Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (2 page)

The battle between the Paris and Nancy camps might have remained just an academic debate if it weren’t for a petite twenty-one-year-old with gray-blue eyes and an adventurous spirit. Gabrielle
Bompard was a troubled young woman from a wealthy family in Lille who ran away to Paris in 1888. She was neglected at home: Her mother had died when Gabrielle was five; soon afterward her father sent her away to relatives and convents and boarding school. By the time she returned home at age eighteen, she was a volatile, independent-minded teenager in love with fashion and eager for the spotlight. She was similar to her mother, whom she’d barely known and who was described as
“subject to brusque and incomprehensible changes in character.”

Gabrielle also was an astounding hypnotic subject. When Professor Donato brought his show to Lille, she sneaked away from home and volunteered to go onstage. She also had a secret lover who had learned the hypnotist’s techniques and kept her in a near-perpetual trance. The more she was hypnotized, the easier she fell under the powers. Dr. Sacreste, the Bompard family doctor, had discovered Gabrielle’s special skill one day in the winter of 1887 when he came to look after an ailing housekeeper. When conversation around the dinner table turned to the popularity of hypnosis, Gabrielle’s father, Pierre, challenged the doctor to try it out on his children. Gabrielle’s younger brother resisted; he just laughed at the doctor’s hocus-pocus, refusing to succumb to the powers.

But Gabrielle was another story entirely. She fell directly into a trance, deeply and fully, with a submissiveness that was startling to behold. She was, Sacreste later recalled, the most extraordinary hypnotic subject he had ever encountered. To test the depth of her spell, the doctor handed her a glass of water and told her it was champagne. No sooner had she taken a few sips than she showed
“all the symptoms of drunkenness,” he said. On a subsequent visit, he hypnotized her again before removing a wart. “I put her to sleep and suggested to her that she wouldn’t feel a thing,” he said. During the procedure she showed no sign of pain. The doctor was convinced that her trance was sincere. “It was impossible,” he concluded, “to believe she was simulating.”

Pierre Bompard was won over to the miracle of hypnosis and asked Sacreste if he couldn’t tame Gabrielle’s obstreperous personality in a few sessions. Sacreste tried but his efforts were fruitless. Conditions deteriorated at home for Gabrielle, and she begged her lover to
rescue her but he would not take her in. Finally she ran off to Paris with her lover’s warning fresh in mind.
“You have a temperament,” he told her, “that finds pleasure in a labyrinth of intrigue. Be careful—because you will be a victim again and again.”

Within a year of her arrival Gabrielle took part in a horrific crime, and she became the heroine of a grand Parisian diversion, the darling of the cheap, mass-circulation newspapers. Hers was a tale perfectly rendered for the real-life stage of the belle epoque: an outlandish murder, an amusing and clever gumshoe, a worldwide hunt for the killers, a series of dead ends, and then a remarkable turn of events, aided by a breakthrough in forensic science and capped by a courtroom drama that riveted the nation—and the world. None of it would have taken place had this young bourgeois woman from Lille not been remarkably susceptible to the influence of hypnosis—had she not been, as they say of people easily induced, like
“clay in the hands of a potter.”

Here, finally, was a real-world test for the competing theories of murder under hypnosis. Gabrielle’s case brought the top academics into the courtroom for a showdown over their jealously guarded beliefs. The law professor Liégeois argued on behalf of the defense: that Gabrielle was a hypnotic puppet who acted against her will and therefore was without responsibility. The state brought in experts aligned with the great neurologist Charcot to argue that hypnotism was not to blame; the fault, they contended, lay with the young woman herself: She was an amoral killer, and must answer for her crime with an early-morning march to the guillotine. This courtroom confrontation represented the first time an accused murderer had put forward a hypnotism defense. The outcome of Gabrielle’s case could set a legal precedent and influence crime and justice for years to come.

