Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (30 page)

In preparation for the suspects’ rendezvous, the scene of the murder was re-created down to the smallest detail: A chaise longue was placed next to the alcove, a rope was dangled out of sight behind the curtain, brandy appeared on a table, and the trunk was positioned against the wall in the kitchen. The accused were to reenact the murder before Judge Dopffer, the forensics specialist Dr. Brouardel, Chief Goron, and other magistrates and detectives. There was to be a standin for Gouffé, played by a Sûreté agent. Planning for the event was splashed across the newspapers, prompting one enterprising spectator to rent the apartment across the hall in hopes of a front-row seat. When it was announced that the murderers’ reunion would take place on Tuesday, July 8, the curious began assembling in front of the apartment the day before to stake out their places.

At 7:30 a.m. on the appointed day Eyraud and Gabrielle were taken from their cells at the Dépôt and escorted separately along bare, monotonous walls and down dismal staircases. Eyraud, looking proud and combative in his fine overcoat and bowler, was conducted to the offices of the Sûreté where a barber gave him a quick haircut and shave. The illusion was complete: He now looked just as he had almost a year ago on the night of the murder. Gazing at himself in a wall mirror, he was satisfied.
“I am reborn,” he said. “I’m sure to attract a lady at Tronson du Coudray.” Jaume was aghast, and wondered if Eyraud really believed his wild fantasy.
“The heart of a man is an unfathomable abyss,” he confided to his diary, “and a man might very well yearn to the point of humiliation!”

Gabrielle also got a sprucing up. She wore a black silk dress pinched at the waist, accentuating her petite figure. She had her coif remade to match the sweet, childish style she wore when she’d guided Gouffé toward the chaise longue.

The former lovers climbed into separate carriages outside the Dépôt several minutes apart, Eyraud departing first, accompanied by
Judge Dopffer. As Gabrielle stepped up into her coach she daintily lifted her skirt, keeping the hem out of the mud, then rode off with Goron at her side.

The carriages made their way from the Île de la Cité to the
grands boulevards
in about twenty minutes. As they neared boulevard Haussmann the scene was like a carnival. People watched the coaches pass from their apartment windows, and shopkeepers waited expectantly outside their doors. The crowd thickened along rue Pasquier, and on rue Tronson du Coudray the mob had crashed through police barricades at both ends of the one-block-long street and thronged in front of number 3.

At about 9:00 a.m. police parted the crowd and Eyraud’s hackney rolled to a stop in front of the apartment. When he climbed out, there was some commotion before he quickly disappeared through a double door at the street level. A crowd awaited inside the small apartment. Jaume counted nineteen people: besides Dopffer and his clerk and Goron and a few Sûreté agents, there were representatives of the prosecutor, two medical examiners, a few Paris magistrates, a couple of select journalists, the building concierge, and the doctors Brouardel, Motet, and Ballet, who were there to assess Gabrielle’s mental condition.
“Eyraud seemed emotional,” Jaume observed. “Was it the memory of the crime? Was it the certainty that he would soon see his beloved again? It could have been the two sentiments striking him at once.”

Two minutes later, Gabrielle’s carriage eased through the throng in front of the building. As she stepped lightly onto the street, the mob surged forward. Pleased by the turnout, Gabrielle calmly gazed at the faces. She was in no hurry to go inside and instead went leisurely to the sweating horses and stroked their backs.
“Poor animals,” she purred. “They’re hot.” She lingered in the spotlight, absently running her fingers through the horses’ manes until Goron piloted her toward the double doors. But when she gave a push, the doors didn’t budge—the star of the show was locked out. “Why …” she cried dramatically. “How is it that it doesn’t open?” Goron rang the bell impatiently, and after several moments the doors parted and he and Gabrielle slipped inside. Two journalists sneaked in behind them but retreated on the threat of arrest.

Inside, Gabrielle immediately recoiled when she caught sight of
her former lover. Whipping her head away, she hissed in a stage whisper that everyone heard:
“I can’t see this man. He disgusts me.”

Dopffer stepped into the center of the room amid flickering candlelight, and everyone fell silent for a moment as if suddenly remembering the tragedy that had befallen a man in this room. Gouffé’s murder was something more than macabre entertainment, it was real and brutal. And now it was time for the truth to emerge.

Dopffer addressed Eyraud.
“Some enormous contradictions exist between your statements and your accomplice’s,” he said. “We want to know if it was she or you who passed the
cordelière
over Gouffé’s neck. I beg you to tell the truth.”

