Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (28 page)

Police fanned out into the neighborhoods, kept an eye on the ports and the rail station, and checked out boardinghouses and brothels. Guards were assigned to the Pucheus’ home.

Gautier was hauled in to the consulate and forced to remain there in case Eyraud was nabbed and denied his identity. But when Eyraud was still on the loose at midnight Gautier insisted on going home, and he was set free. He declined a police escort and set off alone. He’d gotten only as far as a nearby brothel before he was suddenly accosted by a frantic Eyraud; the fugitive had gone to the whorehouse in hopes of spending the night with a favorite of his, a dark-haired young woman from Toulouse named Margot. But she was otherwise engaged and Eyraud was wandering the streets in a distracted state. Later, when it was all over, Goron commented:
“Again, it was this satyr’s exaggerated passion for women that did him in.” Wearing a coarse, beat-up jacket and a straw hat, Eyraud tried to engage Gautier, who dodged him and sprinted away, and kept running until he found two city policemen, Hernández and Crusado. In his poor Spanish he tried to explain the situation but he was so distraught the police thought
they had a crazy man on their hands. Finally they realized he was a foreigner and obviously very worked up over something.

Only the police under Cuba’s civil governor had been notified of the hunt for Eyraud; these municipal officers had no idea the international fugitive was in their midst, but they recognized the seriousness of Gautier’s rantings and went with him to the French consulate. Hearing Gautier’s tale, the consul urged Hernández and Crusado to rush back to the area where Eyraud was seen. Back in their district the officers were joined by another policeman named Lecal and the threesome combed the streets. At 1:15 a.m., on Calle Villegas Amargura, they came upon a man loitering in the neighborhood of the brothel. When they approached him, the idler said,
“Buenas noches.”
The police noticed he fit the description of Eyraud and his Spanish was spoken with a French accent. Lecal said, “Who are you? Where are you going?” When the man replied “Gosski, Hotel Roma,” the officers grabbed him. Eyraud struggled and it took all three officers to subdue him and bind his wrists with rope. Since Gautier had gone home, the police brought the suspect before the Pucheus who, roused from sleep, looked upon the dirty, disheveled Eyraud and nodded: Yes, that was the silk merchant Gosski.

The suspect, who still needed to be positively identified as Eyraud, was taken away and locked up while the police hurried off in search of the trunks Gosski had carted away from the Hotel Roma. The hunt went on through the night until the trunks turned up at a cabaret near the train station. Inside were documents bearing the name Michel Eyraud and a wallet embossed in gold lettering that read
M. EYRAUD
.

At 5:30 a.m., the French consul general was informed of the arrest and set off immediately for the prison, where he was joined by Pérez-López and Dussaq. Opening the cell, the men were shocked to see the suspect lying on the floor in a puddle of blood mixed with shards of glass from his pince-nez. With his hands bound Eyraud had managed to smash his eyeglasses and slice himself with the pieces.

Roused from bed, the consulate’s doctor, Louis Montane, bandaged the suspect’s legs and left arm and pronounced him weakened from the loss of blood but in no mortal danger. While examining the prisoner, Montane discovered a healing gunshot wound on his right side, which the fugitive claimed he’d suffered in Mexico when
he was attacked by five Indians. Still strong enough to boast, Eyraud said he survived the ambush by killing three of the Indians. His identity seemed certain enough from the many photographs in circulation and from documents found in his trunk, but the consul wanted to hear it from the murderer’s own lips.

When asked, the bedraggled and bandaged prisoner admitted:
“Yes, monsieur, I am Eyraud, Michel.”

In Paris, banner headlines announced the news:
“Arrestation d’Eyraud.” But Parisians were leery: There had been too many false reports. Was this one for real?
L’Écho de Paris
addressed the skepticism.
“This time it’s not a lie,” the paper declared. “The murderer of the bailiff Gouffé is in fact arrested.”
Le Petit Journal
assured its readers:
“The news is very official this time.” The paper explained that the French consul general in Havana had sent a telegram to Paris on Wednesday, May 21, alerting officials that Eyraud was sighted in the country. That dispatch was followed by a second the next day announcing the capture. The newspapers printed whatever tidbits they collected: that Eyraud had tried to kill himself rather than face justice; that his trunk contained a pistol, a knife, and French newspapers about the Gouffé murder.

