Authors: Steven Levingston
The Sûreté chief could do nothing but watch while provincial rogues turned their backs on justice. Having begun as a trifling weekend
disappearance of a rich man, the Gouffé case had swelled into one of the greatest frustrations of Goron’s career.
The chief had only one suspect, Gouffé’s business associate Rémy-François Launé, but Launé had repeatedly dodged his clutches like a pickpocket on a crowded boulevard. The robust Launé had become a familiar face at the Sûreté offices and always had a smooth answer for every question and never said more than was necessary.
Launé was forty-two, the son of a distiller who had disappeared after driving the business into bankruptcy. As a young man he’d emulated his father, falling afoul of the law at age fifteen and spending three years in jail. A cunning businessman, he briefly changed the spelling of his name to Launay, a move possibly intended to disguise his illicit activities. A short time before Gouffé disappeared he had been hauled into court for charging illegal high interest rates on loans he provided and, again thanks to his silver tongue, had managed to escape jail. Gouffé had recognized Launé’s craftiness and put him to work on one of the more unpleasant tasks of his business: shaking loose delinquent debt payments. Their business relationship dated back to 1871 and was understandably rife with tensions. Launé collected thousands of francs on behalf of Gouffé but often was slow to part with the money. On July 25, 1889, the night before Gouffé vanished, the two men were overheard on the terrace of Café Véron arguing over eighty thousand francs in Launé’s possession, which belonged to Gouffé. The men were drinking absinthe when Gouffé insisted loudly—and he rarely raised his voice:
“I do not like money to lie idle. I wait for you to reimburse me.”
Other circumstantial evidence pointed to Launé. Goron’s detectives had questioned a woman who claimed she walked into Gouffé’s office just as Launé threatened to kill the bailiff. And he had good reason for wanting Gouffé out of the way. He owed his first interest payments on loans he’d taken from Gouffé for construction of a building in Sèvres, about eight miles from the center of Paris. The payments were due at the end of July but Launé was short of cash—so much so that a few days before Gouffé disappeared he had to halt construction on the project. But the stoppage didn’t last long. Soon after Gouffé disappeared, Launé somehow had come up with the funds to resume construction.
Inspector Jaume wondered if Launé had a large sum of money
he’d collected for Gouffé but hadn’t yet handed over. Suspiciously, a ledger containing notes on the amounts in Launé’s possession was stolen on the night of July 26—the night of Gouffé’s disappearance, the same night a mysterious man entered his office. More curious still, Launé showed up at Gouffé’s office the following day and engaged in a bizarre conversation with the concierge. He apparently was aware of the mysterious visitor and the disappearance of the ledger; indeed, it was tempting to surmise that Launé was acquainted with the thief and that he wanted to ensure that his identity remained unknown.
“You are incapable of recognizing him?” Launé asked the concierge several times, anxiously pressing the point, and only relented when the concierge insisted he’d barely had a look at the man and had no idea who he was. “With this,” one report said, Launé “left like a man reassured.”
As this cloud of suspicion settled over Launé, detectives reinterpreted his dramatic reaction on first learning of Gouffé’s disappearance. The exclamation of surprise and the clapping of his hand over his heart were now seen as a flagrant display of poor acting intended to disguise his own role in the crime. But what was that role? Did Launé have a hand in the deed, or was he just a conspirator? Inspector Jaume suspected Launé had an ulterior motive for wanting Gouffé killed. To get to the bottom of the matter, Jaume invited the shifty suspect to lunch and chatted idly until the dessert arrived. Then he brought up the Gouffé case.
“It is well-proven,” the inspector said, sipping his coffee, “that you didn’t take part in this crime. But,” he added with a laugh, “you could have profited from it.” Jaume suggested that Launé had cash belonging to the bailiff still in his possession. “That would have put some butter in your spinach!”
At that, Launé smiled slyly but didn’t say a word.
If he played a role, Launé had made sure to cover his tracks. From morning to night on the day of July 26 he had made a point of being seen all around Sèvres, as one account put it,
“going from one person to the next as if to say hello to the whole town.” He even joined in a meeting of the local gymnastics society from eight to ten that evening, during which everyone could have vouched for his attendance. His appearance at the meeting ruled out any possibility that he was
on the boulevards in Paris to meet Gouffé after his dinner at Café Véron.
