Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (32 page)

In front of the judge’s dais stood the evidence table, a sight certain to sober jovial spirits. There lay the revolver seized from Eyraud in Havana, his suitcases, Gouffé’s silk hat that Eyraud mistook for his own, the Turkish robe, the red silk
cordelière.
The notorious trunk also was present, covered in a yellow cloth. The wooden table’s long history was evident in its scratched surface, as a journalist put it:
“What countless vials of vitriol, revolvers and knives, blood-stained garments, from satin dresses to workmen’s blouses and ladies’ corsets, have been piled up in this Morgue for things inanimate!”

At 11:45, Judge Robert entered and summoned the twelve jurors one by one, who took their seats in the box. The lawyers for the defense, Félix Decori, representing Eyraud, and Henri Robert, Gabrielle’s
counsel, strode across the courtroom in their robes and caps. Along with them came the lawyer Albert Danet, known in the halls of justice as
“honeyed, persuasive, irresistible,” who represented Gouffé’s daughters as civil parties in the case.

Appearing for the state was France’s renowned chief prosecutor, Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who took on the case not just because of its notoriety but because a forceful closing statement rebutting the unprecedented hypnotism defense required a man of his prominence. Quesnay de Beaurepaire was a fifty-two-year-old legal lion and man of letters who wrote stories of French peasant life. His was a family of high ambitions: His great-grandfather bought the estates of Beaurepaire and Glouvet from the Marquise de Pompadour and adopted the name Beaurepaire for an aura of nobility. Quesnay de Beaurepaire was a devotee of Napoleon III until his downfall; then he switched allegiance to the Third Republic. He moved in elite circles and was known for taking on the toughest cases, most often the ones that posed a threat to the Republic; his latest claim to fame was the prosecution in absentia of Georges Boulanger, the rebellious general and potential leader of a coup d’état who had fled the country a year earlier. Although a bit frail on his feet, Quesnay de Beaurepaire was given to grand theatrical gestures. He had a bony, clean-shaven face and a mocking eye. Adorned in his red robe, he wore his legal cap tilted toward the back of his head in a jaunty, collegiate flourish. A man of unsurpassed eminence in the courtroom, Quesnay de Beaurepaire was one of the chief reasons lawyers in robes fought for a seat on the spectator bench.

Now the stage was set for the entrance of the leading players. There was a stirring as a door in the courtroom wall was opened. Someone cried out:
“Les voici!”
(There they are!) In a scuffling of heels everyone shot to their feet, and those who had their views blocked by ornate female hats cried out:
“Assis! Assis!”
(Sit down! Sit down!)

The first defendant to make an appearance was Michel Eyraud, looking large and powerful in a black frock coat. His thick mustache and short hair were neatly groomed. Holding his hat in his hand, he cast his eyes on the packed courtroom then looked away.

When Gabrielle Bompard stepped into the doorway a melee broke out as spectators fought for a glimpse, sending the bailiffs rushing forward. Judge Robert, seeing his court personnel outmanned, exclaimed:
“But we’re missing a bailiff here!”

The irony wasn’t lost on the crowd—and laughter erupted as someone hollered:
“For sure!”

Once order was restored, Gabrielle was led in wearing a black dress with a dotted veil, a winter coat, gloves with four buttons, and a close-fitting round hat with otter trim. She looked out at the courtroom, then lowered her head and was escorted to the dock. Eyraud, who was already there, separated by a wooden partition, threw
“a furtive, hateful look her way,” according to one report. The judge ordered Gabrielle to lift the veil and keep her face visible at all times.

The proceedings began with a
reading of the charges. Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard were accused of committing voluntary homicide in the death of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé on July 26, 1889, with premeditation. The homicide also involved acts of ambush and robbery. Although the charges were already fully known, Eyraud made a show of listening attentively, while Gabrielle dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes and was heard to sob.

The theater of the streets had come indoors: The actors knew their roles, though their lines were unscripted. And the setting—this temple of justice where Christ gazed down from a massive wood cross
on the paneled wall—promised God’s judgment, both solemn and majestic. While the stakes could not have been higher for the accused, the spectators decked out in all their finery settled in to be entertained.
“To imagine the Assize,” a later court observer wrote, “let us choose a day when a crime célèbre is being tried; on such days, when the Parisian Court session is invaded by the public, the dominant note … is gaiety.”

