Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (7 page)

“A little shudder ran through my veins,” Goron recalled.

Taylor felt a pang of terror as well but not from the horror of an imminent beheading; rather he was afraid that he or the Sûreté might be dragged through the mud by the press for some unavoidable gaffe during the ceremony. Taylor lived in fear of the press and warned Goron to maintain the strictest discretion in public. He had good reason to do so.

The Paris press of the 1880s was an unruly mob, kicking a magistrate one day, hoisting a celebrity the next. The newspapers, having burst from the chains of government controls in 1881, were constantly testing the boundaries of their new powers. The
“freedom of the press law,” as it came to be known, threw out stamp duties, government deposits, arbitrary trials, and censorship. One observer described the new step as “a freedom law the likes of which the press has never seen in any time.”

From inside their offices along the
grands boulevards
, editors sought to create a splash with every new edition, heralding the birth of the modern sensational media; the antics of the French press in the late nineteenth century pointed toward the yellow journalism of the early twentieth century and the tabloid frenzy of our own time.

In Paris, cheap newspapers blanketed the city, giving rise to what
historians have called the city’s
“golden age of the press.” In 1881, twenty-three newspapers could be had for a sou, equivalent to about an American penny; by 1899, there were sixty.
Le Petit Journal
, with a circulation of one million in 1886, and other mass publications defined Parisian culture and the reality of everyday life for their readers. The newspapers were in frantic competition to outdo one another in scandal, murder, and pathos.

There was no richer feast for journalists than an execution. It had it all: vicious murderers, bloody beheadings, swarming crowds, and lots of secrecy leading up to the event. Reporters circled, and Taylor, standoffish in the best of circumstances, was more aloof than ever. His stiffness had won him few friends. On principle he kept information from the press, believing that no good came from newspaper coverage.
“This was well reciprocated,” Goron observed. “Journalists were not slow to drag out their vengeance, which was inclined to be absolute.” And Taylor was often aghast to find himself belittled in the papers, his successes ignored, his failures magnified.

When he finally left his post and was installed in another government department, the official ceremony was open to the public but not a single reporter showed up, indicating no love lost between him and the newspapers.
Le Temps
opined that the absence of reporters
“must have rejoiced the heart of M. Taylor who, one knows, has an antipathy toward the press.”

He was a nervous bureaucrat, out of place in the role of chief investigator of the Paris underworld. His approach was an object lesson for Goron, who, when he ran the Sûreté, sought to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes and therefore broke all of his rules.

Taylor and Goron’s appointment with the condemned wasn’t until 3:00 a.m., so to pass the long hours, the Sûreté chiefs joined several other execution regulars for a night of theater and dinner. Their entertainment was a three-act comedy by Alexandre Bisson called
La Famille Pont-Biquet
, a light diversion about the family travails of an investigating judge.
“I laughed with the professional insouciance that one slips into at certain moments,” Goron wrote in his memoir. But the night’s shadow weighed on him. The play, he noted, was “a preface to that bloody tragedy at which we were ordered to be representatives.”

Over dinner Goron listened as the men shared stories of previous
beheadings they’d attended. “I still have that memorable impression of us at the restaurant on the boulevard with our elbows on the table, smoking cigars, each man telling his own little macabre tale,” Goron wrote.

At nearly 3:00 a.m., the chiefs returned to the Sûreté and climbed into an elegant landau for the trip to the prison. The luxury under the grim circumstances disturbed Goron:
“The landau for a wedding party or a duel conducts the chief of the Sûreté to executions,” he explained. “The rest of the time he takes a hackney or a hansom carriage—so why does he need a landau for this ghastly ceremony?”

Along rue de la Roquette the crowd was pressed against the police barricades. The landau maneuvered its way through the crush and rolled into place de la Roquette where workmen in overalls were erecting the guillotine in dim lantern light. A cluster of journalists hovered nearby, watching.

Climbing down from the landau, Goron caught some of the chatter of the workmen and journalists—talking of their sleepiness, of tomorrow, of a million little things. Some were laughing. The scene darkened Goron’s mood.
“I had a pang in my heart for the banality of death,” he recalled in his memoirs.