Still, Goron kept the pressure on him, summoning him repeatedly for interrogations at Sûreté headquarters. As one session was nearing its end, Launé suddenly tossed out a tantalizing lead.
“There is a man who disappeared at the same time as Gouffé,” he began. But after dropping this bombshell, Launé immediately backpedaled. He was not pointing toward a suspect; no, he was only indicating a certain coincidence. “This has nothing to do with the disappearance of Gouffé,” he explained. “But since the case is so complicated I just give you the idea.”
So why mention it at all? What was his motive? Was he hoping it would get detectives off his own back? Goron came down hard, demanding to know who this person was. And then for the first time the chief heard a name that would trouble his days for months to come: Michel Eyraud.
Inspector Jaume was leery of this new lead. Considering the source, he gave it little credence. The last thing the Sûreté needed was another dead end.
“Could it be one of the useless rumors that we’ve heard enough of?” he jotted in his diary.
But the following day brought a change of heart. “Hold on! Hold on!” Jaume cautioned himself. “The story of the person named Eyraud … starts to seriously intrigue me.” Eyraud, Jaume had learned, was a cash-strapped businessman who had met Gouffé for drinks at Café Gutenberg the night before both men disappeared. Launé, who was present, told the detectives that as Gouffé sat down he warned Eyraud, “I don’t know if I should drink with you since you’ve gone bankrupt.” Eyraud had a ready answer. He glibly accepted no responsibility for his financial straits and, if his conditions were a bit tight, that was because his company had fallen on hard times. “It’s not me who went bankrupt! It was my boss.” A convenient lie, for the truth was, his former employer Fribourg & Cie had chased off the embezzler Eyraud, and the firm’s finances were sound.
Gradually Eyraud began to occupy the detectives’ minds. For one thing, he fit the description of the man in the overcoat who slipped in and out of Gouffé’s office on the night of July 26. On that same night, investigators learned, he stumbled home at 1:00 a.m. and then hurried away again at 7:00 a.m. His wife, Louise-Laure, admitted that her husband had numerous affairs, and he often disappeared for long periods after which he returned in a fugue state unclear about where he had been and what he had done.
Eyraud’s latest mistress, according to his friend Launé, was a twenty-one-year-old named Gabrielle Bompard. The forty-five-year-old Eyraud and his girlfriend were habitués of the boulevard cafés and
brasseries, and were well-known to the maître d’s; but when questioned, none had seen them for weeks. Launé divulged other curious facts. The night before Eyraud disappeared, he used English currency to pay his restaurant bill, raising questions about whether he had been to England recently and why, and suggesting where he might be found now. Launé described a business partnership he and Eyraud had formed in Sèvres in the mid-1880s. In his telling, the two men were wine merchants, although police later discovered that they in fact had created an elaborate scheme to defraud wine distributors.
At the outset of each scam, Launé presented himself to a distributor as an independent businessman who had relationships with many reputable wine buyers. Then Eyraud visited the same distributor under a fake name and posed as one of Launé’s buyers. The distributor would then contact Launé, who would sing Eyraud’s praises, assuring the distributor of Eyraud’s golden reputation and rock-solid credit, and advise the distributor to sell his wine to him. He then recommended an excellent winery where the distributor could purchase his wine to sell to Eyraud; this winery, called Joltrois and Eyraud, happened to be a front set up by the two con artists.
After the distributor bought the wine from Joltrois and Eyraud, he would ship it to the Bercy train station to be picked up by Eyraud under his assumed name. But Eyraud would never show up, and the wine would sit at the station until the distraught distributor called Launé for help. Feigning surprise, Launé would generously offer to buy the lot at a steeply reduced price. The difference between what he offered to pay for the wine and the much higher amount the distributor originally paid left Eyraud and Launé with a handsome profit. What’s more, they got the wine back, which they could now sell again to another dupe. Clever and wicked, the scam was unsustainable and by 1887 had run its course.
And now, two years later, Launé was at the Sûreté headquarters dragging his former partner into the Gouffé case. But while casting suspicion on Eyraud in one breath, Launé tried to protect him in the next.
“You can’t accuse him of anything,” he told Goron. “He’s an honest man. I know him.”
The police pieced together a portrait of Eyraud as a middle-aged man clinging to pretenses. He wore a toupee to hide his baldness, favored cameo cuff links and high silk hats, and thought of himself
as a Don Juan. But just as police became intrigued by him, the leads dried up: The newest suspect was nowhere to be found in Paris.
