Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (5 page)

One of Goron’s most trusted agents, the Sûreté’s chief inspector Pierre-Fortune Jaume, suspected that the case of the missing wealthy man was going to be a tricky one. In temperament and tactics, Jaume was more like Goron than any other agent of the Sûreté. Potbellied, with a thin mustache, he was known for his wicked sense of humor and the easy laugh of a stage actor. He was an undercover genius who relished disguises and had mastered a vast repertoire of facial expressions. With his sharp eyes and ruddy face, he was, like Goron, a blistering interrogator and, also like Goron, he never carried a weapon.

Jaume was concerned now because the chief had assigned the footwork in the investigation to an agent named Léon Soudais. As a brigadier, Soudais was one of the highest-ranking officers in the department but, in Jaume’s estimation, lacked the intuition needed to crack the case. While conscientious and obedient, Soudais was, in the inspector’s view,
“lacking in all psychological sense and initiative.” Jaume noted in his diary that Brigadier Soudais “seems to me as capable of disentangling this business as I am of singing in the Sistine Chapel.”

By the time French justice turned its attention to the Gouffé case, Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard were on their way to Lyon, seated in a railway carriage like father and daughter in an uneasy truce, their backbreaking trunk stowed in the luggage car. Whatever their complaints with each other, the pair appeared utterly commonplace; they gave no reason for fellow travelers to raise an eyebrow at them.

That was far different from the impression Gabrielle had given a year earlier when, running away from home, she rode the train from Lille to Paris. Decent young women simply didn’t travel alone; a girl on her own raised an immediate flurry of questions: Where was her family, or her husband, or her brother, or at least her governess? Why did no one care enough to escort her? A solitary girl, even in the finest of fashion, suggested a dark background: Gabrielle, alone in that railway car, attracted less a gaze of sympathy than of scorn.

She carried with her the scars of her youth, the boarding away from home, the convents, the bitter battles with her father and her governess. Her father, Pierre, was a small, robust man with a heavy black mustache and the affectation of a soldier, though he’d never served. His attention was lavished not on his daughter but on his flourishing metals business. Gabrielle’s sickly mother, Louise-Sidonie, had given birth to five children, only two of whom survived: Gabrielle, who was born on August 14, 1868, and her younger brother. At age five, Gabrielle was living with nuns away from the family home in Lille when she was summoned to her mother’s sickroom to watch her die. Very soon afterward, she was shipped off to her mother’s brother in Ypres, Belgium, about thirty miles north of Lille, where she remained for eight years. Her uncle, Émile Vanaerd, was a dental surgeon
who cared for his niece as though she were his own daughter and provided her with an excellent education; her letters demonstrated a keen command of French composition and a lively intellect.

Gabrielle came home in 1881, at age thirteen, and soon discovered the truth of her father’s sordid living arrangement with the family’s governess, Nathalie Bourgeois. Nathalie, taking advantage of Gabrielle’s absence, had installed herself in Pierre’s life and bed as his de facto wife. The family’s physician, Dr. Sacreste, later criticized the scandalous arrangement, lamenting its impact on the impressionable teenager:
“Her father gave her the example of the most immoral conduct and forced her to live in intimacy … with a concubine.” For his part, Pierre bowed to his lover’s wishes and, after Gabrielle’s shocking discovery, Nathalie insisted the girl be banished from the house. Within days the teenager was on her way to a convent in Fournes, ten miles southwest of Lille.

By age fourteen, Gabrielle was enormously fat and had a reputation as a
méchante
, a bad child. She acted out, cursed freely, and was regarded as a dangerous influence on the other girls. One day in the middle of religious class she declared that the vicar had fondled her, a charge that swiftly ended the incorrigible girl’s residence at Fournes after less than a year. Shipping her home, the convent warned Pierre that his daughter was in danger of a calamitous slide into degeneracy.

Pierre, who had no intention of keeping Gabrielle at home, sent her to board with a teacher in Lille, an arrangement that ended abruptly after one semester. Next she was deposited at a religious institution in Marq, and that, too, lasted just one semester.

