Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (33 page)

“They were left in San Francisco,” the accused said, “in a pawnshop, as I recall.”

The judge then pointed out other evidence indicating not accidental murder but premeditation: the existence of the oilcloth that went over the corpse’s head, the giant sack the size of a man sewn by Gabrielle, and the trunk. He asked cynically if these materials were bought in anticipation of an accident.

“In preparation for a possible accident, yes,” Eyraud replied. “But I was convinced I wouldn’t make use of them.”

“So, all was ready in preparation for a murder,” the judge concluded.

Jurors had a look at photographs of the murder scene at rue Tronson du Coudray. Then Judge Robert took the red
cordelière
from the evidence table—it was not the sash used in the killing but a similar one purchased in London at the same store as the original. The judge instructed Eyraud to show the jury how he transformed it for use in the killing. The defendant obliged willingly, with foolish pride—his thick fingers working coolly and swiftly, turning the silk cord into a noose.

Watching Eyraud in court Jaume couldn’t help being impressed by his performance.
“He is energetic, lucid and crafty,” the inspector wrote. “Eyraud is no longer abject. But he is not yet sympathetic.
He could not be. He has no physical beauty, no youth.” In Jaume’s estimation, Eyraud lacked an important poetic quality, something that Gabrielle possessed. He was all too real, his degenerate brutality was an ugly fact, while Gabrielle was chimera-like, impossible to fully behold; she was seen through a gauze of mystery like a heroine in a novel. Eyraud was easy to hate. Gabrielle, by contrast, was an object of wonder.

The judge declared:
“Bring back Gabrielle Bompard.”

The door in the wall opened and there stood the little demon in her simple black dress. There was a murmuring, an alertness, from the press on the benches in front all the way to the riffraff standing in back as she was led across the floor and seated in the dock.

Judge Robert agreed with the conclusions of the dossier: Gabrielle was guilty of the murder, her responsibility was as absolute as Eyraud’s, and there was no reason to impose extenuating circumstances because of the influence of hypnotism or mental instability. The judge’s examination of Gabrielle took the shape of a prolonged accusation intended to convey his position to the jury. He recited the facts of her life, her birth in Lille in 1868, her father’s wealth, her mother’s death, her boarding with her uncle in Belgium, her residence in a variety of convents.

“Everywhere it was observed that you had a rare intelligence but at the same time you were very vicious. Is this true?”

Gabrielle ignored the question, or perhaps wasn’t listening. She seemed a million miles away, barely engaged in these proceedings which held her life in the balance.

“Answer,” the judge demanded. “You know very well how to speak when you want.”

She maintained a surly silence and looked bored. Her stubbornness would not play well with the jury. In a French court, a defendant had to show an effort to defend herself or risk appearing all the more guilty. If Eyraud lost sympathy because of his hostility, Gabrielle sank in the eyes of the jury because of her sullenness, her unwillingness to fight for herself.

The judge prodded her again: “Your conduct was such that your
father had to send you to a convent for delinquent girls. Your vicious behavior was commented upon there as it was everywhere. Is this true?”

Finally she spoke in a soft, reluctant voice: “Yes, Mr. President.”

“You returned to your father’s home and he wanted to put you to work. But the work bored you and you passed your time reading novels.”

“I was never happy at my father’s home,” she replied. “I do not want to talk about that chapter of my life.”

The judge moved on to her departure from home, her arrival in Paris, her rapid squandering of her money, and her appearance before Eyraud at Fribourg & Cie in search of a job.

“Almost immediately you became his mistress.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How could you have stayed with him, a man of forty-nine and you—you were only twenty?”

“Misery makes you do many things.”

“You know Eyraud claims he encountered you on the boulevard.”

“That’s false.”

Eyraud shouted from the dock: “The dossier contains convincing proof the Bompard girl does not speak the truth.”

Ignoring the interruption, the judge mentioned Gabrielle’s beatings by Eyraud. “If he beat you, why didn’t you leave him?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I couldn’t.”

“Eyraud claims it’s he who couldn’t separate from you.”

This seemed preposterous to Gabrielle. “What influence could I have had on him?”