Eyraud spoke in a loud voice, his eyes dark and fierce:
“I did not strangle Gouffé. I hanged him, or better, we hanged him, Gabrielle and I. She took off the
cordelière
that closed her dressing gown and she passed it over his neck, with it arranged in a slipknot. Then she put the
cordelière
in the snap hook I prepared. I pulled the rope. It rode through the pulley, and Gouffé found himself hanged.”

“But,” the judge remarked, “we found the signs of fingers on the larynx.” Dopffer clearly had reached his own conclusion. The ragged marks in the crossbeam overhead were proof enough that the pulley had snapped out of the wood, and that the hanging was interrupted. But Dopffer needed to hear it from Eyraud himself.

“I assure you,” Eyraud replied, “I hanged him and did not strangle him. The pressure of the
cordelière
was sufficient for that.”

Across the room Gabrielle stamped her foot angrily.
“You lie, monsieur!”

“I tell the truth, mademoiselle, and I advise you to do the same.”

It was clear why Eyraud insisted on a hanging rather than a strangling. He was guilty in either case, but a hanging, as he portrayed it, also implicated Gabrielle. If he wanted to take her to the guillotine with him, he had to prove she placed the noose over Gouffé’s head. He had to dispel any possibility of a strangulation, a deed he could have accomplished alone.

Dopffer directed the players to their places to begin the reenactment. Eyraud went behind the curtains into the alcove. Gabrielle moved toward the door to admit a Sûreté agent playing the role of Gouffé. And so the seduction began. Gabrielle recounted her conversation with the bailiff, her story of her breakup with Eyraud, her
attempts to get Gouffé to sit on the chaise longue, his initial resistance at first, and his fondling of her breasts. She had told this story before but never in the presence of Eyraud. Might he react in a way that proved the truth of her words? That was the gamble of this exercise: that someone in the heat of the moment would lose their composure and shed some new light. Continuing her tale, Gabrielle said Gouffé was preoccupied with his lust when Eyraud burst through the curtain, grabbed the noose from her hands, and threw it onto his neck. Then Eyraud pulled down on the rope and began to hang the bailiff until suddenly the pulley leaped out of the crossbeam and the two men both tumbled to the floor.
“Eyraud strangled him with his hands,” Gabrielle said.

“Mademoiselle lies,” Eyraud growled, emerging from behind the curtain. “It’s she who put the
cordelière
around Gouffé’s neck saying to him, ‘This would make you a beautiful necktie.’ ”

Gabrielle lunged toward Eyraud and was restrained by two agents.

Eyraud confidently repeated his story. Gabrielle placed the noose around Gouffé’s neck while Eyraud, behind the curtain, pulled down on the rope. “I came out of hiding crying: ‘He’s taken,’ ” Eyraud declared, looking back and forth between Dopffer and Goron, reading their reactions. “Then I saw the bailiff was inanimate,” he went on. “Gabrielle hanged him.”

Eyraud turned a ferocious gaze on Gabrielle; his lips trembled and malevolence filled his eyes. In this frothing state, he was a terrifying devil. “You could see that a last hope made the wretch’s heart beat,” Goron recalled. “At this moment I was sure that Eyraud would have joyously placed his head on the rim of the guillotine, if only he could see Gabrielle guillotined next to him.”

“Liar! Liar!” Gabrielle shrieked. “Coward! Coward!” Furious, she tried to shake herself free of the agents restraining her. Her face was a mask of demonic possession. If released, she seemed entirely capable of strangling Eyraud with her tiny hands. “She merited well, at this moment, the nickname of
petit démon
that had been given to her,” Goron observed.

The staggering sadness of their lives was on full display. There had been such promise in these two lost souls. Both intelligent, born to opportunity, yet they slid with a carefree glint in their eye into degradation, deceit, and murder. Consumed by greed and lust, Eyraud
was finally done in by his hunger for a crafty femme fatale. Gabrielle, cast out by her family, drifted to the edge of madness and resorted to cunning to survive.

She shrieked—she insisted she was telling the truth: Eyraud strangled Gouffé.
“That’s true, absolutely true!” she cried. “That’s just how it happened. Monsieur is a liar.”

“It’s mademoiselle who lies,” Eyraud persisted. “She’s a liar, a dirty liar.
I
tell the truth.”

“What nerve he has! He’s a liar! He’s the one who did it all!”

