Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (12 page)

With the label between his fingers, Goron was confident he was closing in on the discovery of Gouffé’s body. The scrap from the trunk read “From: Paris 1231. Paris 27/7/188. Express Train 3. To: Lyon-Perrache, 1,” indicating that trunk number 1231 had left Paris on July 27, the day Gouffé vanished. The only question remaining was to prove the year was 1889. Goron was so intent on the answer that he took the label to the station himself and waited while the railway agent searched the 1888 registry for bag number 1231. When nothing turned up, he asked the agent to try again for the year 1889.

The second search took quite some time because tens of thousands of baggage-toting visitors had poured into Paris for the International Exposition. Normally an impatient man, Goron was content to wait while the agent flipped through the registry; he smoked cigarettes and toyed with the ends of his mustache, convinced he was on the verge of the most important breakthrough in the case.

At last the railway agent delivered the news: There was indeed a trunk numbered 1231 that departed Paris on the day Gouffé went missing. The notation in the baggage registry read: “27 July 1889, Train No. 3, 11:45 a.m., No. 1231. Destination: Lyon-Perrache. One trunk, weight 105 kilograms [230 pounds].”

For Goron, the conclusion was inescapable: the body of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé had ridden from Paris to Lyon inside that trunk. But Goron still had to prove it. In order to do that he needed the Lyon corpse to be exhumed. Only a second autopsy could reveal the truth. Only the body, indisputably identified as Gouffé’s, could save the case.

Moving swiftly, Goron begged Dopffer to arrange a visit to Lyon for Inspector Jaume and himself. Was this not a fool’s errand? Dopffer worried. By now, he supposed, the corpse was so badly decomposed its identity could never be known. Nonetheless he agreed to inquire, and on November 9, 1889, Goron and Jaume were on their way to Lyon. As the train cut through the countryside heading south, the two Sûreté men laid out their battle plan. Their ambitions were huge: They wanted to dig into the dossier; they wanted to interrogate the coachman Laforge; most of all, they wanted a new autopsy to prove
they were right all along about the corpse. Echoing their hopes,
Le Gil Blas
wondered whether Gouffé’s brother-in-law hadn’t missed something when he viewed the rotting remains on the morgue floor.
“Was he mistaken?” the paper asked. “Was his examination too superficial? Anything is possible.”

The detectives arrived in Lyon braced for rude treatment similar to that which Brigadier Léon Soudais and Louis-Marie Landry had received. There was no assurance that Vial, while cultivated and welcoming, could control the animosity that inflamed the rest of the Lyon investigative force. But the alarm was unfounded. Vial was as accommodating as he could be. He brought the peasant Laforge from his prison cell to an interrogation room where Goron and Jaume were waiting. Informing the coachman of the latest developments, Vial advised him:
“Now search inside yourself and tell us the truth.” How could he have picked up the three men with the trunk on July 6 when that trunk had not even arrived in Lyon until July 27?

But the peasant didn’t budge. He twisted his hat in his hands, seeming guileless and asserting that what he had said was the truth. The monkeying around infuriated Jaume, who lost his temper and grabbed Laforge by the arm.
“Listen, my friend, you are not going to do this to us,” he hissed. “We are not from Lyon.”

The outburst not only startled Laforge but also insulted the entire legal system of Lyon. Jaume knew exactly what he was doing; his hotheadedness was a calculated act, and Goron, who was secretly delighted, had to bite on his mustache to keep from laughing. He later explained that the inspector was
“a good man but an incorrigible rascal.” To salvage appearances, however, the chief drew a stern face and disciplined his underling with some sharp words and a rough shove. But the display fooled no one in Lyon.
“From this moment on,” Goron recorded in his memoir, “I think I was no longer in their hearts.”

Judge Vial was the only man in the room not offended, and as a show of camaraderie handed the interrogation over to Goron, who was famous for his brutal grilling of suspects. So intense were his sessions that his interrogation rooms were dubbed
“Monsieur Goron’s cookshops.” Now, with the Gouffé case hanging in the balance, the chief went to work on the peasant coachman, who burned in the Paris
hot seat. He quickly admitted that everything he had said was a lie and threw himself on Judge Vial’s mercy. He fell to his knees before the judge and burst into tears.
“What do you want?” he whimpered. “
I
am just a coachman.”

