Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (3 page)

The opening went on as scheduled, and the exposition supplied spectacle on a grand scale. Fairgoers were awed by the largest enclosed building in the world, the iron-framed Gallery of Machines, which was possibly the noisiest too, with sixteen thousand machines clacking and clattering at once. In modern American terms, it was more than four football fields long and one football field wide. Among the many marvels inside was Thomas Edison’s phonograph. The device so fascinated the men of the French Academy that they recorded the
voices of their most gloried members so that years in the future, as a reporter put it, one would be able to hear
“the dead speak.”

The exposition was a contest of extremes. E. Mercier Champagne, which claimed to have the largest cellars in the Champagne region, displayed what was billed as the single largest cask in the world, a gargantuan oak barrel dwarfing the average man and containing enough wine for two hundred thousand bottles. On July 14, the centennial of Bastille Day, two thousand musicians performed a
concert gigantesque.
Another day, twelve hundred musicians played for an audience of twenty thousand in the Tuileries Garden; before the performance, thirty thousand pigeons were released into the air.

The most glorious achievement was Gustave Eiffel’s iron latticework tower, created specially for the exposition as an emblem of French science and industry. It shot a thousand feet into the sky, higher than any other man-made structure in the world—so high it afforded a new perspective.
“At a height of 350 feet,” said a visitor ascending to the top, “the earth is still a human spectacle—an ordinary scale of comparisons is still adequate. But at 1,000 feet, I felt completely beyond the normal condition of experience.”

Eiffel’s tower was a marvelous but unsettling lurch into the modern world, a symbol of progress but also an inescapable reminder that humankind was hurtling toward the unknown. A fairgoer standing high atop the tower couldn’t help but sense the loss of the Old World and shiver at what lay ahead.

Gouffé declined his companions’ invitation to the exposition. He kept silent about his planned rendezvous for the evening, a lark that had come his way only that afternoon in a flurry of fortuitous coincidence. After lunching at home on rue Rougemont, as was his custom, Gouffé was strolling along boulevard Poissonnière on his way to his office when he ran into Michel Eyraud, a recent boulevard acquaintance. Eyraud burst into a display of theatrical surprise over their chance meeting, then informed his friend of some news: He was finished with his young mistress Gabrielle Bompard. Gouffé had had his eye on Gabrielle and listened with interest as Eyraud explained that she was now a free woman. And by the way, Eyraud snickered suggestively, Gouffé must have realized, hadn’t he, that Gabrielle found him attractive? Then with a flourish of male bonhomie, Eyraud
offered his mistress to Gouffé, giving him her address: 3,
rue Tronson du Coudray.

Just the previous day, Gouffé had dined with the lovers at a boulevard brasserie, and Gabrielle had whispered in Eyraud’s absence that she was fed up with the brute, and she was leaving him. Now, to Gouffé’s delight, the breakup had come to pass.

Bidding his friend farewell, Gouffé continued on his way along boulevard Poissonnière and as he turned onto rue Montmartre, he was surprised a second time when Gabrielle herself appeared before him. He wasted no time.

“So is it true, what you confided to me?” Gouffé asked her.

“Who told you?”

“I just saw him,” Gouffé told her. “He even gave me your address.”

“Ah!” Gabrielle exclaimed. So the plot was proceeding exactly as planned. “Then come see me tonight,” she told her admirer, setting the date for eight o’clock. As Gouffé sauntered off she called after him: “Don’t forget: 3, rue Tronson du Coudray.”

On the pavement outside Café Véron, Gouffé and his dinner companions had said their adieus, and his friends had climbed into a cab to join the slow procession to the fairgrounds.
“Everyone is heading for the Exposition or is coming back or returning again to it,” the writer Guy de Maupassant grumbled. “In the streets, the carriages form an unbroken line like cars of a train without end.”

While mobs converged on the Champ de Mars, Gouffé found a cab and went his own way. Along the streets France was dressed up for a celebration. The national tricolor flag decorated lampposts and building windows, and centennial bunting draped the façades of department stores and hotels.