By the afternoon of May 24, Léon Soudais and another Sûreté detective, the Spanish-speaking Inspector Gaillarde, were aboard the steamer
La Bourgogne
headed for Havana to bring the fugitive home.

At first Gabrielle rejoiced.
“Ah good news,” she told Judge Dopffer. “Good news.” Now that he had the real killer in custody, she insisted that he no longer needed her; he could let her go. Did she truly believe her legal travails were over? Or was her plea merely theatrical? Or was it perhaps further proof of her detachment from reality? Following fast on her joy came a fit of panic, for Gabrielle now feared for her life. Deranged scenarios whipped through her head.
“Don’t leave me alone with him! Not for a minute!” she pleaded, obsessing on the nightmarish chance that guards would put the two of them together unattended. “He’ll kill me!”

Jaume believed Gabrielle had other reasons to fear Eyraud. For
weeks she had been the star of this sordid drama, the sole defendant shaping perceptions of the crime in her own way. Now that Eyraud had stepped onstage, the real danger to her was his portrayal of the murder. Wouldn’t he argue in person, as he had in his letters, that she was the chief architect of the killing? And even worse, perhaps, was that his entrance would steal attention from her.
“Another sentiment, obscure, unspoken, difficult to express, agitates her,” Jaume noted in his diary. “She thinks that Eyraud will take away her popularity, because it is very evident that he will, in his turn, benefit from the great spotlight.”

A reporter visited Eyraud’s wife and nineteen-year-old daughter at their apartment and found them very sad, their faces drawn, though he noted the younger woman was extremely pretty and genteel. Both women sobbed and admitted that they wished Eyraud had succeeded in killing himself. To his daughter he was a coward; he was lost to her forever.

In Havana, Eyraud was under a twenty-four-hour suicide watch in his empty cell: no cot, chair, stool—nothing but four walls. He lay on the stone floor in his filthy white pants and straw hat with one guard posted at his head, another at his feet, and a third watching from outside. His eyes were closed. Was he sleeping? The guards were on alert, the slumber may have been a ruse: No one wanted to be caught flat-footed if he tried to escape or kill himself again.

Soudais and Gaillarde docked at New York on June 3, putting up at the Hotel America, Eyraud’s last known residence in the United States, in hopes of taking possession of any belongings he’d left behind. But the hotel owner refused to surrender them without a New York court order. Unable to wait, the detectives set sail the next day aboard the steamer
Le Seneca
, arrived in Havana on June 9, and checked in to the murderer’s former lodgings, the Hotel Roma. They rested barely an hour, then headed to the French consulate where they handed over Eyraud’s arrest and extradition papers, setting in motion the legal formalities for his release.

But no sooner had the gears started turning than they ground to a halt: Under a French-Cuban treaty, France was prohibited from taking possession of its own prisoner on Cuban soil. So Eyraud had to be escorted onto a French steamer by Cuban police and officially
transferred to the Sûreté agents waiting on board. But there was no French steamer in port. So Eyraud’s departure would have to wait until June 16 when a French vessel, the
Lafayette
, already en route from Veracruz, Mexico, was expected to reach Havana.

Eyraud was kept in the dark about his extradition. His greatest fear was to return to France for a show trial, a pronouncement of guilt, and execution. When a newspaper reporter, visiting him in his cell, asked if he liked Havana, he replied:
“Yes. Two thousand miles away.” But he was annoyed by the prisoner in the next cell, a Jesus look-alike soon to be hanged for murder, who kept a rooster that crowed at all hours.

On June 16, at four in the morning, a Cuban entourage tramped along the prison corridor: Second Chief of Police Pérez-López, the prison superintendent, a battery of police officers, and soldiers armed with swords. Eyraud’s neighbor, the Jesus-like murderer, awoke with a start. Had the hangman come for him? But the procession passed his cell and he heard the next door clang open: They wanted the Frenchman. Eyraud was roused and told it was time for a court meeting, just a formality, something about arranging his extradition. But he was suspicious: It was too early for the courts. He refused to speak as they locked his wrists and ankles in iron chains, hustled him into a carriage, and rode in a caravan toward the wharf. His suspicions were right—he was sailing for France. Defeated, he accepted his departure with equanimity, breaking his silence.
“Farewell, Cuba,” he muttered, “I am content.” He was escorted across a plank onto the
Lafayette
and taken to a lower deck where the consul general along with Soudais and Gaillarde awaited the handoff, and in an instant it was over: Eyraud, still in irons, was in French custody. Exhausted and filthy, he buried his face in his hands and wept. Real tears? Or the first scene in a con man’s drama?
“The world thinks I am an assassin,” he cried. “I know I am not—and when I think of my little daughter, my heart breaks.” He asked the consul for news of his family and when the consul assured him his wife and daughter were well, he groaned:
“My greatest punishment is to be deprived of knowing about their lives.” The shame he had caused them—it was too painful for him.

