Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (24 page)

If ever a crime was destined for the Musée Grévin, it was the Gouffé murder. Not only did it have shock value and glamour but there was the eerie coincidence that the victim, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, had last been seen alive directly across the street at the Café Véron. In early February, just weeks after Gabrielle returned to Paris,
the museum created a rendering of the murder scene at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray, an identical replica of the apartment with the alcove, the chaise longue, the red silk sash, the cognac bottle, and the rope dangling from the pulley in the ceiling—a haunting tableau in dim lighting. Standing in the room where Gouffé was strangled the spectator could imagine his every groan. Crowds who swarmed the display gazed upon the
“famous trunk … reproduced with complete fidelity,”
Le Gil Blas
reported, noting that the scene was skillfully reconstructed from the latest revelations. It was an impressive depiction, the paper said, that gave “the greatest honor to the artist who so rapidly executed it.”

Around this same time Judge Dopffer turned his attention to the crime scenes far from Paris: the hotel in Lyon, the riverbanks where the body had landed and where the shattered trunk was found. He wanted to comb the Millery area in person, and he wanted Gabrielle as his tour guide. He needed her to show him exactly where the deeds took place and to describe in detail what she and Eyraud did. She was to be put to the test: Would her tales hold up, or would she prove to be the little liar, the
petite menteuse
?

When Jaume told her she was to travel south, Gabrielle was elated.
“I was beginning to go moldy here,” she said, and immediately turned her mind to her wardrobe. What to wear? Silk? No, it would be too cold for silk. She was to be on tour like a French celebrity and had to impress the public with her fashionable attire. Jaume bristled at her sense of self-importance but he’d resigned himself to it. She was now part of French culture.
“Her fame is immense,” he wrote in his diary. “From what has happened so far, Gabrielle will never be forgotten. People compose songs and write columns and put on scientific conferences about her. Artists, photographers, and caricaturists seize on her petulant little face.”

On February 7, after several postponements, the trip to the south was set. Two Sûreté agents, Wahlen and Robert, collected Gabrielle in her cell at 5:30 a.m. and found her as excited as a child. She was fussing at the last minute over whether to wear the same beige dress she had lately displayed at the Palais de Justice or another outfit of a darker shade. She chose the latter but was so high-strung the men expected her to change her mind again.
“There will be a lot of people at the station to see me leave,” she chattered at her guards. She was
anxious to win plaudits for her public appearance. “And when we arrive in Lyon I’m quite sure the crowd will be large.”

Wahlen and Robert escorted her out of her cell into a frigid, overcast morning and to a waiting carriage. The delays had confused the public about which day she was to depart and, arriving at Gare de Lyon, the trio found the station largely deserted. No one had turned out at that early hour to gawk at her in her black dress and velvet hat and long brown overcoat. No one paid her any attention except a journalist from
Le Petit Journal
who was assigned to stalk her incognito throughout the trip.

While Agent Wahlen went off to get the tickets, Gabrielle stood with Robert and prattled loudly, hoping to turn the heads of the few sleepy-eyed stragglers on the platform. Her liveliness, so out of place in the early morning, attracted the attention of a group of young military officers who encouraged her by ogling, wholly unaware that the object of their clowning was the celebrated little demon.

“Had they only known!” Jaume exclaimed in his diary.

The travelers settled into a first-class compartment aboard the 6:25 a.m. train. Although she was disappointed by the poor turnout, Gabrielle reasoned it was probably best that no journalists were begging for her time. With the rush to board she could not have properly entertained them.
“They would have wanted to question me and I would not have been able—to my grand regret—to respond to them,” she commented to her guards.

“I pity Wahlen and Robert,” mused Jaume, who stayed behind in Paris. “They will not have a minute of rest between Paris and Lyon. If they do not compliment her thirty times on her outfit, she will be in a bad humor and say she won’t talk anymore and then suffer ridiculous mental crises.”

Goron, to his unending frustration, was still in bed, confined to his house, unable to participate in any way in the expedition. Dopffer traveled on the same train as Gabrielle but in a different compartment.

As the train lumbered out of the station, Gabrielle was in high spirits. The
Petit Journal
reporter, who hid himself in an adjacent compartment, could hear her bantering gaily with her escorts.
“She burst out laughing,” he wrote, “and seemed absolutely unconscious of the gravity of the situation.”