A small, thickset man who had been meticulously checking the bolts on the guillotine stepped over to introduce himself. He was at least twenty years older than Goron and had soft eyes and a retiring manner. Louis Deibler had been the executioner in Brittany and had lived for many years in Goron’s hometown of Rennes before taking up his duties as the executioner in Paris. He looked nothing like the fire-breathing monster of darkness one imagines of an executioner but rather like the kindly tailor he was during the daylight hours.

Growing up in Rennes, Goron—as well as every other child—knew that the executioner lived in a small house on rue du Pré Perché, set off from the others in what seemed morbid isolation. Young Goron and his friends had to pass by the house every day on their way to school and if, by chance, they had to come home after dark, they took a detour.
“After nightfall,” Goron remembered, “the sinister house seemed to our childish imaginations full of ghosts holding their heads in their hands.”

Taylor and Goron and the other magistrates—a judge, a mayor, the police commissioner, the head of the prison—all in overcoats and
top hats, trooped to the cells of Rivière and Frey, two pimps who had strangled and robbed a woman in her home. The murderers were led in a procession through the giant iron door of La Roquette and into the courtyard where early birds chirped in the trees and the guillotine loomed, its tall red uprights bright in the pale dawn.

“I had not known an impression more terrible,” Goron recalled.

Now it was all business. Rivière went first: Deibler locked his neck in the lunette and, wasting no time, released the efficient blade. Next came Frey. As he was laid on the bascule he barked the slang of the streets, sneering at those responsible for his execution:
“Au revoir, tous les hommes!”
(Good-bye, all you tough guys!)

After it was over, Goron stopped at a snack stand in the Gare d’Orléans for a light breakfast, inaugurating what would become his post-execution ritual throughout his tenure at the Sûreté.

But he never got used to these bleak mornings. No matter how vile the condemned man was, he never accepted what he called
“this butchery without grandeur.” He rejected arguments that the guillotine was a deterrent to crime. “The truth is the guillotine does not scare those condemned to death,” he said. “The criminal always believes he will escape punishment. He is not preoccupied with it, he is not terrified of it, except when it feels very near.”

The guillotine did not protect society—it demonstrated a
“contempt for human life,” Goron believed. A beheading didn’t exact justice but merely satisfied the public’s bloodlust. “I confess,” he wrote, “that personally the death penalty disgusts me.”

On this night, two men died and Taylor was spared any public humiliation; the press found nothing in his actions to ridicule. Goron, meanwhile, was introduced to the darkest side of his job and to a boss who could not be more unlike him. When Goron took over from Taylor in late 1887, he immediately showed the press he was different from his predecessor. From his first day as the chief, Goron flattered and manipulated reporters.
“I understood quickly that, damaging or useful, it would be necessary to live in concert with the press,” he recalled. “The chief of the Sûreté had all to lose by not giving information to reporters. It was the nature of these times.”

Acutely aware that the newspapers could be friend or foe, he played to reporters with a savvy unknown among his contemporaries. He used all of his considerable showmanship to win them to his side.
What reporters wanted most was exclusive information—descriptions of blood-soaked murder weapons, wild behavior of suspects in custody, ghoulish details from autopsies—anything to titillate their readers. Goron, the keeper of criminal secrets, handed out scraps and reaped the rewards.

At the same time, he appreciated that journalists could help his investigations. They were amateur sleuths digging up clues Goron’s own agents might have overlooked.
“How many times have I arrived at a murder scene,” Goron recalled, “only to find reporters next to the cadaver with notebook in hand.”

He accepted that he was a partner with the newspapers in sensationalizing coverage.
“The press has a tremendous skill in whipping up the public spirit and enthralling the whole world in current events,” he explained. Public enthusiasm over a case was beneficial to any investigation. In Goron’s imagined perfect world, an engaged populace was always ready to deliver the case-breaking clue—something he sorely needed now in the Gouffé case.