As soon as she returned home from one failed boarding, her father began the search for her next destination in exile. But with each dismissal, it became harder to find an institution that would accept her; her prospects were frustrated by a stack of poor recommendations. Finally Pierre managed to get her into the Bon Pasteur convent in Arras, twenty-five miles from Lille, where she took up residence in late 1883. This was no average convent; it was a home for wayward girls and women—child-mothers and adulterers—a merciless environment, harsh and prisonlike, and Gabrielle languished there for three years. She mingled with other castoffs and learned the ways of fallen women and girl criminals. The head of the convent, Sister Marie Joseph Emphrasie, gave Gabrielle high marks for intelligence
and obedience, even if she was sometimes mean-spirited. Another administrator, Sister Marie de Saint-Gabriel, said Gabrielle, who was plump and round and stood just four feet eight inches tall—was a submissive, docile girl, although she had mood swings that whipped her from genial to vicious in a flash. Sister Marie noted, with extraordinary prescience, that the troubled young girl had
“a grand tendency to peculiar friendships.”

In 1886, at age eighteen, Gabrielle was sent home with a note from Sister Marie Joseph advising her father to keep a close eye on her. Pierre now owned two adjacent buildings in Lille behind an iron gate at 216–218, rue Nationale. The gate opened onto a courtyard littered with the commodities of his trade: scraps of iron, cylinders, wheels, pipes—not a soft, cradling environment for a fragile girl. The buildings bore signs indicating the residence and the business: one read
P. BOMPARD
, the other
METALS
.

Gabrielle had spent so much of her life elsewhere that she was a stranger in her own home. None of the institutions she had inhabited was terribly far away but her father never once came to visit. During her eight years with her uncle, her father contributed not so much as a sou to her education, even though during that time he had become a prosperous metals merchant and had established himself as a respectable member of the community; while ignoring his daughter’s needs, he donated to charity and bought memberships in prestigious institutions, such as the geographical society and the association for educational development.

At home, his concubine Nathalie made sure Gabrielle felt unwelcome. But the teenager fought back and asserted her independence. She lost weight, dressed provocatively, and took up with a Lille businessman named Jules who, embracing the current fad, had trained himself as an amateur hypnotist; in Gabrielle he had found an eager subject. Her father objected to her sassiness at home and her saucy displays in the street, complaining that she brought public shame upon him. Later he disingenuously told the press that it was trying for him to have a daughter like her—he had made so many sacrifices for her and paid so much for her education. He finished the interview by saying:
“If one knew when they came into the world that children would turn out this way, one would break their neck.”

The climax came when Nathalie warned Gabrielle that her father
wanted to incarcerate her again in a home for wayward women. Instead of accepting another round of misery, Gabrielle chose to escape. In August 1888, she was on her way to the train station, with Nathalie escorting her to ensure she didn’t change her mind at the last minute. Nathalie rode on the train with her as far as Arras, where she stuffed a handful of francs into Gabrielle’s hand and bid her farewell. While Nathalie got on the next train back to Lille, Gabrielle, at age twenty, was on her way to Paris alone.

All that was a distant, year-old memory now. Since then Gabrielle had been sucked into the brutal world of Michel Eyraud: his rages, his scams, his chameleon way of life. Now, having murdered a man, they had little to show for it: The cash windfall that Eyraud had counted on hadn’t materialized; he had nabbed only a hundred and fifty francs from Gouffé’s pocket—a gold piece worth a hundred francs and a fifty-franc banknote—and he’d snatched the sapphire-and-diamond ring from the dead man’s pinkie. The killing had left him more desperate than ever. He took on a new name, Émile Breuil, and posed as a businessman traveling by railway with his daughter. They arrived at the Lyon-Perrache train station late in the day on Saturday, July 27, 1889, around the time Louis-Marie Landry was informing police that his brother-in-law had disappeared.

At the Hôtel de Toulouse father and daughter were put in room number 6 on the upper floor, requiring considerable sweat from Eyraud and the hotel staff to get the trunk up the stairs. The next morning Eyraud rounded up a coachman, a busboy, and a housekeeper to bring the trunk back downstairs and hoist it onto the platform of a carriage he’d rented. The housekeeper, Jean Reyne, felt the contents shift inside; the sticky, wine-colored substance oozing from the bottom and staining his hands and smock, he assumed, was just paint. As father and daughter prepared for their journey, their tense relationship—he domineering, she aloof—was evident to everyone.