Gouffé’s destination was a one-block-long side street not far from the
grands boulevards
, named after a minor figure of the French Revolution. Tronson du Coudray was one of two lawyers given the impossible task in 1793 of defending the deposed French queen, Marie Antoinette. But no legal magic could avert the queen’s fate and she—along with her husband, King Louis XVI—lost her head to the guillotine. For his efforts Tronson du Coudray was hustled off to prison.

The apartment building at number 3 was an unremarkable three-story structure, its narrow windows overlooking the hushed street.
Gouffé rolled up at eight fifteen. No one saw him climb out of the carriage, no one saw him go toward the ground-floor apartment, no one saw the young woman in a dressing gown greet him at the door, so tiny was she that her head reached only as high as his chest. No one ever saw Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé alive again.

At the Gouffé home on rue Rougemont, the cook Matilde Pagnon was the first to notice something was amiss. Matilde had worked for Gouffé for seven years and was acquainted with his idiosyncrasies. On Friday evenings, she knew, he didn’t dine at home, preferring to take his meal with friends on the
grands boulevards
before setting off for one of his amorous liaisons.

That was all well and good by Matilde’s reckoning, for Gouffé kept up appearances and nearly always was back in his bed by morning so he could have breakfast with his two daughters, aged nineteen and twenty. A third daughter, age sixteen, was at school in a convent. Gouffé’s wife had died eight years earlier and Gouffé, with assistance from Matilde and a housekeeper-governess, Marie-Léontine Bullot, had brought the girls up on his own. If he needed a woman’s embrace now and then, Matilde wouldn’t begrudge him it, for he was punctual and proper and a doting father. Whenever he was delayed, he sent a telegram informing his girls and the household. But on this particular day, Saturday, July 27, 1889, no communication came.

When he failed to appear for breakfast, Matilde ventured into his bedroom only to find the bed undisturbed. Wishing to protect his daughters and preserve appearances, she devised a ruse: She threw the bed into disarray, opened the drapes, filled the basin with soapy water, and generally disrupted his belongings; then she informed the girls that their father had gone out early that morning on business. By lunchtime, however, her façade was crumbling and, unable to keep her worries to herself, she visited Gouffé’s brother-in-law around the corner on rue de Trévise. Louis-Marie Landry speculated that after his night out Gouffé had gone directly to his office and was perhaps snoozing there before starting work as usual on Saturday morning.

Hurrying to the office at 148, rue Montmartre, Landry found Gouffé’s clerks at their desks, awaiting the boss’s arrival. Nothing was amiss. Indeed, sitting in plain view in a box on a countertop was fourteen thousand francs that Gouffé apparently had neglected to lock away in the safe the previous night.

But the husband of the building’s concierge had some curious news for Landry. Claude Joly was standing in for his wife the previous night when at about nine o’clock a man in an overcoat and hat rang the bell and came up the stairs quickly two at a time, with a key chain jiggling in his hands. The man unlocked the office door and disappeared inside. Although Joly did not get a good look at him, he assumed the man was Gouffé, who sometimes worked at night. When the visitor came down a few minutes later, Joly offered him a bundle of mail and was surprised to see that the man was not Gouffé. Who are you? Joly asked, to which the visitor replied gruffly that he worked in the office. Then he vanished down the stairs and disappeared into the street.

Joly rarely assumed his wife’s duties—he was a bread deliveryman—and hardly ever saw the building’s tenants. So Landry assumed that the husband, who was a bit dim-witted, simply got it wrong: He just hadn’t recognized Gouffé. For his part, Gouffé may have been surprised to see Joly and simply didn’t want to engage with him.

Gouffé was a legal professional who performed a range of services. Often he collected outstanding debts on behalf of his clients as well as informing the clients’ overstretched customers that their bills were past due and they faced potential legal action. In some ways, he was a more respectable species of debt collector. He had amassed a small fortune from these activities and was a member of the lucrative professional class, but he often found himself dealing with unsavory characters. To handle the worst cases, he had a longtime associate who himself had a shady past and a well-practiced talent for intimidation. Rémy-François Launé was a habitué of the meaner boulevards whom Gouffé called upon from time to time to shake loose payments from his toughest delinquents.

When Gouffé’s brother-in-law tracked down Launé and informed him of Gouffé’s unexplained absence, Launé went into a stagey display of shock that was certainly curious—and more than a little suspicious.
He threw a hand over his heart, turned pale in disbelief, and cried out:
“You did not have to announce it in such a brutal manner! Heart patient that I am I could have just dropped dead.”