His confession was abject and thorough—he recanted everything. He never picked up the three suspects, never took them to Millery, never even saw them on the night of July 6. And he never laid eyes on the trunk. If he was to suffer for his lies, he wasn’t going alone. He now dragged the unscrupulous Lyon magistrates into the mud with him.
“If I was able to give a fairly exact description of the trunk,” Laforge said, “that was because Monsieur Commissioner Ramonencq helped me.” At the time he gave his testimony, he explained, he didn’t even have a permit to operate his hackney. It had been revoked more than two weeks earlier after a run-in with the law. And the officials encouraging his false story didn’t even realize it. Laforge had shown up at headquarters knowing police were hungry for a lead.
“So I thought I would please these gentlemen and give them one,” he continued. “To tell you frankly, I saw quickly that what I said had the effect of pleasing them a lot. And the nicer they were to me, the more I talked.”

Why had he lied? That was simple: to get into the good graces of the police.
“I hoped that as a reward for my service,” he said, “the police would rehabilitate me and return my permit.”

And how did he come up with his three suspects? He chose the three young thugs because they were already in jail charged with a separate murder.
“It seemed to me,” he reasoned, “that another crime more or less would not much aggravate their situation.”

The magistrates’ actions were reprehensible—and farcical. One local paper likened the case to the zaniness of Eugène Labiche’s play
The Italian Straw Hat
, a famous farce that became a model for the Keystone Kops.
“The entire inquiry tumbles like a house of cards,” the newspaper wrote.

Amid the ruins, Chief Goron saw an opportunity to grab control of the investigation, prompting a local newspaper to ridicule him for
“an attitude that his position doesn’t justify.” The chief “arrives in Lyon,” the paper chided, “not relying on anyone but himself to do the inquest.” Goron wanted to start the case over from the beginning, with a new autopsy. But no sooner had he broached the idea than he
ran into another wall of provincial ineptitude. Judge Vial informed him that another autopsy was impossible because no one could locate the body.

The coffin containing the unidentified corpse had been tossed into a communal graveyard at La Guillotière cemetery with nothing—no marking, no cross—to distinguish it from any other. There were no records of where unidentified bodies lay. The remains became part of a jumbled heap in this confused mass burial site. These were indeed lost souls. Finding and exhuming a specific body from this loners’ resting ground would require nothing short of a miracle. No one even knew where to begin.

Goron was appalled, but still he plowed ahead hoping other evidence would build his case. He and Inspector Jaume rode out to the desolate riverbank where the corpse was recovered and peered over the parapet at the shrubbery below. In nearby Millery they chatted with locals, uncovering more evidence of malfeasance by Lyon authorities. When the Lyon police came out to speak to residents, the locals said, they were interested not in digging up the truth but in simply confirming Laforge’s story. The police posed leading questions:
“It’s since the beginning of July, isn’t it, that you smelled the stench of the corpse?” and obliging locals gave the answers the police wanted.

Goron took the opposite tack: He encouraged the people of Millery to draw on their memories, as best they could, to tell him when the odor overtook the town. Undirected and unintimidated, they produced a timeline starkly different from the one insisted upon by Laforge and the Lyon investigators.

At Restaurant de la Tour, a popular gathering spot in Millery, Goron bumped into a Paris journalist from
Le Petit Journal
who had come to conduct his own investigation.
“M. Cornély came, like me, instinctively, to find out,” Goron wrote in his memoir. “The procedures of a good reporter do not differ much from that of a policeman. For one, like the other, there are no small details in a case: all should be searched to the core. This was not unfortunately the doctrine of some magistrates.”

It was a cold November Sunday and the restaurant was packed. Goron sat at a table with the owner, Antoine Thiebaudier, and asked him to recall when the putrid odor had invaded the town.
“No doubt is possible,” Thiebaudier said, “it’s only after the fourth or fifth of
August that one started to smell bad odors in the countryside.” Others confirmed Thiebaudier’s account. These new recollections made sense. If the trunk arrived in Lyon on July 27 containing the body of a man killed the previous day and the corpse was dumped soon afterward on the riverbank, probably on July 28, an odor of decomposition would likely have swept over the town in another week or so. That would have lent accuracy to Thiebaudier’s estimate of August 4 or August 5. It also destroyed Laforge’s story that three men dumped a body on July 6.

