Nine-Lived Caillaux

Dense white fog settled around the chill towers and spires of Chartres, billowed over hoary ramparts, poured down into the valley. Approaching, speeding up the valley road into the fog, came a silent, richly glinting limousine, the car of M. Joseph Caillaux, famed "Statesman with Nine Lives."

As he lounged on cushions of matched snakeskin M. le Senateur Caillaux could not know that he was near to losing another of his "lives"--this time physically. Most of his previous "deaths" have been political: One, when he failed as Prime Minister (1911-13) to create a Franco-German commercial entente, and was denounced by Frenchmen as a traitor; Two, when scandals touching his private life were exposed by Editor Calmette of Le Figaro who was therefore shot dead by Mme. Caillaux; Three, when M. Caillaux was sentenced for High Treason (1920) because he was thought to have intrigued for a defeatist peace with Germany; and finally Four, when as Finance Minister, after an astounding comeback from prison to Power, he dismally failed to negotiate a satisfactory Franco-U. S. debt settlement (TIME, Nov. 9,1925).

Having died these four deaths urbanely --and being in fact still politically defunct last week--M. le Senateur Joseph Caillaux rode on through the blinding fog, trusting, as rich men will, to a harassed chauffeur who had been told to hurry.

Gripped as usual by the muscles of M. Caillaux's right eye was his monocle. He was reading. Suddenly out of the fog--a truck! Brakes screamed. The chauffeur did his best to swerve. But the long low cradling limousine crashed headon, crumpled, overturned. The monocle, gripped spasmodically at the moment of impact, shattered, terribly cutting M. Caillaux about the eye.

Other lacerations, savage, made the Senator all gory and unrecognizable as he crawled from the wrecked limousine. His nose was broken. Prudent, cool-headed and courageous, he insisted upon being rushed by train to Paris as soon as a provincial doctor had cleaned and bound his wounds. At home, in his sumptuous house Joseph Caillaux presently entrusted his bald head, lacerated face and body to the Professors Laurent and Revaux.

In their first bulletin the Professors confidently predicted complete recovery. Candid, they described dealing with the Senator's face in such thoroughgoing fashion that "it will be temporarily impossible for him to take food, except through a tube piercing the bandages."