In the first days of the investigation, Goron spoon-fed tidbits to the press in hopes of spurring the public’s help and keeping press criticism at bay as the probe ran into one dead end after another. But after ten days, when the chief still knew next to nothing about the whereabouts of Gouffé or his possible attackers, the press turned on him. His fraternizing with reporters, his generosity in supplying details, even his charm proved inadequate for hungry editors and a restive public.

On August 7, the Sûreté chief was forced to defend himself publicly, telling
Le Gil Blas
that he was confident of success in what was now a very strange case. Cutting the chief a little slack, the paper allowed: “However arduous this case may be, M. Goron does not despair of bringing it to a good end.”

Then came rumors of an imminent arrest. But the only arrest was of a con man who preyed upon Gouffé’s grieving daughters; he claimed to have been a friend of their father and said he had important information, convincing the girls to part with a thousand francs for it.

The slow progress turned the chief into an object of ridicule:
“M. Goron … marches through deception upon deception,”
Le Gil
Blas
said. Goron was at such a loss that he began to reinterview everyone in the case, desperate for an overlooked clue, a careless word—anything to put the investigation on track. But as he whirled vainly in all directions,
L’Écho de Paris
summed up the situation:
“Rien, rien.”
(Nothing, nothing.)

Barely two weeks into the investigation, an extraordinary gathering took place at the Hôtel Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris, in the shadow of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité. The event brought together nearly two hundred scientists, doctors, and experts for the First International Congress of Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism. The four-day conference, which opened on Thursday, August 8, 1889, held sessions on a range of issues from hypnotic hallucinations to hypnosis treatments for mental conditions.

Scholarship on hypnosis was at its peak. Books, magazines, and professional journals poured off the presses. In France there was the
Revue de l’hypnotisme
; in Germany, the
Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus.
Between 1885 and 1889, France led the world in publishing, turning out 37 percent of the 408 articles and books on hypnosis. Germany was home to less than half as many.

The most anticipated lecture of the congress would come on the final day when Jules Liégeois, a law professor at the University of Nancy, delivered his hotly contested theory of crime and hypnosis. That session would turn the amphitheater of highbrow academics into a schoolyard of squabbling children. Wisely, the organizers kept it for the close of the conference.

The site of the gathering, the Hôtel Dieu, had served as a refuge for the poor and the infirm ever since the church founded it in 651, five years before the first stone was laid on the Cathedral of Notre Dame next door. Despite the best intentions, for centuries the hospital was a chamber of horrors where patients in huge wards shared beds and breathed stagnant air, pungent with disease and death.

Although there were efforts to improve conditions—in the twelfth century King Philip Augustus donated straw from his stables to ease
the bed shortage—the Hôtel Dieu remained notorious throughout the Renaissance. In the late seventeenth century if you showed up ill on its doorstep you had nearly a 30 percent chance of dying, double the rate at the more modern La Charité Hospital.

Disease and overcrowding weren’t the only threats. A few days after Christmas in 1772 a fire broke out in one wing and raged for a week, killing scores. In the late eighteenth century, the philosopher Denis Diderot condemned the Hôtel Dieu, writing:
“Imagine … every kind of patient, sometimes packed three, four, five or six into a bed, the living alongside the dead and dying, the air polluted by this mass of sick bodies, passing the pestilential germs of their afflictions from one to the other, and the spectacle of suffering and agony on every hand. That is the Hôtel Dieu.”

By the time of the hypnotism conference a hundred years later no trace of the original Hôtel Dieu remained. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, demolished the building in 1865, along with many other structures during his massive remodeling of Paris. The design of the new hospital stressed the importance of ventilation. Gone were the stuffy rooms and the stagnant air, and corridors were open to the outdoors. Planted courtyards, offering a breath of fresh air, served as gathering spots for both doctors and patients.

The two opposing schools on hypnotism assembled in the hospital amphitheater; on the one side were the Nancy theorists represented most prominently by Liégeois and the group’s leader, Hippolyte Bernheim, and professing that the heart of hypnosis lay in suggestion, and on the other were the Paris academics, led in spirit by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was represented at the congress by Georges Gilles de la Tourette, his fiercest acolyte.