The judge offered his jaundiced view: “You wouldn’t be the first woman who had the power to exert an influence.”

“What would you have liked me to do?” Gabrielle asked. “Take up with another man?”

To which the judge replied, “That wouldn’t have bothered you much.”

The interrogation jumped to the murderers’ activities in London: the purchase of the trunk, the
cordelière
, the rope, the large pieces of fabric.

“He had me make a sack without telling me what it was for,” Gabrielle said.

“How could you—who are so intelligent—how could you make this large sack destined to contain a man who is five feet nine inches tall without asking what this could be used for?”

Gabrielle replied with stony indifference: “I didn’t ask him why it was made and he didn’t tell me.”

“You don’t habitually make sacks,” the judge pressed. “Eyraud doesn’t usually use them, and you didn’t ask for any explanation?”

“I would have been beaten,” she explained.

Judge Robert didn’t understand how Gabrielle could have rented the apartment on rue Tronson du Coudray if she and Eyraud were pressed for money. She ignored the financial question and merely suggested she was sleepwalking at the time.

“I had only to obey,” she said. “Eyraud wanted it.”

“But this does not explain it,” the judge reasoned. “This was a man who did not have money.”

“I could only obey,” Gabrielle repeated. “He would have killed me if I had questioned him.”

“When did you first become aware of this planned crime?”

She knew nothing until the day it took place: Friday. “He told me: ‘If Gouffé doesn’t give me money, I’m going to hang him.’ That made me laugh a lot. I found it very funny. I couldn’t believe he was serious.”

“When Gouffé arrived, what did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘Hello, little demon!’ ”

“Wasn’t that the moment to tell him he was in great danger? You knew that Eyraud wanted to hang him.”

Alerting Gouffé was impossible, for Eyraud was within earshot behind the curtain. “If I said a word, he would have come out. I didn’t dare.”

“There was a chaise longue,” the judge said, urging her to go on.

But suddenly, as she approached the moment of the killing, Gabrielle seemed to have drifted away. “Ah, yes,” she said.

“He lay down?”

Her mind was somewhere else. “I think he sat down.”

“You were very close to him or far from him?”

She was lost now. “I don’t know.”

“You were not sitting on his lap?”

“No.”

“He didn’t kiss you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t have a
cordelière
around your body?”

The judge might have asked her anything—her answer would have been the same.

“No,” she said.

“What did you say to him?”

“I don’t know.” After several moments, she said, “I’m lost in all this.” Her voice was aloof, her eyes had gone blank, she was unreachable.

Was this a calculated act? Was she performing for the jury? Or was she losing touch with reality? Was her mind melting?

Judge Robert again asked about her actions just prior to the murder, when she was entertaining Gouffé. But she ignored the questions and skipped to the final moment.

“Gouffé found himself face-to-face with Eyraud,” she said, then added with coolness: “It’s at this moment he strangled him.”

“What did you do?”

“When Eyraud seized Gouffé, I let out a cry.”

“You were only a witness, you didn’t play any part.”

“None.”

The judge contradicted her: “That’s really unlikely or very implausible. If things happened like this, Gouffé would have had time to cry out. He could have been heard. He could have thrown himself against the window and called for help. Things could not have happened the way you say. The passersby would have heard.”

“Passersby on a deserted street?”

“People taking in the cool air in their doorways. We are in the month of July. It was very hot.”

“I cannot tell you anything but what I know,” Gabrielle replied. “Wasn’t I the one who first told you the story of the pulley? And you told me that I was mad.”

“Not at all,” the judge said. “No one said that to you.”

“Oh yes, the investigating judge told me I’d read all this in a novel. He even cited the page to me.”

“The truth,” Judge Robert asserted, “is that it was you who organized everything. You prepared the crime.”

“How? Do you think that if I’d been free, I’d have stayed there?”
An odd laugh fluttered out of her, and she said, as if responding to something in her head: “No, not that!”

“Gouffé dies,” the judge went on. “What happens then?”

“He undressed him, tied him up, put him in the sack, pushing him into it as if putting on a glove.”

