Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (14 page)

Lacassagne’s observation of the corpse’s right leg turned up another curious clue. The bone suggested that that leg had suffered from some kind of disease, causing stunted development in the lower part. Lacassagne looked closer: The knee had signs of some inflammation, as did the right heel bone. He surmised that the victim was afflicted in the heel during his youth, a condition that weakened the right leg. Indeed, the right, according to Lacassagne’s measurements, was much lighter than the left.

Did anyone know whether Gouffé had a leg problem?

Goron raced back to the telephone to launch his agents into action. He also sent out a flurry of telegrams in search of Gouffé’s medical history. He wanted to probe the recollections of Gouffé’s daughters, his shoemaker, and anyone who knew the bailiff when he was young. Soon he was fielding the replies. He learned that Gouffé had had a childhood accident: He fell over a pile of apples that for years left him with an ankle inflammation in the right leg. One of Gouffé’s doctors revealed that he had treated his patient for water on the right knee. Another confirmed that the patient’s right leg had weakened over the years—it was so weak that Gouffé limped slightly, though he disguised it well.

Lacassagne was so rigorous that the autopsy consumed three days. At last he turned his attention to the ghoulish head—minus its eyes and nose. He dug into the mouth and discovered the victim was missing a molar in the upper right side of the jaw, which sent Goron off to the phone again. The chief ordered Brigadier Soudais to track down Gouffé’s dentist, who corroborated the finding: Some years ago Gouffé’s upper right molar had been extracted.

Lacassagne lingered over the teeth, analyzing the buildup of tartar at the roots and the amount of wear in order to estimate the victim’s age. Bernard’s guess on the age ranged from thirty-five to forty-five. To Lacassagne, the teeth reflected those of a man of about fifty, which was a year older than Gouffé’s forty-nine.

Next Lacassagne went to work on the corpse’s black, greasy hair,
washing it several times, revealing what Goron had discovered: The hair was in fact not black but chestnut brown—just like Gouffé’s. But was this the corpse’s true hair color? If the victim had dyed his hair chestnut brown, then the match with Gouffé’s would be merely coincidence, not conclusive.

Lacassagne left nothing unexamined. He subjected the hair to chemical analysis, looking for copper, mercury, lead, bismuth, and silver—all elements found in dyes. None turned up, suggesting the true hair color was indeed chestnut brown. Next, under the microscope, he studied strands of the corpse’s hair next to strands taken from Gouffé’s brush: The thickness of the two samples was identical.

The professor had exhausted all avenues of exploration. He was now satisfied. Bit by bit he had teased out the human life that once animated the putrid remains. Lacassagne set down his instruments and proclaimed to the assembled spectators:
“Gentlemen, I herewith present you with Monsieur Gouffé.”

“Light is shed,” cried
Le Petit Journal
, “and this time it’s definitive.” At long last the body had surrendered its secret. Goron was triumphant, returning to Paris on November 15 aboard the express train from Lyon, in a shower of press accolades.
“We were given to see yesterday the face of a happy man,”
L’Écho de Paris
reported. “We speak of M. Goron, who arrived, face glowing in the company of principal inspector Jaume, no less radiant than his chief.” His reputation salvaged, Goron was now, in the words of
Le Figaro
,
“the very skilled chief of the Sûreté.”

Newspapers displayed photos of Gouffé’s gruesome remains next to images of the man himself in full life, and reporters held back nothing in their revolting descriptions of the autopsy. The reading public was appalled and delighted, swarming newsboys on the streets. The editions rapidly sold out.

Finally Goron had a body—and proof that Gouffé had been murdered. The bailiff’s brother-in-law, Louis-Marie Landry, acknowledged his mistake at the Lyon morgue, telling
L’Écho de Paris
he was resigned to Gouffé’s death:
“Yes, there cannot be any more doubt, it’s him.”

Now, four months after the man had disappeared, the murder case was only beginning. With no suspects in hand and no leads, Goron turned his single-minded obsession to the trunk. It was the only tangible evidence he had. It had moved through public places, it was at Gare de Lyon, on a train, in the streets of Lyon—it was notably large and had some distinguishing features, such as reinforcing metal bands. Someone somewhere had to have seen it, someone had to have noticed it—and the travelers who accompanied it.

