Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (34 page)

“No, Mr. President.”

Judge Robert closed the session at 5:45 p.m., and the crowd, sated on the spectacle, filed out into the subfreezing evening.

The deep chill eased a little overnight, but a wicked hailstorm in the morning sent the crowd outside the courthouse dashing for cover. When the doors finally opened, ticket holders bolted inside, pushing and shoving to claim their seats.

The scheduled witnesses were mostly bit players, except for Georges Garanger, who was to reveal his own role in the sordid affair. The gossipmongers wondered how Eyraud—and Gabrielle—would react to the sight of the dignified gentleman. Did Eyraud still harbor a murderous vengeance for him? Was Gabrielle still in love with him and might she swoon, or collapse in a hysterical attack?

She looked very pale as she made her entrance.

The witness parade began with Louis-Marie Landry, who recounted the disappearance of his brother-in-law. Georges Fribourg, the thirty-two-year-old son of the owner of Fribourg & Cie, denounced Eyraud for appropriating company funds for his private use; he produced a letter in which Eyraud threatened the elder Fribourg:
“I am ready to prove to you that I can mete out my own kind of justice.” An eighteen-year-old locksmith named Edmond Gentil from a shop on rue Saint-Jean said he repaired the trunk on July 26, 1889, the day of the crime. “I put metal bands under the bottom of it to strengthen it,” he told the court.

Judge Robert taunted Eyraud: “This was in case of what you have called an accident?”

“Yes,” Eyraud replied. “The bottom was weak.”

After a half-hour recess, Nicolas Demange, the fifty-nine-year-old husband of the concierge at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray, took the stand in place of his wife, who handled most of the duties at the site but was ill. As Demange settled in, it was apparent to everyone
that he was a clumsy, witless oaf, and before the judge could ask him anything he blurted out: “I know absolutely nothing.” When Judge Robert stated the obvious—“We know that”—the courtroom burst into laughter. Under questioning, Demange flubbed up the layout of the apartment, prompting Gabrielle to jump in: “It’s not like that. I think you should have a look.” His idiocy brought a rare moment of agreement between the two accomplices, with Eyraud defending Gabrielle: “I believe Gabrielle Bompard is right on this point.”

Denis Coffy, the road mender in Millery, described finding the corpse at the foot of an acacia bush: “I nearly suffocated at that moment.” And Alphonse Richard, a thirty-six-year-old day farmer, declared proudly: “It is I who found the trunk.”

At last, the adventurer-businessman Georges Garanger, who had managed to keep out of the limelight throughout the investigation, strode toward the witness stand. He was a handsome forty-six-year-old with a strong neck, cheerful face, and red beard trimmed to a point, although one newspaper commented that
“his peregrinations around the world have left him prematurely fatigued.” He had a wealthy, well-fed look, a roundness of the body. Gabrielle glanced at him, then covered her face with a handkerchief.

Garanger spoke in a monotone, his sober voice drained of any emotion as he recounted meeting Eyraud and Gabrielle and believing that they were E. B. Vanaerd and his daughter Berthe. He spoke of signing a business contract with Vanaerd and of learning later that Vanaerd was Eyraud and that the proposed business was a fraud. He said he gave Eyraud five thousand francs before he and Gabrielle set off together for France, money Eyraud swindled from him.

Judge Robert, turning to Eyraud, said, “What do you have to say to this?”

“I absolutely deny having received five thousand francs from Mr. Garanger.” Eyraud challenged Garanger to produce a receipt for the money.

“I told him it wasn’t necessary,” Garanger explained, “because we were in business together.”

Eyraud volleyed back: “Mr. Garanger is not a man to give five thousand francs in the first place without getting a receipt.”

Garanger sensibly asked, “Can the witness say how he was able to live in San Francisco without my money?”

Eyraud ignored the question and accused Garanger of trying to swindle his brother-in-law in Paris out of the five thousand francs for a bogus repayment.

Gabrielle, unable to watch the confrontation between her lovers, put her head down and chewed on her handkerchief.

The prosecutor Quesnay de Beaurepaire pressed Eyraud: “You did not answer the question the witness posed to you. How did you live in San Francisco, if it was not with his money?”

“I had arrived in San Francisco with three hundred francs,” Eyraud said.

Gabrielle suddenly looked up and shouted, “He had fifteen francs in his pocket!”