Then his mood took an ugly turn and he snorted that the Cubans had deceived him into thinking he was going to see a judge today.
And taking a slap at Soudais, he boasted:
“The first time you were in America you would have caught me, but I read about your arrival in the
Herald
and fled to San Francisco.”

Eyraud’s lodging for the long journey home was a cage eight feet long and eight feet wide, a cell for mutineers, with Soudais and Gaillarde on a strict schedule of guard duty, each on a four-hour shift twice a day. Eight sailors on one-hour shifts were enlisted to cover for the agents the rest of the time. The regime allowed the detectives time to sleep and to dine with the other passengers as the steamer set a course for Santander, Spain, then Saint-Nazaire along the west coast of France.

Soudais and Gaillarde’s single-minded obsession was to get Eyraud back to Paris alive and healthy so he could stand trial. They were among the Sûreté’s finest, and they knew the nation was watching. Gaillarde was a small man in his fifties with a dark complexion, who in Paris headed a squad of forty detectives. He was older than the powerfully built Soudais. On the job he was deadly serious but off duty he was a vivacious bon vivant, full of merriment and jokes.

On the agents’ orders, no one was permitted to see Eyraud except a doctor and an enterprising
New York Herald
reporter who had arranged exclusive access for himself.
“This very wise and proper decision on the part of the detectives,” the reporter wrote, “was a great disappointment to all on board who had hoped to see Eyraud on exhibition like a wild beast without any Barnum to charge for admission.”

Down below, Eyraud was under constant suicide watch.
“He has nothing to live for,” the journalist explained, “and if he does not kill himself it will be due to the vigilance of the French detectives.” In the stifling heat the reporter offered Eyraud his hand fan, which passed Soudais’s safety inspection. But the prisoner could barely wave it in front of his face because of the chains on his wrists. Even still, after a couple of hours, Soudais had second thoughts and confiscated it.

On two occasions, early in the voyage, the electric lights in the lower deck suddenly blinked out and, each time, Soudais and Gaillarde leaped forward in the darkness to seize Eyraud. At mealtime, the prisoner had to eat without a knife or fork and when he asked for some wine it arrived in a tin cup, causing him to growl about the absence of a wineglass.

Although the famous prisoner was invisible to the passengers, his presence on board buzzed throughout the ship. Here right below deck was the brutal killer whose thick hands had been at Gouffé’s throat. The
Herald
reporter dubbed Eyraud
“the
Lafayette
’s bugaboo,” adding “the children on board have been told that if they were naughty Eyraud would strangle them.”

As the days wore on at sea, the
petit oiseau
(little bird), as Soudais and Gaillarde called their caged prisoner, swung through a range of moods. He lay for hours on the stone floor silent, with his eyes closed, then suddenly came alive and talked nonstop, usually to defend himself against the charge of murder. In one story he claimed Gouffé was already hanging in the makeshift noose when he arrived at the apartment on rue Tronson du Coudray. No, he proclaimed, he would never go to the guillotine! At other times, he was morose, resigned to his fate. When a barber came to shave him, he shooed him away, announcing that only the Monsieur de Paris—the executioner—would shave his neck hair. Three miseries awaited him:
“My trial, my sentence, then the guillotine.”

His daughter and wife were often on his lips. His girl—she was an exceptional artist and pianist, Eyraud boasted, then wept and rubbed his eyes with his manacled hands.
“Thank God, she can’t see her father now.” He cried out: How happy he and his wife were ten years ago. She had a carriage and servants, and they traveled in style to London. And in the next breath he was bragging about his many female conquests. How many mistresses he’d had in France, England, the United States, and Mexico. He revealed all the salacious details, then suddenly swerved in the other direction and dredged up a sweet memory of his wife, which launched him into another crying jag. His lurid tales revolted the
Herald
newsman. Eyraud, the reporter wrote,
“is utterly incapable of understanding a moral obligation and in this respect appears to be at once a brute and a fool, although intelligent enough in other matters.”