Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (26 page)

“I will buy it from you,” Eyraud told his new friend.

When Dr. Pardo agreed to the sale, Eyraud told him the robe was so gorgeous he wished he could photograph it. Would Dr. Pardo be so kind as to allow Eyraud to borrow it briefly to take a few photographs? Dr. Pardo, fully flimflammed, had no hesitation. And off Eyraud went with the robe, promising to return shortly with the cash. Dr. Pardo never saw the wealthy businessman, or his robe, again.

Around February 8, four days before Soudais and Houlier landed in New York, Eyraud vanished from the Hotel America. He had been seen reading a foreign newspaper; then he suddenly dropped it on the table and rushed to his room. He scooted out of the hotel, leaving
behind his own trunk and Garanger’s, along with an unpaid bill of $45. The last sighting of Eyraud in New York was at a whorehouse at 120 West Thirty-First Street where he had a liaison with a petite woman named Marcelle. She told detectives that the man talked movingly about his tiny mistress who was stolen from him.

“We have determined,” Soudais and Houlier informed Prefect Loze on February 20, “that we are not going to see him anymore in this area and that very probably he fled from New York.”

The agents followed a few leads pointing in several directions but the hope of finding Eyraud in the vast territory of North America was fast dwindling. In Montreal, they learned, Eyraud passed himself off as a silk merchant, met the editor of the newspaper
Le Monde de Montréal
, and presented him with a business card that read: “E. B. Vanaerd, Paris, Brussels.” Eyraud was eager to learn about business opportunities in the city and, more important, what the editor was hearing in the news from France. Soudais and Houlier shivered through the bitter Montreal weather, telling Prefect Loze in a March 4 dispatch:
“There is no less than two feet of ice on the streets. We have been obliged to do our research in sleds.” And then they happily set off for the warmer climate of California.

In San Francisco, they retraced the journey that Eyraud, Garanger, and Gabrielle had made into the wine country. But the trail in America had gone cold, so the detectives began making plans to return to Paris. While their sweep of North America had deepened the portrait of Eyraud, the French press painted the agents as bumbling fools. Eyraud, by contrast, came across as a savvy renegade always one step ahead of the law. The papers romanticized him, portraying the murderer as a folk hero. Here was a ruthless fugitive who easily outwitted the Sûreté. He was a seducer, a ladies’ man, a raconteur with too many paramours to count. One newspaper declared:
“Decidedly, Eyraud has turned into a legend.”

Smarting from the ridicule, Soudais and Houlier slunk back across America and sailed for France on March 22 aboard the five-hundred-foot steamer
La Champagne.
Inspector Jaume was sympathetic to the travails of the agents, knowing that the odds in the hunt favored Eyraud: The criminal watched the newspapers for the detectives’ movements and benefited from knowing the New York terrain far better than his French pursuers. Jaume was confident that the
agents’ work would help pave the way for Eyraud’s eventual capture.
“They learned many things about Eyraud but they did not see him,” he wrote in his diary. “There is nothing surprising about that: the game has the advantage over the hunters.”

Goron was less charitable. When Jaume briefed him on the failed mission, the Sûreté chief was annoyed that
“Houlier and Soudais had toured a bit more than half of the world and yet returned empty-handed.” But he saw one positive result: The hunt for Eyraud was now a cause for many people across the globe—and for some, an obsession. Goron was confident that all the publicity, particularly the photos of Eyraud in foreign newspapers, would prompt someone to step forward: “People were as passionate about the Gouffé case in New York, Canada, and Mexico as they were on rue Montmartre or boulevard des Italiens.” But the Sûreté couldn’t shake off the fiasco. When a French-language newspaper in the United States reported that Eyraud was probably still in New York in early March, a month later than the detectives had determined,
Le Gil Blas
asked:
“If these facts are true, why did inspectors Houlier and Soudais return in failure? These fine bloodhounds must have given American detectives a feeble opinion of the French police.”