By eight o’clock that night, the missing man still had not materialized, so his brother-in-law, accompanied by Launé, brought his concerns to the police station serving the Bonne-Nouvelle neighborhood. Local police commissioner Michel-Émile Brissaud took statements from the two men and asked the usual questions: Was there anyone in the unsavory world of bill collection who posed a threat to Gouffé? A few names were put forward. Was there any reason Gouffé might have considered suicide? None, Landry insisted, saying his brother-in-law was well-off, his health was good, and he was happy with his life, and besides he would never cause such anguish to his daughters.

Brissaud learned from Landry that Gouffé had relationships with at least two demimondaines and that he was sometimes invited into the bedrooms of female clients desperate for leniency on their bills. Of all the collectors who might land on the doorstep, Gouffé was the one a woman most wanted to see. His gentle manner and willingness to hear them out endeared him to these women, and their gratitude for a small act of clemency knew no limits.

The shifty Launé volunteered that he was well-acquainted with Gouffé’s private life and often accompanied him on his jaunts of pleasure, prompting the police commissioner to declare that to find the missing man it was necessary to find the mistress. Yes! Launé agreed. Find the woman! His friend, he feared, had fallen victim to a treacherous tart. Everyone knew Gouffé was rich, Launé said, and that he was not averse to accepting a dangerous rendezvous.
“He was easy prey,” Launé warned, “and may have been taken hostage.”

Commissioner Brissaud worked the case through the weekend—he interviewed the concierge’s husband and inspected Gouffé’s office—then handed it off to the head of the Paris detectives, Sûreté chief Marie-François Goron.

On that same Saturday morning of July 27, 1889, the morning Gouffé had failed to appear for breakfast, Michel Eyraud rolled up to the apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray in a horse-drawn cab and hurried inside with the driver. Minutes later the two men carried out a large trunk and loaded it onto the carriage.

While they fussed over the trunk, Gabrielle Bompard appeared at the top of the steps, dressed for travel but looking tired and angry. She came down into the street, climbed into the carriage, and took her seat beside Eyraud. The driver flicked the reins and they rolled off amid a clattering of hooves.

Gabrielle was exhausted, having spent a sleepless night alone with a corpse, and she was furious at Eyraud for having deserted her. She nearly went mad in the darkness, knowing the dead man was there inside the trunk, tied up with rope and stuffed into the burlap sack she’d sewn. Though the cadaver was out of sight, the man was still alive in her mind. During the long night, she’d fallen prey to a ghoulish fantasy. She imagined herself getting dressed and going down to the boulevard and picking up a rube from the provinces. She’d bring him back to the apartment and just as she was about to sleep with him, she’d say,
“Would you like to see a dead man?” And she’d throw open the trunk. While the poor guy screamed, or fainted, she’d run out of the apartment and lock him inside. Her fantasy took her out into the street again where she would find a policeman. “Monsieur,” she would say, “please go see what has happened at 3, Tronson du Coudray. A crime has been committed.” Her mind weak, she had laughed to herself imagining the look on the rube’s face when the police arrived.

Inside the cab Eyraud, suddenly agitated, exclaimed that he had
the wrong hat. Having rushed out of the apartment, he’d left his own hat behind and the one he now stared at in his hands belonged to Gouffé—it was a rich man’s hat of shiny silk, and well-brushed. As fashionable as it was, Eyraud wanted his own hat. Feeling lost without it, he ordered the cabdriver to turn the carriage around. Gabrielle snarled that if they went back to the apartment they were sure to miss their train, and then what? Didn’t they have to get out of Paris—now? Unhappily Eyraud gave in to reason, and the couple carried on toward Gare de Lyon.

It was one year, almost to the day, since Gabrielle had first encountered Eyraud. In late July 1888 she was a twenty-year-old runaway from Lille, a bourgeois girl, already broke after just three days in Paris, when she went to his office at the trading company Fribourg & Cie hoping for a job. In a fine black dress and veil, she poked her head around his door, which bore a brass plaque reading
DIRECTEUR
; and when he invited her to sit down next to him at his big wood desk, she’d had a bad premonition.