When the train pulled into Gare de Perrache in Lyon at 5:44 p.m.,
Gabrielle was greeted like an arriving conqueror. Her tour had been well-publicized, and a mob packed the station. An army of journalists was on hand, some having waited an hour. A committee of local dignitaries was ready to welcome her: the head of the Lyon Sûreté, the Lyon prosecutor, and other officials, including several police commissioners. Jaume sardonically observed:
“Only Napoleon’s entrance into Berlin, perhaps, was on par with that of Gabrielle into the Gare de Perrache.”

Despite the long journey Gabrielle looked fresh and well-coifed when she stepped onto the platform with a small travel bag in her hand. Seeing the swarm of reporters and spectators, she cried,
“So many people! There would not be as many for the Queen of England.” She scanned the faces and swelled with delight:
“Ah, I’ve had a success!” As she moved through the station the crowd tagged along. In the jostling and pushing, a few unfortunates were knocked over and trampled. Gabrielle picked up her pace and suddenly her leg buckled beneath her and she nearly fell over as a heel broke off one of her boots.

Before climbing into her hackney she stopped to greet local officials, then she was off for the short ride to Saint Joseph Prison, located just behind the train station. And suddenly reality hit. Sitting in her cell on the prison’s second floor she had no one gawking at her, no one chasing after her for a look. She was alone. She didn’t feel famous at all. There was an iron bed with a wool blanket, a water jug, an earthenware basin, and a wooden chair. In this stark setting she had time to think about the crime scenes she was to see tomorrow and the interrogation she faced. Her eyes moved along the bare walls and she lost her composure and sobbed. Worst of all, she wept,
“There’s not even a mirror for me to do my coif.”

Paul Dopffer was close to wrapping up the case. As the investigating judge, he was entrusted to gather the facts about the crime and prepare the dossier, which contained all the testimony not only from the accused but from a battery of witnesses. So in addition to interrogating Gabrielle, he interviewed dozens of people with any information that could shed light on her character and the commission of the crime. Wielding his enormous power, the investigating judge shaped the primary evidence in the case in a way that set the tenor of the trial and guided the performances in the courtroom. Since he worked for the state, his dossier aimed to prove the guilt of the accused, and because of the great respect accorded him, his conclusions were not contested in court. The trial was not a pursuit of the truth but a public exposition of the dossier proving the criminal activities of the defendant.

But Dopffer still needed to fill in some crucial pieces on Gabrielle and Eyraud’s movements after the murder. He’d carefully courted the Lyon magistrates to gain their cooperation and impressed upon them the need to treat Gabrielle with special care to ensure her compliance. A happy Gabrielle was, in Dopffer’s view, a truthful Gabrielle. His courtesy quieted the bulldogs in Lyon, and in a rare show of amity, Parisian and provincial authorities questioned Gabrielle together on her first morning in Lyon. Dopffer was joined inside the interrogation room at Lyon’s Palais de Justice by Judge Vial, who had shaken the truth out of the coachman Étienne Laforge; the special police commissioner Ramonencq, who had encouraged Laforge in his lies; and the prosecutor Georges Chenest, who had lodged the complaint against Goron claiming he’d ridiculed the Lyon justice system.

After the questioning, Gabrielle was escorted by a parade of officials to the Hôtel de Toulouse, where she and Eyraud had stayed with the trunk. There she encountered the hotel carriage driver, a man named Novel, who recognized her. Gabrielle explained that Novel and three hotel boys were needed to haul the trunk to room number 6. Inside the room she pointed to the spot where the trunk had sat against the window. Then the procession was off to the Hôtel d’Orient, where the murderers stayed after disposing of the body and the trunk. The manager, Madame Descombes, recognized Gabrielle right away.
“Only,” she said, eyeing her red hair, “you were brunette at the time.” Gabrielle burst out laughing: “You are not the first person, madame, who has made that observation today.”

A caravan of eight carriages then made its way to the location along the riverbank where Gouffé’s body had lain. Gabrielle faithfully pointed to the exact spot near a small wall where she stood lookout as Eyraud opened the trunk and turned it upside down, shaking out the sack. She described the way Eyraud heaved the body over the edge:
“He threw it like one would throw a heavy package, helping it with his knee.” And she pointed to the spot where it landed. Dopffer was pleased that the location she indicated was precisely where the cadaver was discovered. The little liar was telling the truth.