Gabrielle was close to a hysterical breakdown, and this reunion was in danger of a quick end. To pilot her back from the brink, Dopffer addressed her in the calming, paternalistic tone he’d used at similar moments during her interrogations.

“What did you do then,” he asked in a tender voice, “when one of your lovers was strangling the other?”

“I hid in a corner,” she answered meekly. “I turned away so I didn’t have to see.”

Eyraud interrupted, declaring again what he had already told interrogators in private: It was Gabrielle who conceived the murderous plan. It was she who put the notion in his head. He was a man in love and could deny her nothing. Yes, he would kill for her!

“Oh! What cheek!” Gabrielle snorted. “This is not true! Was I the one who knew that Gouffé always had lots of money on him?” She stamped her foot: “Liar! Liar!”

Sadly, Dopffer realized the rendezvous had accomplished nothing other than inciting the accomplices, and he called a halt to the farce. The truth of the night at rue Tronson du Coudray was still hidden, perhaps forever, by the mutual loathing of the former lovers.

The press seemed to side with Eyraud. Though he proved nothing, he somehow implicated the petite demon.
“Gabrielle seems to have taken an equal part to that of Eyraud in the murder of Gouffé,” wrote
Le Matin
, “and the general opinion is that the two merit the same punishment.”

As Gabrielle left the apartment, she grabbed Soudais’s hand and placed it on her chest, declaring:
“How my heart beats!”

Riding back to the Dépôt with Goron, she raged at Eyraud:
“He’s a liar! He lies all the time. Nothing can be done with his dirty type!”

Back in her cell by 10:30 a.m., Gabrielle descended into a full-blown
hysterical attack. She became incoherent, raved like a madwoman, and writhed in convulsions. The nuns who looked after her tried their best to calm her, undressing her, cradling her, and finally putting her to bed. At last she was resting, sobbing quietly to an old nun who had an affection for her:
“Do you think, my sister, this is not abominable? That man said I did everything—and they believe his lies. Now he’s the one everyone listens to.”

Then, during the night, she went wild again, becoming delirious. In the morning, Dr. Voisin visited, pronounced her in a state of “grand weakness,” and had her transferred to the infirmary.

The old nun was worried about her young charge. So charmed was she that she disregarded her prisoner’s dark side and saw only a clever, industrious girl who had been wronged. She had put Gabrielle to work on worthwhile projects, making good use of the sewing skills she’d acquired in the convents. Gabrielle embroidered shirt collars for charity and had stitched a beautiful piece that was delivered to a needy orphan. But once it was learned whose hands had created it, the accursed collar was immediately sent back.

The confrontation on rue Tronson du Coudray proved good business for the Musée Grévin. In the aftermath, visitors crushed into the wax museum’s basement exhibit to see the remarkable likenesses of Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard.
“It is true to say that these personages are of a gripping resemblance,” observed
Le Petit Journal.

The couple’s barbed bickering found a home in French folklore. At the famous Montmartre cabaret Chat Noir, patrons sang a ditty called
“The Reconstruction of the Crime,” by the poet-performer Jules Jouy. In twenty two-line stanzas, Jouy lampooned the crucial questions of the case: Was Gabrielle conscious of her actions during the crime, and who placed the
cordelière
over Gouffé’s head?

Goron was criticized for demanding the reenactment, which the newspapers called a
“useless experience” that “did not advance the
investigation one step.” The only result, some critics observed, was that the newspapers were again filled with lurid details of the crime. Goron wrote in his memoir:
“Some political men were concerned about what they called the indiscretions of the police—or more, the indiscretions of M. Goron—because I was the one always targeted in this case.”

Days after the confrontation Gabrielle was still morose and constantly a hairsbreath away from an emotional breakdown. When she was summoned to Dopffer’s office for further questioning, she needed assistance going up the stairs at the Palais de Justice and was supported on a guard’s arm while walking the wide corridors overlooking Sainte-Chapelle. On July 14, Bastille Day,
she begged her keepers to raise her spirits by taking her out to see the celebrations. She wanted to ride through the streets in a carriage and take in the dancing and drinking, the laughter, and the French flags draped over the window ledges along the avenues. If she were lucky she might catch the parade of schoolboy rifle battalions.
“Since I am suffering you could afford me this favor,” she pleaded with her guardians. When her request was denied, she sobbed and was comforted by the old nun. To kill time, she read and sewed, and on Sundays she went to hear the prison chaplain deliver mass.