Goron needed the public’s help. He needed to get the trunk in
front of a large number of people. But how? Soon he would introduce a sensational solution.

But first, the trunk had to be restored, as closely as it could be, to its original appearance. It needed to look as it did when it was brand new, before it was smashed to pieces and lay in the dirt on the riverbank, exposed to the elements for weeks. When Goron returned to Paris he brought the reconstructed trunk with him. He disapproved of the craftsmanship of the workmen in Lyon; their work was so slapdash no one would ever recognize the trunk. So he hired fine Paris craftsmen to take the trunk apart and reassemble it, this time with artistry.
“I assigned some workers—I even called upon some true artists—to do a reconstruction that would give the complete illusion that this could have been the parcel by all appearances that left the Lyon station on July 27,” Goron wrote in his memoir.

While the craftsmen worked, Goron turned his attention back to two curious figures in the case: Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard. There was little to connect them to the crime but that didn’t stop Goron from speculating. Newspaper stories with their photographs began appearing around the world.
L’Écho de Paris
reported:
“The police search with feverish activity for Eyraud and his mistress against whom charges seem to accumulate.”

Now back in favor, Goron had little trouble playing the press. He reminded reporters that Eyraud was born in Saint-Étienne, just forty miles from Lyon, and therefore was familiar with the area. And as
L’Écho de Paris
dutifully explained: “Whoever dumped the cadaver knew the countryside and carefully chose the site.” The newspapers portrayed the fugitives like heroes in a mystery novel. Gabrielle was
“a petite, attractive brunette, with large eyes of velvet in a rosy face,” said one paper. Another called her
“a ravishing brunette with large black eyes and a childlike face.” Eyraud, readers learned, had a full brown mustache and was between forty-five and forty-eight years old. Insights into their Paris relationship emerged. As one report revealed,
“Eyraud presented himself as very proud of his mistress and he never neglected an occasion to show her off to his friends.” Reporters traced Gabrielle to a hotel on rue Beauregard where she had lived under the name “Mme. Eyraud.” She also apparently spent time at the Hôtel
de Mulhouse on rue la Ville-Neuve, where she was known as Lucie Doria. In May, Eyraud was paying for an apartment for her in Levallois-Perret.

The couple was known to frequent a house on rue de Rome where small groups gathered for hypnosis sessions and Gabrielle was the star performer.
“She was adored there, the one who wanted to be put to sleep,”
Le Petit Journal
reported, adding she was “extra-responsive” to the commands of a hypnotist. But the society lady who held the salons discovered something about Gabrielle she did not like—and her participation ended. The paper didn’t specify what it was, referring only to “the spiciness of this young person.”

Speculation turned to the murder.
“How could Eyraud have attracted Gouffé into an ambush?” Inspector Jaume wondered in his diary. “One can well guess: he was helped by his mistress, Gabrielle Bompard, young, pretty, vicious—completely ideal for a philanderer like the bailiff of rue Montmartre.” The hypothesis making the rounds was that Eyraud strangled Gouffé—the autopsy had revealed that the bailiff’s larynx was broken—and the most tantalizing theory was that Gouffé was attacked while in the throes of his lovemaking with Gabrielle. But afterward, how did the killers carry the trunk, stuffed with the victim, weighing more than two hundred pounds? “Gabrielle Bompard could not have been much help to her lover in that regard,” Jaume reasoned. “Was there a third accomplice?”

While suspicion fell on Eyraud—partly for the lack of any other suspects—his faithful wife, Louise-Laure, still defended him vigorously, telling police she could not imagine he was involved in an act as vicious as this. She described him as a man who would do anything to ease another’s misery.
“He was so good, so charitable that it is impossible … [he] has become a criminal,” she said. “Of course he has made mistakes in his life. He might have compromised his honor, he has not always acted properly, but from there to become a murderer—I don’t want to, I can’t believe it.”

All the speculation, however, proved nothing. And as the trunk’s reconstruction dragged on, the public became restless.
L’Écho de Paris
complained that the success of the autopsy inspired hope that the Gouffé case would gain momentum but the opposite had occurred:
“The investigation advances slowly, very slowly, threatening to be eternal.”