If Eyraud were to turn up, many surmised it was to be on his own terms—killed by his own hand. Suicide seemed the only way the chase would end. Reports of his self-inflicted death poured in. In early April, a body with a bullet hole in the head was discovered on the banks of the Meuse in Maastricht, Holland. A wallet found in a pocket was stuffed with French newspaper clippings about the Gouffé case. In a coat pocket was a handkerchief embroidered with Eyraud’s initials: M.E. The dead man’s hat bore the same initials. Here apparently was the end of the case. News reports said the body had a striking resemblance to Eyraud. And the French press took the opportunity to slap the Sûreté yet again:
“Once more has luck put police on the trail that their finest bloodhounds were unable to discover.” Yet the excitement was unwarranted—the case did not end in Maastricht. The corpse, it turned out, belonged to someone other than Eyraud.

Later in the month a crowd formed outside the New York City morgue when rumors spread that a suicide fitting Eyraud’s description had been carted inside. But it too proved to be unrelated.

Suicide mania had taken hold. In the western Paris suburb of Suresnes a sailor came upon a bottle on the banks of the Seine that contained a purported final note from Eyraud. But again, hopes were dashed. Finally, on April 28,
Le Figaro
tried to halt the craze. It declared that it would now doubt any report until it was proved true: “Several times already Eyraud’s suicide has been announced and yet suicide is so little in the nature of Gouffé’s murderer.”

The publicity had some grisly consequences. In Copenhagen, a soap maker named Philipsen was arrested for the murder of a bank clerk by the name of Meyer who, like Gouffé, disappeared without a trace. Philipsen confessed to police that he had robbed and strangled Meyer and then stuffed the body in a crate that he shipped to America. The box sat in the New York port for two months. Who else but the Paris strangler could have inspired such a crime? Eyraud, commented one paper, was the school principal to students of murder seeking a method for disposing of a body:
“The simple expedient is to ship it quickly to a faraway address.”

For Gabrielle, Eyraud suddenly loomed large again. His picture in the papers revived the reality of the man—and terrified her. If he were found dead, then she could rest. But his possible capture was a source of intense anxiety. Even if he were brought back to Paris in chains, she still would not feel safe. She lived in terror of his finding a way to kill her. Even from a distance Eyraud haunted her.
“This man exerts such an influence on her,”
Le Figaro
explained, “that she seems to think she is in his presence even when she is protected by police.”

No one wanted Gabrielle to stand trial alone. But there was no choice: Eyraud had vanished, and the public was impatient for a resolution. Although Eyraud undoubtedly had a hand in the crime, if not the dominant role, the authorities began making plans to bring Gabrielle into court as the sole defendant in the murder of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé.

Judge Dopffer appointed a trio of doctors to assess her mental health. Leading the examination was Paul Brouardel, who was the top figure in the legal-medical world in France. If there was a celebrated crime, Brouardel was the expert called in; he was a preeminent voice in forensic science and the head of medical investigations at the Paris morgue, where he oversaw the newly created toxicology lab. He also occupied the chair of legal medicine at the University of Paris. For the examination of Gabrielle, he was joined by two leading French psychiatrists, Auguste Motet and Gilbert Ballet.

Mentally unstable criminals did not have a friend in Paul Brouardel. In an earlier case of a man who raped and dismembered a four-year-old boy, Brouardel, Motet, and another expert overlooked his obvious mental illness. As a historian wrote of the case,
“for these men he was nothing more than a degenerate. They were unwilling to see him consigned to an asylum and seemed little troubled by the probability of his execution.”

Steeped in such bias, the three doctors began their assessment of Gabrielle. They met with her several times a week, questioned her, hypnotized her, physically examined her, studied her testimony and her letters to Eyraud and to her lover in Lille, interviewed her family and acquaintances and the nuns at the convents where she had boarded in her youth.

Was Gabrielle mentally impaired and therefore not responsible for her actions at the time of the murder? To answer this question, the doctors searched for insanity in her family, discovering a paternal uncle given to bizarre behavior and a maternal uncle who, it was said, died crazy. As a baby Gabrielle had had convulsions. By age eight, she was in puberty; early menstruation, according to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, suggested degeneration and a tendency toward prostitution. And until age eighteen, Gabrielle was very fat. The doctors looked into her troubles at home, the tensions with her unsympathetic governess, Nathalie, who was her father’s mistress, and made note of Gabrielle’s unruly behavior, her loose tongue, her interest in men and fashionable clothing. The family physician, Dr. Sacreste, informed them that he had been asked by Gabrielle’s father, who claimed his daughter was deranged, to alter her behavior by hypnotism, an effort that failed.