Judge Robert, the president of the court, began by laying out the case against the defendants, a proceeding that typically mocks, and even demeans, the accused.
“The defendant is immediately put upon his defense,” an American legal scholar wrote, describing the difference between U.S. and French legal procedure at the time. “The reasoning is that the defendant having reached the Cour d’Assises must explain why he is in court.” The judge uses the opening examination to set the tone for the trial, exposing to the jury the facts in the dossier; it was a presentation known to be “usually long, involved, minute … one-sided” and “highly prejudicial.” Americans took a withering view of French judicial procedures, which were an affront to the honored premise in the United States that a defendant was innocent until proven guilty. Writing in 1891,
The Washington Post
noted that the French
“president of the court, instead of being … prepared to hold the scales of justice impartially between the prisoner and the state, has informed himself of the charges in advance, and with his mind apparently made up that the prisoner is guilty, proceeds to get the jury into a similar frame of mind. He virtually acts as coadjutor in the prosecution.”

Judge Robert chose to present evidence against Eyraud first; so Gabrielle, who was not invited to witness it, was escorted out of the courtroom. The judge began with a review of Eyraud’s past, painting it in the harshest possible light. He enumerated the defendant’s shady business and private dealings: the distillery in Sèvres, the theft of funds from Fribourg & Cie, his failure to pay a Paris jeweler for a ring and earrings, his violent streak.

“All this pales next to the crime I’m blamed for,” Eyraud commented sensibly.

A murmuring throughout the courtroom suggested that the spectators agreed with him, and the judge was wasting his time on trivialities.

“I bring it up,” the judge retorted, “to show what kind of man you are and how you graduated to murder.”

To demonstrate the depth of Eyraud’s brutality, Judge Robert asked if he wasn’t violent even toward his own mother, and then he described his attempt to extort money from her on the pretext of saving the family vineyard.

“That’s slander!” Eyraud cried.

The accused acknowledged that he’d had a hand in a crime, and he was prepared to accept the consequences. But, he demanded, “I don’t want anyone discussing my past.”

“That’s a very arrogant position,” the judge warned him.

Although Eyraud was reviled as a brutal strangler, most important to him was protecting scraps of his imagined reputation. “I will defend my past,” he asserted.

Judge Robert charged that Eyraud had corrupted Gabrielle, an allegation more rhetorical than factual; the subtleties of truth were dismissed as the judge sought to fashion a thoroughly reprehensible image of Eyraud for the jury. In a French trial, the judge, defendants, and witnesses were all permitted to speak more freely than they were in an American court; attorneys, however, had no recourse to correct erroneous or misleading statements either through objections or cross-examinations, the result being an imperfect, messy journey toward justice.

Drawing on the dossier, the judge asserted that Gabrielle had met Eyraud when she went to his office at Fribourg & Cie looking for work.

“No, I met her on the boulevard,” Eyraud countered, implying that she was a woman of loose morals offering herself on the street. He added: “I will prove it.” Here was the con man at work. He would say anything, float any proposition, in the hope that it would stick—that it would influence the jury.

“It’s a minor point,” the judge said dismissively. What was important, he continued, was that she became Eyraud’s mistress and that he introduced her to his degenerate lifestyle; he took her to disreputable places and even turned her into a prostitute to collect the cash. “You robbed her of her morals to the point where this girl, who still had a certain discretion, who still was chaste enough in her language, began
to express herself in such obscene terms that some women, even those who were not themselves virtuous, completely broke off with her.”

“That’s false.”

The judge retorted that Gabrielle entertained numerous lovers for pay and that Eyraud lived off the proceeds.

“That’s slander!” Eyraud charged.

Amid these exchanges, a juror suddenly fell ill, causing a small commotion in the jurors’ box and forcing the judge to declare a brief recess.

When court resumed just before 3:00 p.m., Judge Robert reminded the jury that by June 1889, Eyraud had fled in disgrace from Fribourg & Cie and no longer had any means of income, ill-gotten or not.

“Didn’t you often have the intention of killing someone to procure money for yourself?” he prodded.