When at last the craftsmen finished their work, they had reconstructed the trunk with reasonable fidelity, even covering the interior with the original white paper dotted with blue stars. But they could not overcome the ravages of nature. No one could have made the trunk look exactly as it did when it was new; the shattering of the wood and the long exposure to the elements were simply too much. So Goron had a second trunk built to the exact specifications of the original. Parisians would see the battered original in all its ghoulish glory and compare it to a brand-new replica.

Now Goron began preparing to exhibit the two trunks in dramatic fashion at one of the city’s most popular attractions: the Paris morgue. He needed frenzied participation of the masses to elicit clues, and he understood better than most that Parisians hungered for gruesome entertainment. Who hadn’t seen drunken spectators surge toward the guillotine at public executions? Sigmund Freud, who came to Paris in 1885 as a medical student, wrote home:
“Suffice it to say that the city and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny; the people seem to me of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are all possessed of a thousand demons.” Freud battled his own demons—massive anxiety and apprehension—applying
“a little cocaine,” he wrote in early 1886, “to untie my tongue” in the face of his mentor, the imposing Jean-Martin Charcot. He toured the city, catching glimpses of Parisians indulging their dark impulses. A daily stream of visitors strolled through the morgue’s exhibit room where unidentified children pulled from the Seine or unknown women murdered in back alleys were laid out for viewing—sometimes with touching scenic effects. One four-year-old girl discovered in a stairwell in 1886, with no apparent injuries except a bruise to her hand, sat in a dress on a red cloth-covered chair that accentuated the paleness of her skin, and attracted fifty thousand viewers. Police relied on the visitors to identify the anonymous dead. Do you know this child? Do you recognize the clothing on this brutalized woman?

The morgue’s spectators came from every social strata—workmen, grandes dames, tourists, all strolled by for a look.
“All day long a multitude of the curious, of the most diverse ages, elbow and jostle
one another from eight in the morning until nightfall in the public gallery,” wrote a contemporary medical inspector. Neighborhood merchants relied on the steady stream of gawkers. Children broke off their games in the street to dash inside on the arrival of the latest corpse. Commentators described the morgue as theater for the masses.
“It is nothing but a spectacle
à sensation
, permanent and free, where the playbill changes every day,” explained a journalist.

Freud’s perception of the French was informed by their love of such spectacle.
“I don’t think they know the meaning of shame or fear,” he wrote. “The women no less than the men crowd around nudities as much as they do round corpses in the Morgue or the ghastly posters in the streets announcing a new novel.” All of it fed into the Parisian lust for outrageous sensation. Just the previous month, the city had thrown the doors open on the raunchiest, loudest, most unpredictable dance hall anyone had ever seen. There were already plenty of decadent nightspots in Montmartre, such as Moulin de la Galette, where the working class whooped it up, and Élysée Montmartre, where a man calling himself Father Modesty tried to dissuade innocent youth from indulging in the temptations of the night, though his work was in vain. Or Reine Blanche, where an acrobatic cancan dancer one night suddenly walked on her hands, revealing no underclothing and prompting the policeman on duty to exclaim:
“Cré Dieu! Les belles cuisses! God! What beautiful thighs!” And so was born Nini-la-Belle-en-Cuisse—Nini of the Beautiful Thighs.

But of all these places none rivaled the Moulin Rouge, which opened on October 6, 1889. If one establishment reflected the Paris of the belle epoque it was this riotous dance hall, known for its slowly revolving red windmill in front and its daring freedom inside, a mood captured by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a radical young artist whose name would become forever synonymous with the outrageous nightclub. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted the pathos of the music-hall life: gay, high-kicking dancers and joyous patrons alongside dark, mournful souls. Inside the raucous hall he found the hopeful reveler and the sad-eyed drunk, the promise and the doom of Parisian society.

The new attraction was the brainchild of Joseph Oller, an enterprising Spanish businessman who created extravagant circuses, the first heated indoor swimming pool in Paris, an aquarium, and an
amusement park. The brilliance behind many of Oller’s projects was the handiwork of the man he now installed as the director of the Moulin Rouge, Charles Zidler, a tannery worker at age ten who eventually showed an inventive genius as an impresario; he discovered many stars, such as the mad dancer Jane Avril, the distinct warbler Yvette Guilbert, and Joseph Pujol, better known as Le Pétomane, who sang from his behind and told Zidler at his audition,
“I have an elastic anus that I can open and close at will … If you would be so kind, I will perform a remarkable musical program for you.”