“When Mr. Garanger says I swindled him of five thousand francs, that’s slander,” Eyraud cried.

Gabrielle shouted, “We constantly lived on the money from Garanger. He does not want to admit it, but that’s the truth.”

Garanger interjected that Eyraud only wanted to harm him in every possible way. “Everything he said is a fabric of lies.”

“The slander is on your part,” Eyraud shot back. “You told the newspapers I wanted to kill you.”

“I never said anything to the newspapers.”

Eyraud was in a rage,
“furious at the witness,”
Le Figaro
said, adding wryly: “If he were free, he’d have thrown himself on him to eat his nose.”

Judge Robert incited passions further. “Eyraud,” he said, “the truth is that you never forgave Mr. Garanger for taking Gabrielle Bompard from you.”

At that, Gabrielle shrieked: “He did not take me!” She threw her arms into the air. “It is I who left with—” Whatever she said after that was drowned out by thunderous laughter.

Eyraud, sensing her fragile state, gave her a push. “Mr. Garanger,” he said, “would you like to comment on Gabrielle’s mental condition?”

“My mental condition!” she cried. “I took a carriage and I went to the prefecture—and voilà!”

After two days in the dock, swinging between frenzy and apathy, Gabrielle now plunged over the cliff. She waved her arms, cried out hoarsely, and stamped her feet until she fell backward and came to rest in a catatonic state on the floor behind the bench. A guard swooped
in and lifted the childlike figure in his arms. Pandemonium broke out in the courtroom as spectators climbed on their seats, straining for a look. Suddenly she came alive and cried out hysterically:
“Oh Michel! Michel! Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” Doctors rushed to her, one administering ether while another unlaced her clothing, and she was carried from the courtroom.

In America, these theatrics left newspaper readers puzzled. Comparing courtroom conduct in the two nations, the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote that there were many more opportunities for dramatics in a French proceeding.
“One defendant is allowed to contradict the other in court, and even to terrify her into hysterics, and it is all considered as proper and tending to further the ends of justice. It may be that the system is more effectual, but it is revolting to our ideas.”

After a half-hour recess, Gabrielle reappeared, without her hat, her hair in disarray. She had a lace wrap around her shoulders. Her face was drawn, her skin pale. The courtroom physician, Dr. Floquet, sat at her side in the dock for the duration of the session.

When court resumed, her lawyer, Henri Robert, had a question for Garanger, playing off her display of hysteria in front of the jury.

“Mr. Garanger,” he began, “didn’t you often put Gabrielle Bompard to sleep? Wasn’t she a very remarkable subject for hypnotism?”

“That’s correct,” Garanger said.

The lawyer then sought to establish a crucial fact: that Gabrielle was so extraordinarily sensitive to hypnosis that even someone with little experience as a hypnotist could induce a deep trance in her and take possession of her will. He asked the witness, “Do you have expertise in matters of hypnotism?”

Giving the jury something to ponder, Garanger replied, “I don’t know anything at all.”

On day three, snowflakes drifted out of a gloomy sky, blocks of ice clogged the Seine, and snow-draped construction sites were shut down. Some twelve thousand masons trudged home, temporarily out of work. It was such a dreary day that Judge Robert ordered the gas lamps in the courtroom to be fully lighted. In the press gallery, journalists hovered over candles in their inkwells.
“The line of flickering lights gave the press bench the aura of a small chapel,” one scribe wrote.

In the dock Gabrielle sat almost motionless. From time to time she stirred and kneaded her handkerchief in her fingers then resumed her passivity, looking almost lifeless.

The session opened at eleven forty-five, but then Judge Robert immediately halted it when he realized the jury chief was absent. Fifteen minutes later, the missing juror climbed into the box. This was the day for the
“princes of science,” as they were known: the doctors who investigated Gabrielle’s mental state, the medical examiners who studied the corpse, and the Bompard family physician who knew Gabrielle before her slide into crime.

Before the scientists, however, came another parade of ordinary witnesses. In its edition that morning
Le Figaro
had already lamented the previous day’s procession:
“Thirty witnesses,” the paper complained, “one more insipid than the next. This Gouffé case is so worn out that at each new deposition, one wants to cry out: ‘Move on then! It’s already known.’ ”

Heedless of the complaint, the court introduced a stream of fresh witnesses, including Léon Darras, a workman who told the court that Eyraud once boasted to him:
“If someone bothers me, I’d open his stomach like a dog’s.” And there was Joseph Taurel, a forty-year-old
acquaintance of Eyraud’s in America who gave the weary audience a moment of mirth at his own expense. When the judge asked him if Eyraud chased women, Taurel replied, “That I cannot tell you, having never had relations with a woman myself.”