It was a long journey to the courtroom. When
Le Figaro
first reported in July 1889 that a wealthy gentleman, a widower with a slight limp and an unquenchable libido, had vanished, his absence was just another curious incident in the messy life of Paris. There was no inkling that a year and a half later this small mystery would attract the world’s attention as a sensational hypnotic crime and turn Gabrielle into the prototype of a celebrity killer.

Her case spilled far beyond its French borders, as she and her accomplice fled Paris for New York, Vancouver, and San Francisco.
Gabrielle filled headlines across the United States as Americans avidly followed the detectives’ chase and later the trial, amused by the spectacle but also uneasy about her hypnotism plea. If the French courts ruled in Gabrielle’s favor, then murderers across the world would have a cunning new strategy for escaping justice.

In Paris in 1889, even murder was a form of theater. And what Michel Eyraud had in mind was a brilliant bit of staging: a sexual farce full of suspense and melodrama and then a tragic denouement. Eyraud had a cockeyed sense of himself. In his invented world he fancied himself a romantic, a flaneur at his ease strolling along the boulevards, a raconteur idling at Maxim’s, a ladies’ man, a conjurer who glided like the devil between the light and the dark. And pushed to the edge, he could kill with style.

He and his mistress had acquired all the props they needed for the evening’s performance. They’d been to London and bought some rope, a pulley, a silk
cordelière
for use as a noose, and a trunk so big it could hold a human. They’d rented an apartment under an alias on a quiet side street near the
grands boulevards
, taking rooms on the ground floor so no one below could hear the thud of a body hitting the floor.

Gabrielle was a skilled seamstress, a craft she learned during her years in the convents, and for two nights she had sat by the window stitching two pieces of burlap together to form a human-size bag. He was the show’s director and set designer. On this Friday evening, July 26, he climbed onto a chair in the sitting-room alcove, with his mistress spotting him, and hammered the pulley into a crossbeam; he ran the rope up through the pulley and down again to the floor. He installed a curtain across the alcove and placed a wood chair next to the dangling rope. Here was his hiding spot, where he was to lie in wait. He pushed a chaise longue next to the alcove, then scurried about creating a romantic atmosphere for the killing. He lowered the gas jets, lit candles, and arranged cognac and biscuits on a silver tray.

And again he instructed his actress in her scene, how to speak her lines, how to slide the red silk
cordelière
off her dressing gown and secretly turn it into a noose. Gabrielle was the star of this show, a petite twenty-one-year-old, the sexual bait tossed before a genial man of wealth. She had been on her own in Paris for a year—about a hundred and forty miles from her home in Lille—and now she was desperate and broken, a near-hysterical runaway, a femme fatale, lethal to her lovers.

A short distance away, on boulevard Montmartre,
Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé sat with three friends on the terrace of Café Véron sipping absinthe. His silk hat was impeccably shined, his beard was well-groomed, and his shirt bore his monogram. Gouffé was a bailiff, who, in France, was not the stolid uniformed officer known to sit in American courtrooms but a professional of a higher order: a business figure who handled legal matters and was somewhat comparable to an attorney. The man looked rich, satisfied, and untouchable.

But he had his vulnerabilities: A careful eye watching him on the street might detect his slight limp, and a casual ear did not miss his high-pitched voice and minor lisp. Lifting his glass to his lips, he revealed manicured fingernails and on his pinkie was a treasure that marked him as a target for murder: a gold ring with a sapphire mounted in a halo of diamonds.

Outside on the boulevard the world of Paris circulated: dandies and wits, mesdames in plumed hats, messieurs in white gloves, demimondaines in heavy face paint and feather boas. Across from Café Véron was the stone-arch entrance to the Musée Grévin, the famed wax museum. Inside stood molded kings and queens in breathtaking three-dimensional realism. Down the block, at the Théâtre des Variétés, the comic opera
La Fille à Cacolet
was on the boards. Earlier in the year, high society had flocked to the premier of
L’Affaire Édouard
, the latest work by the playwright Georges Feydeau, who was establishing himself as the master of stage farce.

