It was easy for Anton to maintain a journalistic detachment. The conduct of the trial was lax, the reporting scandalous and the participants hard to like. It made him laugh, it made him angry, but, like Maxwell, he couldn’t take it seriously.

However, on the sixth day there was a change of atmosphere when the lawyers at last agreed which of the ‘intimate letters’ could be read out. The defence had argued that Le Figaro’s apparent intention to print these letters was what had placed Madame Caillaux in an impossible position; they thus had no choice but to agree that their contents must, to some extent, be revealed. The exchange came from a time when the correspondents were both married to other people, and much of Caillaux’s first lengthy letter was about the deception of his then wife and his reassurances to Henriette.

Having arrived two hours early, Anton had found a seat as near the witness stand as possible. Henriette Caillaux, wearing the same mauve blouse as on the first day, held on to the rail of the stand as her inner life was laid bare.

The lawyer’s voice was soft, apologetic for the intimacy it betrayed, but in the silence of the courtroom it was loud enough.

Madame Caillaux’s complexion, never healthy, grew paler as the lawyer’s voice went on. While the contents of letters were thus made public, Le Figaro became at liberty to print what it had previously only threatened to disclose. Was it the thought of millions reading it that made Henriette grip the wooden rail so hard, Anton wondered. Or was it the knowledge that everyone in the courtroom was picturing her in the act of lovemaking, wondering what noise she made, about the softness of her skin or what little preferences she had revealed to her bald lover.

Anton looked away from the poor woman’s face for a moment; when his eyes returned to her, it seemed that all the blood had gone from her cheeks.

The lawyer’s quiet voice resumed: ‘A thousand million kisses all over your adored little body …’ But he got no further, as Henriette Caillaux collapsed and fell to the floor.

‘What a piece of acting,’ said Maxwell. ‘They must have rehearsed it.’

‘I was sitting quite close,’ said Anton. ‘She couldn’t have faked the pallor of her skin.’

‘It was the perfect drama for the defence. It showed her as the feeble woman with no self-control – which has been their argument all along.’

‘It could be both. Genuine and helpful. It can’t be easy to know that everyone in court’s imagining you in bed with your husband. Or someone else’s husband, as he then was.’

‘Well, personally I tried not to think of old Caillaux poking her all round the moon. Can you imagine?’

They were in a bar on the rue des Écoles, having decided to venture into the Left Bank for a change.

Anton drank some beer. ‘Do you know what your government plans to do with Germans and Austrians on British soil when war breaks out?’ he said.