Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (50 page)

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Completed in March 1889, the Eiffel Tower soared 1,000 feet into the air on the Champ de Mars, higher than any man-made structure in the world, and served as the centerpiece of that summer’s Paris International Exposition.

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Wealthy ladies’ man Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé slept with twenty women in July 1889 and disappeared late that month after a liaison.

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Marie-François Goron
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, the head of the Paris Sûreté, and his chief inspector, Pierre-Fortune Jaume, defied skeptics and clung to the belief that Gouffé’s body had turned up on a riverbank near Lyon, about 250 miles south of Paris.

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Gouffé was positively identified from his badly decomposed remains by means of groundbreaking forensic techniques.

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Twenty-one-year-old Gabrielle Bompard, the fabled “Little Demon,” and her middle-aged con man lover, Michel Eyraud, the murderers of Gouffé.

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After killing Gouffé at the apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray, Bompard and Eyraud stuffed his body into a trunk, carried it downstairs to a waiting carriage, and eventually dumped both trunk and body on the banks of the Rhône river.

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The
malle sanglante
, or bloody trunk, was painstakingly reassembled after being smashed to bits by Eyraud and was displayed before thousands of curious Parisians and tourists.

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The killers fled to New York, Vancouver, and then to San Francisco, making the acquaintance along the way of a wealthy Frenchman, Georges Garanger, who was smitten by Gabrielle. She returned to Paris with Garanger and turned herself in to the police.

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After his capture in Havana, Eyraud attempted suicide. Back in Paris, he posed for his mug shot and had his anthropomorphic measurements taken.

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With both Eyraud and Gabrielle once again in Paris to face justice, the press sensationalized the case to an eager public. Illustrations in
Le Petit Journal
depicted the murder, the dumping of the body, and Eyraud’s and Gabrielle’s return to the murder scene to reenact their crime for investigators.

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Gabrielle was tried in a courtroom packed with diplomats, dignitaries, famous artists, writers, and scientists, and she became so overwrought she had an hysterical attack that halted the proceedings while she was carried out for treatment.