On this Friday, the rain had pelted off and on, muddying the thoroughfare but not intimidating the giant Percherons thundering along, drawing the double-decker Impériale omnibuses. On the boulevard, as one historian fondly recalled, there was a
“bedlam of noise … a
cacophony of hoofbeats, whirling wheels, rattling pushcarts, cries of hawkers and the occasional neigh of an impatient horse.”

Paris was an urban carnival, bold in its amusements: music halls, café concerts, rickety roller coasters. A guidebook promised,
“Paris is the only corner of the world where pleasure is a social necessity, a normal state.” Tourists expected a bacchanal, flooding in to escape rigid Germany, stuffy Britain, puritan America. To the outside world Paris floated on a champagne bubble.
“It is we,” declared a French journalist, “who have infected the world with gaiety, this brightness.”

But the dark also beckoned: Paris swayed between delight and doom. Since the Prussians humiliated France on the battlefield in 1870, capturing Louis-Napoléon, annexing Alsace-Lorraine, and precipitating a bloody civil rebellion, the country had slept fitfully, tossing and turning over a grim question: Was French glory a thing of the past? The indignity of defeat lingered. The scars were written on the drunks in the alleyways, the blank-eyed syphilitics in the insanity wards, and the anxious faces of the politicians. The Third Republic teetered perennially on the edge of collapse.

The gaiety of Paris, this brightness, could suddenly go dark, as could the electric lights just beginning to glimmer across the city. And no one was immune—not presidents, generals, famous authors, or the rich. Though he looked untouchable, Gouffé was as exposed to the dangerous uncertainties as the next man. He too was dancing on a volcano. And like his countrymen, all he could do before stumbling into the abyss was to raise a glass and laugh with friends, in the spirit of the Montparnasse poet who cried:
“People must make merry before dying.”

As Gouffé dug into his meal—pasta with carrots and green beans—one of his companions, a newspaperman, enlivened the table with a tale of his experiences among the anarchists. Although the anarchists were feared for their bold ultimatums—vowing to deliver
“the bomb that cleanses” and “the knife that purifies”—so far they were waging mostly a war of words. Their ranks were growing, but the waves of deadly bombings were still on the horizon. The early warnings came in published manifestos and in promises to slit the throats of government ministers. Gouffé and his dinner companions might nod somberly at the threat but were confident they themselves stood at a safe remove.

After dinner, Gouffé’s friends invited him for a stroll around the International Exposition, the massive world’s fair sprawling along the Champ de Mars, the quai d’Orsay, and the Trocadéro gardens, more than two hundred acres of food, fun, and eye-popping mechanical inventions. The French were throwing a months-long party to mark the hundredth anniversary of the 1789 revolution but purposely played down the historic meaning—the overthrow and execution of royalty—to keep from offending the many kings and queens still sitting atop their thrones throughout Europe. Entertainment overwhelmed the politics: The very symbol of royal tyranny, the Bastille, was re-created not as the feared political prison it once was but as an amusement park with rides and colored fountains and shops tended by merchants in eighteenth-century costumes.

Apparently still touchy about the march of history, no monarch in Europe except the King of Belgium sent a representative to the exposition’s opening ceremonies on May 6, 1889, prompting the president of France, Sadi Carnot, to declare pointedly in his dedication speech:
“Our dear France … has the right to be proud of herself and to celebrate the economic and political centenary of 1789 with her head held high.”

While his speech chided absent royalty, it also was meant to buck up his own beleaguered nation, which only the previous evening had barely escaped calamity. Setting off from the Élysée palace for an exposition ceremony at Versailles, President Carnot had ridden in an open landau through streets packed with revelers. As he moved along the rue du Faubourg-Sainte-Honoré, a deranged shopkeeper from the French colony of Martinque, believing he had been mistreated by the government, fired a single shot at Carnot’s carriage, missing the president but delivering the message of national insecurity.