Eyraud climbed aboard, sat himself beside Gabrielle on a raised bench at the front, flicked the reins, and the horse set off at a leisurely pace. As soon as they were out of earshot, Gabrielle became frantic about the blood on the housekeeper’s apron. He saw! He knows! He’ll call the police. Eyraud shrugged it off.
“Bah!” he growled at her, ready with a lie if anyone asked. “It’s just an animal we caught in the woods.”

The carriage with the bickering couple rolled out of Lyon and traveled along a desolate road above the Rhône River. From time to time, the horse balked, refusing to move until Eyraud climbed down and beat it into submission. The dusty route ran from nearby Millery to Givors and on to Saint-Étienne and saw little traffic except for Gypsies ambling with their dogs. Along the river, the embankment was thick with brambles and the air was rich with the scents of woodland and wildflowers. Gabrielle, emerging from a sulky silence, chattered gaily, taking in the sounds of the chirping birds and the beauty of the woods.

The carriage climbed a knoll and the river dropped from sight. At the summit, Eyraud stopped the horse and went for a look down the steep embankment: a fine spot to dispose of a body. With nature humming all around him, he worked the trunk off the platform and shoved it toward the edge. Tilting it up at an angle, he opened the lid and shook out the bulky burlap sack. Gabrielle held on to his arm as he booted the sack over the edge. Together they watched it tumble down the bank and come to rest at the foot of an acacia bush.

Eyraud then stomped on the trunk and broke it apart with a hammer, tossing the pieces onto the carriage platform. He climbed back up and rode on several miles before jumping down again and flinging the scraps of wood over the side. Then, with the dead man’s fine silk hat still on his head, he got back onto the carriage, sat down next to his mistress, and guided the now-submissive horse—eager for the return journey—toward the Hôtel de Toulouse.

Of the myriad pleasures of the belle époque, sex was among the sweetest—and sometimes the deadliest. The detectives on the Gouffé case were soon obsessed by a primary question: What role might a woman have played in his disappearance? With admirable depth of feeling, the widower had mourned the loss of his wife; but eight years on he was back into the fullness of life, most avid in his amorous adventures. Gouffé was a man of his era, one who appreciated the sentiment of another voluptuary who said,
“Whoever has not undressed a woman [of the late 1800s] has missed one of the better refinements of love-making, from the first tiny pearl button of her rose-point cuffs, to the lacings of that inflexible bastion of honor, the corset.”

Even bourgeois married women, pious in public, were crafty lovers, capable of navigating a logistical nightmare for a dalliance known as a Four to Five, named for the time of day when it customarily took place. As a social historian eloquently explained,
“There was first the problem of giving the slip to her ever vigilant coachman, ordering him to wait outside some shop or tearoom while she escaped through a back door and scurried down a side street to her lover’s flat. Once arrived in this bower of bliss, there arose the further and serious problem of her clothes … taking them off and getting them back on again without the assistance of her personal maid.” And that was just the beginning. “After returning to her own house,” this observer said, “there was the risk of facing the same maid whose all-seeing eye might note a button unfastened or a hook caught in the wrong eyelet. There would follow the lady’s stammered explanation that she’d been for a fitting at the dressmaker’s and had had to take off her frock … which did not explain, as sometimes happened, why she had brought back her corset concealed in her muff.”

No one exemplified both the ecstasy and the agony of lovemaking more movingly than the famous writer Alphonse Daudet. At age twelve he lost his virginity during a weeklong sojourn in a brothel with a prostitute from Lorraine
“whose skin,” he told his friend the diarist Edmond de Goncourt, “was covered with freckles but was so soft to the touch that it had driven him mad.” Daudet exulted over the
“glorious frenzy” of sex “with a woman who is naked, a woman one rolls on top of and covers with kisses: copulation as practiced by artists, men of passion, men who really love women.”

A mysterious disappearance naturally gave rise to the question of sex, and the offices of the Sûreté soon became the crossroads of Gouffé’s paramours, who were all questioned intensively. Had a love affair turned sour and deadly? Was the bailiff lured to a rendezvous and attacked? Had Gouffé denied clemency to a seductress in debt and had she taken lethal revenge?