A friend of Eyraud’s cast doubt on Gabrielle’s truthfulness. In a deposition read to the court in his absence, a hypnotist named Risler claimed he regularly put Gabrielle into a trance at the Paris salon of Madame Marmier. “Gabrielle Bompard had some very bad habits,” he said in the document. “There was more: she was a liar.”

Judge Robert asked Gabrielle: “Did Risler put you to sleep?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Then the judge zeroed in on the key question. “Did Eyraud put you to sleep?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Did he try?”

“I don’t know.”

“During the investigation, you said he tried and he couldn’t.”

“All right then,” she said testily. “No, he was not able to put me to sleep.”

Her answer was baffling. Did Gabrielle just purposely shatter her own defense? Did she even realize what she did and, if so, why would she sabotage herself? Had her mind become so weak that she would send herself to the guillotine? During her pretrial interrogation she often admitted to what she thought investigators wanted her to confess just so they’d leave her alone. She may have wanted to put an end to questioning on a subject for which she simply didn’t have an answer. It was possible, in fact, that she didn’t know whether Eyraud ever succeeded in hypnotizing her. If he did put her into a trance he could have planted a posthypnotic suggestion that wiped out her memory of the experience afterward. So she could truthfully have had no recollection of having been hypnotized even though it might very well have occurred. What seemed a crippling admission was in fact evidence that could save her. Her attorney, Henri Robert, only had to assert that she had participated in the murder in a hypnotic trance but didn’t have a clear recollection of it because of a posthypnotic suggestion. This reasoning bolstered the argument that she was unconscious of her actions, that she had surrendered her will to Eyraud and therefore had no responsibility in the commission of the crime.

Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the forensic medical expert in Lyon who teased Gouffé’s identity out of the rotted cadaver, took the stand. “Dr. Lacassagne,” inquired Henri Robert, “did you not observe lesions in the area of the neck? Did they come, in your opinion, from strangulation produced with a rope or with the hand?”

Henri Robert asked that the
cordelière
be placed in Dr. Lacassagne’s hands.

“I repeat,” said Lacassagne through his bushy mustache, “that these lesions were caused by the act of the pressing of some fingers.”

The judge turned to Eyraud. “Did you grab the victim by the throat?”

“No,” Eyraud said.

Albert Danet, Gouffé’s daughters’ attorney, requested that Gabrielle be invited to explain what happened. She repeated what she had said earlier, adding that Eyraud threw Gouffé to the floor and put a knee on his stomach and strangled him.

“Where were you?” Danet asked Gabrielle.

“Right next to the table.”

“He grabbed him, you say,” the judge asked. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Gabrielle replied with annoyance. “He threw him down and strangled him. I was terrified!”

Eyraud leaped up. “In another deposition,” he asserted, “Gabrielle said I put the cord around Gouffé’s neck.”

“I never said that,” she snapped.

“She said it,” Eyraud insisted. “I will indicate the passage for you.”

Félix Decori, Eyraud’s attorney, thumbed through a stack of papers.

Gabrielle’s lawyer, Henri Robert, came to her defense: “A nervous and impressionable woman could not have had the presence of mind to remember all the details from a scene like that.”

“I ask the doctor,” Eyraud said, turning to Lacassagne, “how long does it take to strangle a man like Gouffé?”

“Sometimes it only takes a very short time,” Lacassagne offered. “A simple pressure on the neck, even light and momentary, could be enough.”

Decori found the passage from Gabrielle’s deposition and read it into the record. His role was to defend Eyraud, but the passage he read damned his client. Gabrielle had testified that Eyraud came out of hiding and put the
cordelière
around Gouffé’s neck. But Gouffé
was not hanged, she said. “Eyraud gave up hanging Gouffé. He dropped the rope and grabbed him by the neck and strangled him. Monsieur Gouffé neither spoke a word nor uttered a cry. It was done very quickly. It did not last more than two seconds.
I
was in the corner of the room, terrified.” No one seemed to notice that this testimony conflicted with other statements Gabrielle had made. She had also said that Eyraud strangled Gouffé after the pulley collapsed and the two men dropped to the floor.