Next Goron visited Paul Bernard, the medical examiner who had performed the original autopsy. Although the earnest young doctor had largely botched the inquiry, he had shown a flash of foresight by setting aside some hair from the corpse.
“I had the excellent idea to save a few tufts,” he told Goron, putting them into the chief’s hand. The clump of coal-black strands were coated with blood and a greasy substance from the decomposing scalp. Nothing about them suggested they’d been clipped from Gouffé’s chestnut-brown mane. Goron rolled the hairs between his fingers, his mind working. These hairs, he reasoned, came from a corpse exposed to the environment and the action of decomposition for possibly two weeks. Did those conditions have any impact on the coloring? No one, Goron realized, had questioned whether these slimy strands were in fact originally black. Goron, who was a leading proponent of the scientific investigation of crime, proposed a simple experiment.

“I asked for a bit of distilled water,” he recalled later in his memoir.

When Bernard produced a basin, Goron plunged the hairs into the water, and the men waited several minutes; then Goron lifted the hairs out and combed them through his fingers, removing grease and dirt. He dropped the hairs back into the water and retrieved them again several minutes later, combing away still more grime. He repeated the process one more time. He then presented the hairs to the young doctor.
“He recognized immediately that he had been oddly mistaken,” Goron remembered. “The hairs were, in fact, brown.”

Of course any number of victims could have had brown hair. What was it about these particular hairs that said they belonged to Gouffé? Without a body, there was no room for doubt. Goron needed an exact match. He telegrammed his agents in Paris to contact the Gouffé family: Had anyone saved a hairbrush belonging to the missing
man? The next day, hairs from Gouffé’s brush were on their way to Lyon.

When Goron placed the hairs side by side—the cleansed strands and the ones from the hairbrush—he and Bernard were astonished by the similarity in color and texture. An encouraging breakthrough, but was it enough to build a case?

Inspector Jaume understood now why Gouffé’s brother-in-law did not recognize the missing man on his visit to the morgue. The corpse’s matted hair darkened by blood and dirt left Landry
“naturally mistaken about its true color,” the inspector surmised in his diary. He applauded Goron for his determination and cleverness, then took the opportunity to ridicule Lyon authorities for their idleness: “Why had no one had the idea for this new and so simple, controlled experiment?”

That Dr. Bernard had saved a few tufts of hair from the corpse was fortuitous. But it was nothing compared to the twist of fate that next came Goron’s way. As he wrote in his diary:
“Decidedly, luck returned to me, and, as always, good luck and bad luck come in a streak.” It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of a medical apprentice who had assisted Dr. Bernard in the original postmortem. The young trainee had followed the Gouffé case in the newspapers and wondered if Goron’s hunch about the Millery corpse might not be right. The autopsy had disappointed him: The failure to identify the remains, he believed, would haunt the case. He suspected that before this drama played out the corpse would need to see the light of day again. He also knew that remains buried in La Guillotière cemetery were lost forever. And as he was accompanying the body to its unmarked resting place, he got an idea.
“At the moment of the burial,” the apprentice told Goron, “I made marks on the coffin.” Then he added: “I did better than that.” He took one more step to ensure that this body could be singled out from all the others. “I left an old hat of mine with the corpse,” he explained to the speechless Sûreté chief. “In that way, I was sure that one wouldn’t be mistaken on the day one wanted to exhume the Unknown of Millery.”

The Gouffé case suddenly roared to life. As a local newspaper put it:
“Without this hat … the case was definitely buried like the cadaver.” Ecstatic, Goron stuffed five hundred francs from the Gouffé daughters’ reward fund into this ingenious assistant’s hands, which
he accepted with humility.
“This modest one,” Goron gushed in his memoir, “had the trait of a genius.”

On the evening of November 11, the state prosecutor ordered the body of the Millery unknown to be exhumed from the communal grave in La Guillotière cemetery and an autopsy to commence the following day.

In San Francisco, Michel Eyraud was safe. Here on the far side of the world he was free to remake himself, establish his false identity, and renew his prospects. He had come to the right place. Here, he could pose as a sophisticated French vintner. To the north lay the Napa Valley, where nearly a hundred and fifty wineries dotted the fields. If there was an American wine, it was Californian, and the vintage flowed abundantly. Right now, wine production was so strong it was causing an oversupply, pushing down prices, and forcing some vineyards to close.