“One sees that it’s not necessary to put great hope in this new trail,” one newspaper commented. “The double and simultaneous disappearance of the bailiff and his friend the trader could be nothing more than a simple coincidence.”
Eyraud’s wife stepped forward in his defense. Although she’d had no word from him, Louise-Laure insisted on his innocence. His disappearance, she told the newspapers, was easily explained: He had gone to Rio de Janeiro on business.
The newspapers beat up on Chief Goron—his handling of the case was in a shambles. His obsession with the Millery corpse was indefensible, and the papers demanded he give up on the hunch. Agreeing to an interview with
L’Éclair
, Goron said what the public wanted to hear.
“I tell you frankly,” he insisted, “that I never thought that the cadaver was that of Gouffé.” But, he added, if there was the slightest chance the corpse might have played a role in the bailiff’s case, he had to pursue it; he sent Soudais and Landry to Lyon to demonstrate that he was neglecting nothing in his investigation. Privately, however, he still clung to his hunch, and his trusted sidekick, Inspector Jaume, stood staunchly by his side. From the outset, just like Goron, Jaume never doubted the importance of the corpse in the Lyon morgue.
“In learning of the discovery of the cadaver of Millery, I did not hesitate one second,” Jaume wrote in his memoir. “I said to myself: ‘That’s Gouffé’s cadaver there! I bet the universe against a bunch of carrots.’ ”
The reporter from
L’Éclair
challenged Goron on the search for Eyraud. If he had been a potential suspect, why hadn’t the Sûreté chief known about him sooner? Goron grew testy.
“What do you want?” he said, then added in an obvious slur on Launé: “In this case, one must confess that Gouffé’s acquaintances have not been very valuable in our assistance.” Careful not to alienate the press, Goron claimed he wasn’t displeased by any of the criticism in the newspapers. In fact, he insisted, the press attention only drove him and his men to work harder.
“The more the newspapers occupy themselves with this case, the more information will come to us,” he said. Indeed, he had received two hundred letters from the public thanks to press
coverage. “There are some idiots among them,” he pointed out, “but some of the letters are full of very useful observations.”
With little reason for optimism, other than his unwillingness to accept defeat, Goron finished on a note of bravado: “I have the strong hope that I will straighten out this mysterious business.”
The case already was shaping up as a sensation. As
Le Figaro
declared:
“Opinion continues to follow with passion the twists and turns, which are more moving than the best-framed novels.”
Goron was wracked by his failure. He stayed up into the night obsessing over botched leads and new angles. Inspector Jaume detected the signs of stress in his boss.
“I see,” he noted with lighthearted concern, “that Goron’s mustache has lost its symmetry.”
Chief Goron had no corpse, no suspects, no solid leads. Weeks after Gouffé’s disappearance, the investigation was at a standstill. In late September
Le Figaro
asked:
“Where does the Gouffé case stand?” Ten paragraphs later the reader understood there had been no progress.
The Gouffé family took matters into its own hands. In a plea for help, they offered ten thousand francs to anyone who provided details that led to Gouffé’s whereabouts. Goron soldiered on. He sent photographs of Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard to police throughout France and around the world and awaited a response. But nothing came.
Then startling news arrived from Lyon: The case had taken a sudden turn—it was now in the hands of a no-nonsense investigating judge named Vial who, unlike certain other Lyon magistrates, prized justice and was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. Vial relentlessly questioned the coachman Étienne Laforge until he broke down in tears.
“All right,” Laforge blubbered, “I did not tell you the whole truth.” But the new version of his story deviated from the original only in small details: He still claimed to have picked up the three men with the trunk and taken them to the riverside on July 6.
Unconvinced, Vial tossed the coachman into prison so he could stew over his half-baked testimony.
He then turned his attention to the incomplete baggage label found with the shattered trunk. Here was a vital—but disregarded—clue. Did the trunk depart from Paris in 1888, as Bastide and Ramonencq believed? Or did it come to Lyon in the current year, 1889? Vial knew there was only one way to get the answer: Someone had to pore over the baggage registry at Gare de Lyon in Paris. So he sent a note to Goron requesting help. For a provincial magistrate, Judge Vial showed uncommon courage
in reaching out to Paris. In his note, he requested that Goron dispatch a detective to the train station to examine the registry. To the chief’s astonishment, the Lyon judge also sent along the baggage label.