Bitter, twisted business.
“Putain. They’ve covered one scandal by stirring another.”
Raoul’s Story
A Taste of Disappointment
I’m so disappointed I want to cry.
I feel used, like a brand new sponge specifically bought to clean the stains from a soiled nation which, job done, has been tossed aside, dirty, unwanted, of use to no one.
And I was promised so much.
When they drove me away from the Palais de Justice that evening, Maurice, Conrad, and Theo, I thought they had been sent to bring me to the inner core of the New France. Victorious France. France, where Alsace and Lorraine were once again reunited with the motherland. They were strangely tightlipped in the car.
“Keep your head down,” I was advised. “Keep your head down!” Conrad’s manner was aggressive. He almost pulled me to the floor of the car. That shook me. What was this? I had expected a Champagne reception.