“Eyraud claims you helped him in this job.”

“In that?” Again, she shuddered and gave an odd laugh.

“He also remembers this: Gouffé seemed to have opened his eyes in the midst of all this. And you said, ‘Take care—he’ll recognize us. Finish him!’ ”

“Me?” Gabrielle scoffed. “That’s something I’d have said? It’s the first I ever heard of it.”

“What’s the point? Why would he say it if it’s not true?”

“Because I betrayed him,” she said angrily. Then, with indifference: “It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to me.”

“Really? When the guillotine is waiting?”

“Oh, I assure you. Yes, it’s all the same to me.”

The judge pressed Gabrielle on why she stayed with the cadaver after Eyraud departed for the night. If she were innocent, as she claimed, she could have fled. “You could have placed yourself under the protection of the police.”

“I could not.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t.” Was she implying she had lost the will to act on her own? “If there had been a whole regiment there, I could not have been able to run away.”

The judged changed direction. “You’re vague about Eyraud’s role. How did he throw the
cordelière
over Gouffé’s head?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’d he do it?”

“Gouffé turned around,” she said. “He recognized him. So Eyraud strangled him.”

“And Gouffé didn’t say one word?”

“No, not one.”

“But, still, how did Eyraud throw the
cordelière
over him?”

“I told you everything I know. To me, Gouffé was not hanged. He was strangled.”

Surprisingly, Eyraud kept silent.

Judge Robert called a twenty-minute recess, then questioned Eyraud again, keeping Gabrielle in the courtroom this time. The judge went through the disposal of the body, the sojourn in Marseille with Eyraud’s brother Jean-Baptiste, the return to Paris, and the defendants’ departure from France. He moved on to their introduction to Georges Garanger in Vancouver.

“You had the idea of exploiting Mr. Garanger?” the judge said.

“Never.”

“What did you do in San Francisco?”

Eyraud, still the con man, rattled off a series of lies. “I wanted to start a business,” he told the courtroom, though everyone already knew the fraudulent nature of that ambition. “Garanger followed me everywhere. He told me, ‘I am a gentleman. Have confidence in me. I’ve just made a trip to Indochina to guarantee French interests there.’ That’s when he asked me for Gabrielle’s hand in marriage. I wanted to say to him that she is not my daughter but my mistress.”

“Stop there,” the judge instructed Eyraud. Turning to Gabrielle, he said, “Recount the facts for us as you remember them.”

Gabrielle described their hasty retreat from France, her dressing as a boy with her hair cut short, their meeting Garanger in Vancouver and his arrival in San Francisco. “He was with us almost every day,” she told the judge. “And then Eyraud said to me, ‘I don’t have any more money. Garanger has ten thousand francs on him. I’m going to lure him outside of San Francisco and kill him.’ I was absolutely opposed to this and I told him, ‘Rob him if you want, but I don’t want you to kill him.’ I was afraid he was going to do something.”

So she followed them everywhere; she didn’t want Garanger to be alone with Eyraud. And once, when Gabrielle and Eyraud were alone, he became enraged. “Now you’re going to have your turn,” Gabrielle said he told her. “He tried to force a bottle of chloroform into my mouth but I got away from him.”

She described leaving with Garanger and being free of Eyraud. “I laughed a lot. I was so happy to escape him finally.” And in Paris she went to the prefect of police.

“What did you tell the prefect?” the judge asked.

“I don’t remember. All I know is that my story was not completely true.”

“If only all of it wasn’t true!” the judge offered dramatically.

“It’s all so tangled,” she said simply.

“Eyraud,” the judge said, “you’ve heard all this. What do you have to say?”

“I never intended to murder Garanger.”

For the jury’s benefit, the judge then had Eyraud recount his life alone on the run from San Francisco to Mexico to Havana and then his capture. By the time Eyraud ended his tale the courtroom was darkening.

The judge recapped, turning to Eyraud: “So, according to you, the crime was inspired by Gabrielle Bompard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At first you resisted, then you yielded, and the two of you participated together.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“The woman Bompard,” the judge said, turning toward Gabrielle, “do you have any further explanation?”