Brouardel’s committee weighed Eyraud’s influence on Gabrielle’s behavior. She asserted that she followed him blindly, not because of affection but from sheer terror. She recounted one time when she tried to leave him but he found her on the boulevard after two days.
“He hit me,” she said, “and I had to return with him.” Another time, she said, he found her and beat her so badly she was sick for fifteen days. “I followed him like a dog follows his master,” she explained. “I would have let him kill me. When I think about it now I tremble.”

But the doctors did not believe she was quite as browbeaten as she suggested. She was, they said, given to exaggeration. They questioned her sincerity, particularly in how she depicted her own role in the planning and execution of the crime. Gabrielle told them she had no idea of the intended use of the sack she stitched. The trunk? She thought they bought it for clothing. The sash for her dressing gown? She said Eyraud demonstrated the slipknot he’d made in it and told her she had to put the sash over Gouffé’s head; Eyraud had said he only wanted to convince Gouffé to sign some bank notes—that was all. Not kill him. But with Eyraud hiding right behind the curtain, she was so terrified she could scarcely speak to Gouffé as he sat on the chaise longue.

The doctors made much of the fact that during their interviews Gabrielle demonstrated an utter indifference to the murder itself. When relating details she did so without the slightest sign that she was
personally engaged in what had occurred. She showed no remorse. She was merely a witness imparting information about a crime. She gave no indication that she was a direct participant or even an accomplice. The doctors had a ready explanation for Gabrielle’s apathy, and it had nothing to do with mental impairment. Quite the contrary: The young woman had a robust intelligence, but also a flawed character. In the eyes of the doctors, she was a born criminal of the lowest type: she had failed to develop a moral sense. She was egotistical and vain and demanded to take center stage. She was capable of doing ill with complete indifference. She personified an Italian proverb:
“Woman is rarely wicked, but when she is, she is worse than a man.”

Her physical exam revealed another feature of the born criminal: a large lower jaw. But she also had neutral characteristics, such as a symmetrical face; large, almond-shaped eyes; irises of gray-blue; white, well-spaced teeth; and small ears. The doctors described her hip and breast development as rudimentary and said, in a reference to her disguise when she and Eyraud fled France:
“One can easily understand how Gabrielle Bompard could have been taken as a young man of fifteen.” Her facial expression was intelligent, the doctors observed, adding,
“the bright look takes at times a hard fixity.”

To assess her susceptibility to hypnosis, the doctors tested her under Charcot’s guidelines for symptoms of hysteria. Hysterics, according to Charcot, suffered from a form of hyperesthesia, abnormal skin sensitivity on the neck, under the breasts, on the abdomen above the ovaries, inside the thighs, and on the arms. Using these tests, the doctors were able to affirm that Gabrielle was a hysteric. They further discovered that, like a typical hysteric, she was easily hypnotized. Even though she had not been in a trance for several months, she went quickly into a hypnotized state and like one of Charcot’s star performers experienced a profound hysterical attack in the investigators’ presence. Her arms and legs went stiff. She succumbed to hallucinations and tried to bat away tormenting visions that rushed in on her. Even these thick-skinned doctors, who had seen so much, acknowledged that her horrors were terrifying. After she calmed down—and was still in a trance—the doctors ordered her to perform specific actions when she awakened, testing her ability to carry out posthypnotic suggestions.
They didn’t reveal what those actions were but, they noted,
“these acts were exactly realized at the moment desired.”

Gabrielle indeed proved herself an extraordinary hypnotic subject. She was pliable and responsive, and she acted without any conscious thought. In a trance she lost her free will. In the hands of other investigators, these conclusions might have entered the dossier as support for the argument Gabrielle intended to put forward in court: that Eyraud was the author of the crime and she was his unconscious automaton. But, as adherents to the Charcot school, the doctors were quick to head off any claim that hypnotism played a role in the crime. Brouardel had written a preface to a book on hypnosis and the law by the Charcot disciple Georges Gilles de la Tourette, in which he said that hypnotic suggestion could induce action—but only within limits.
“If a hypnotized person is given agreeable or indifferent suggestions, he submits himself to them,” Brouardel wrote. “But if the suggestions challenge his personal beliefs or natural instincts he opposes them with an almost invincible resistance.” Such was the power of one’s moral convictions: Hypnosis could not turn a moral person into an immoral killer.