“Never.”

“Who had the idea of extortion, blackmail, and murder?”

“That’s Gabrielle Bompard.”

Eyraud told the court that at first Gabrielle devised a robbery plot. She had her sights set on a very rich gentleman she knew, a jeweler reputed always to have a fat wallet on him and pockets full of jewels. “I was shocked,” Eyraud said. “But she insisted. One night we had a violent discussion and I had no choice except to hit her to make her stop talking.” But she wouldn’t drop it, Eyraud insisted; she talked incessantly about finding someone rich to rob so Eyraud could pay off his debts and the couple could flee to Argentina and live a tranquil life. “She said it so much I finally agreed,” he explained.

Although they hadn’t yet decided on a victim, they plotted their method of attack. “She spoke to me of a rope that we would pass through a pulley,” Eyraud said. “I would only have to pull on it.” He described the trip to London, shopping for fabric for a sack, the purchase of a
cordelière
, then, back in Paris, renting the apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray. “One night, Gabrielle said to me, ‘Your friend Gouffé is rich. He has a lot of money. He gives lots of money to women!’ ” Eyraud claimed that he didn’t know Gouffé was rich but he asked around and discovered that the bailiff was indeed quite wealthy. On July 26, Eyraud nailed the pulley into the ceiling crossbeam.
“Then Gabrielle set out to trap Gouffé. She encountered him on the boulevard and set a rendezvous for that night at eight.” Eyraud left out his role in the entrapment. Gabrielle had explained her version to Dopffer, that Eyraud’s strategy was to purposely bump into Gouffé and tell him he’d ended things with Gabrielle and urge him to see her, and then to position Gabrielle on the boulevard so she, too, would bump into Gouffé moments later to confirm the breakup and invite him to the apartment that evening.

At eight fifteen Gouffé entered the apartment and, according to Eyraud, told Gabrielle, “You have a very pretty little nest.”

The judge wanted to know if Gabrielle then sat on Gouffé’s lap.

“Yes. He kissed her.”

“And he fondled her more or less?”

The judge’s high-pitched voice posing a salacious question like that in a solemn setting like this was too much for the crowd. There was an outburst of laughter, which caused the judge to flare with anger. “In a case of this gravity,” he scolded the courtroom in his soprano pitch, “I do not understand the attitude of the public. If this reaction occurs again,” he warned, his voice undermining his authority, “I will have the room evacuated.” Then he went right back to his bawdy line of inquiry: “He fondled her?”

“Yes,” Eyraud said. “He kissed her on the face.”

“And then?” the judge asked.

“No, sir, just on the face.”

The judge wouldn’t let it go: “He at least began to open her dressing gown?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Eyraud acknowledged.

The plan, the suspect maintained, was just to frighten Gouffé: toss the
cordelière
over his head and give a tug on the rope to ensure he knew they meant business. The killers intended only to hide him in the apartment while his family delivered money to a location Gouffé was to designate in a letter. But as the plot moved forward, it swung out of control. The
cordelière
was on Gouffé’s neck and Eyraud pulled down on the rope. “I looked through the curtain,” he said, “and unfortunately the accident had happened. I found I was in the presence of an inanimate body. I slapped his hands. I blew on his face. Nothing there. No one there. I was shattered. I cried.”

But, the judge reminded him, his anguish didn’t prevent him
from running off to Gouffé’s office and rummaging in the dark with lighted matches on a blind hunt for cash. “Perhaps you had planned on extortion,” he said. “But then you changed your mind and decided to murder him and then rob his office.”

“Not at all,” Eyraud pushed back. “I was very agitated. I went back to rue Tronson du Coudray and I said to Gabrielle, ‘We’re lost!’ I wanted to blow my brains out. I drank a bottle of cognac. But I wasn’t tipsy enough. So I drank a bottle of champagne.” Eyraud failed to mention that Gabrielle claimed he raped her that night. Instead, he said of his drinking binge, “I needed to give myself courage. I had never touched a dead person in my life.”

The judge asked about the diamond-and-sapphire ring Eyraud stripped from the victim’s pinkie. “What did you do with the diamonds?”

“Gabrielle had them made into a pair of earrings.”

“What happened to the earrings?”