On her way back to her cell that evening Gabrielle joked with the Sûreté agents. Her mood had markedly improved from her first night when she had refused to eat and a nun had to talk her into having two eggs. There was no problem with her appetite on this night: As the newspapers dutifully reported, she polished off a meal of escargots,
saucisson de Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise, pieds de mouton, veau chasseur, bifteck cresson, macaroni gratiné, dessert varié, café
, and champagne. She also insisted on éclairs and, over the course of her brief stay, was reported to have eaten more than a dozen. To her great delight she was offered after-meal cigarettes, remarking:
“Well, you are more gallant here than they are in Paris!”

She spent the night smoking cigarettes and reading a book called
Artists’ Wives
by Alphonse Daudet. Each of the twelve stories illustrated how wives harmed the lives of their husband poets, painters, musicians, and sculptors and pointed up the tensions between men and women generally. The artists, Daudet revealed, were distracted from their important work by troublesome domestic concerns. Some
of the pieces were light, others serious—but all made the case that artists should never marry.

The next day, climbing into the carriage at the prison for the ride to the Palais de Justice for more questioning, Gabrielle playfully commanded:
“Coachman, to the palace!” People filled the streets hoping for a glimpse of her and, as a carriage pulled up to the curb, the crowd closed in. A cry went up: “It’s Gabrielle!” But jubilation quickly turned to disappointment when someone other than the celebrated murderess stepped out. Yet some of the spectators skipped away calling out: “It was her! Gabrielle! For real!”

Among her many interrogations, Gabrielle sat for an hour-long session with Alexandre Lacassagne, the esteemed criminologist whose autopsy had saved the case. He wanted to hear her describe the pulley breaking free of the ceiling and the rope falling to the floor; he wanted to hear her say that Gouffé was not hanged but strangled, as the autopsy showed. She reiterated what she’d told Dopffer: that after the pulley gave way, Eyraud threw himself on Gouffé and strangled him bare-handed. Her recounting of events intrigued Lacassagne not so much for its content but for its style. Her manner was offhand; she was untroubled by the depravity of the actions she described. Lacassagne said she sounded like a ten-year-old child describing a play she’d seen in the theater. She showed no sign of shock or deep emotion. What she described did not seem real to her.
“I didn’t do anything,” she told Lacassagne. “I did not touch Gouffé. I did what Eyraud told me to do. If I thought about it too much he would beat me.”

Lacassagne believed Gabrielle was conscious of her actions during the murder. But was she a full accomplice? He allowed that her mind was so fragile she could only be held partially responsible for what she did.

For Dopffer, the Lyon trip was a success. He’d gotten Gabrielle to lay out in detail what happened after the killing; he’d studied the locations, heard the witnesses, and was able to stitch all of the evidence together to prove step by step the accuracy of her account. The man who once sneered that she was the
petite menteuse
, the little liar, now was gratified that she had so willingly helped build the case for him. He revised his opinion of her, telling the local press that
“he had rarely seen a witness enlighten justice in a fashion so clear and so precise.”

A crowd swarmed the train station for Gabrielle’s departure. Some admirers tossed her bouquets of flowers, prompting one cranky spectator to say:
“We have come to assist in the glorification of a crime.” Mostly, however, the throng was fascinated by the petite show-off. As she mounted the steps of the carriage, the mob surged forward and Gabrielle stood in the doorway shaking hands like a
grande artiste.
At last she boarded, and once she was settled inside her compartment, she pulled back the drapes and waved to her fans, who blew her kisses. The antics disgusted Jaume.
“Should one laugh?” he asked. “Should one soil oneself? Or should one philosophize on the inexplicable excitements of the provinces? The departure of Gabrielle Bompard surpasses all that the most sour misanthrope could imagine in order to scoff at humanity.” The behavior of both the criminal and her admirers was beyond anything Jaume could countenance. “If the train had not gotten under way, the devotees would have undoubtedly asked Gabrielle to give them her blessing,” he wrote. “This infatuation with a criminal is the most droll phenomenon I have ever heard of in my whole life.”