Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (35 page)

Amid the confusion of the proceedings, spectators welcomed the occasional slide into slapstick. As Paul Bernard, the thirty-one-year-old medical examiner from Lyon, testified, Judge Robert ordered that the sack that once contained Gouffé’s decomposed body be put on display for the jury. A courtroom porter went to the evidence table, opened a sealed bag, and pulled out the soiled burlap sack. Immediately, a ghastly stench—the same misery that overwhelmed the small town of Millery—spread throughout the courtroom. Amid the groaning and blatant discomfort, the judge sensibly advised the jurors not to breathe too deeply, causing a burst of laughter. After a few moments, the judge instructed the porter to stuff the murder sack back into the bag and seal it up again. He then invited the poor man to leave the room to wash his hands, and the room again burst into laughter.

Dr. Paul Brouardel knew more than anybody about the personal life and criminal instincts of Gabrielle Bompard. He and doctors Auguste Motet and Gilbert Ballet had conducted a months-long medical examination to assess her motives, her susceptibility to hypnosis, her criminal responsibility. Brouardel began his presentation to the court by summarizing his conclusions, although they were already well-known to everyone in attendance. The doctor’s report, which was never meant to be published, found its way into the newspapers and became the subject of dinner conversation in Paris.

As Brouardel revealed intimate details of her personal life, Gabrielle hid her head in her hands. He reminded the jurors of her birth in Lille, her childhood spent in a series of convents, her early obesity, her slimming down by age seventeen, her tiny stature. He noted that she reached puberty at a very young age:
“She became a woman at an age that one almost never is, at eight.”

The audience listened in rapt silence.

Brouardel found that Gabrielle had no hereditary predisposition for crime and admitted that she had an extraordinary intelligence but also a tendency toward amoral behavior.

“From another point of view,” he explained, “we found that she was incontestably a hysteric.”

Now he had crept to the edge of the hypnotism debate. Using Charcot as his guide, Brouardel told the courtroom he had concluded that Gabrielle was not a grand hysteric but rather subject to small attacks of nerves. This was an important distinction. If she were a grand hysteric, along the lines of the women locked up at the Salpêtrière Hospital, she would also be prone to episodes of grand hypnotism—raising the possibility that she could be induced to act in
almost any way while in a trance. A diagnosis of grand hysteria would have supported the defense’s argument that Gabrielle could have been under a hypnotist’s control when she participated in the murder.

Brouardel was firmly on the side of the prosecution; he appeared as an expert witness not to pronounce objectively on Gabrielle’s mental condition but to help build the case against her and ensure the failure of the hypnotism defense. He, therefore, needed to demolish the contentions of the Nancy school, so he went after its leader, Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim, telling the jury: “The day after we finished our exam, we read an interview with Dr. Bernheim in the journal
Hypnotism
in which he declared that this young woman, whom he had never seen, had certainly acted under the influence of hypnotism. We were therefore obliged to examine her from this point of view.” Brouardel and his associates hypnotized Gabrielle, and the sessions proved to him that she was only a
petite hypnotique.
“She went to sleep and presented some phenomena that were absolutely trivial from the point of view of hypnotism,” he testified. Gabrielle was extremely intelligent and she understood the consequences of her actions, he added. Although slightly hysterical, she was in full command of herself. “At no moment was she unconscious of her behavior,” Brouardel concluded. “She is therefore responsible for her actions.”

Gabrielle’s lawyer, Henri Robert, strode forward. He needed to prove that Gabrielle was as hysterical and as prone to deep hypnosis as the women of the Salpêtrière. One symptom of the
grandes hypnotiques
was their intense physical sensitivities in certain parts of their bodies. The newspapers had already reported that Gabrielle had hyperesthesia—abnormal skin sensitivity—a fact Brouardel had left out of his deposition.

“Did you observe some points of exaggerated sensitivity on Gabrielle Bompard?” Henri Robert asked him.

“Yes, there is exaggerated sensitivity in the arms. If one touches her arms she jumps.”

“Did you observe that her crises of hysteria were more tragic than in others? That’s the word you used in your report.”

“I said that in my report,” Brouardel admitted. “In her attacks of nerves she indicates a terror of Eyraud. I don’t know if this is the same in all of her attacks, but in front of me she was like this. I would say, however, that my use of the word
tragic
was a bit exaggerated.”

“Does not one encounter these terrors in grand hysteria?” the lawyer persisted.

“It did not resemble that at all,” Brouardel countered. “It’s like what a little bronchitis is next to deadly pneumonia.”

But, Henri Robert persisted, wouldn’t repeated hypnotization, as Gabrielle had experienced through her life, have a profound impact on her? It was understood that the more often a person went into a trance, the more fragile the subject became. Robert was implying that Gabrielle’s repeated exposure to hypnosis had turned her into a
grande hypnotique
—and therefore she was capable of a profound state of hypnotism like the grand hysterics at Charcot’s Salpêtrière. Henri Robert needed to prove that Gabrielle was a hysteric who could go into a state of hypnosis so deep that she could kill a man against her will. He inquired of Brouardel: “Could not all these experiences have had an unfortunate influence on her nervous state?”

Brouardel conceded: “These experiences are very dangerous in a general way because they develop nervous states.”

A juror then posed the fundamental question: Was it possible to coerce someone to act in a criminal way through hypnosis? This was the central question that the two schools, Paris and Nancy, had battled over for years. Gabrielle had challenged the academics to face it in the real world. But there was no simple answer. The resolution to the debate would be revealed in her fate.

To address the question, Brouardel began by distinguishing between two types of behavior under hypnosis. The first was the array of actions a subject would often agree to carry out while in a trance—drinking water and believing it’s wine, biting into a potato and believing it’s an apple. The second type of behavior consisted of the actions one could be commanded to undertake after coming out of hypnosis in an awake, posthypnotic state. The Salpêtrière school believed—and had conducted experiments proving—that a hypnotized person would indeed perform simple acts both while in a trance and post-hypnotically, such as hugging a person or stabbing someone with a paper knife. But anything beyond these simple, unthreatening actions was impossible. By contrast, the Nancy school believed a hypnotized person—robbed of her free will—could be forced unknowingly to perform all manner of actions. “The school of Nancy,” Brouardel told the court, “professes that a person awakened from hypnotic sleep
will under the influence of suggestion carry out an act with the same inevitability that a rock falls to the earth.” Brouardel dismissed this theory, raising the question of fakery: “How is it possible to know that one is not deceived?”

Motet, who co-authored the report on Gabrielle, followed Brouardel to the witness stand and reiterated that Gabrielle was immoral but not insane and displayed only a minor form of hysteria. “Mild hysteria has never been successfully invoked for a lessening of responsibility in criminal acts,” he said. Further, he affirmed, her behavior under hypnosis revealed that she was a
petite hypnotique
, not a
grande hypnotique.

Ballet, the third contributor to the report, added yet another voice of medical authority for the prosecution. “There was no disagreement among the doctors,” he stressed to the court. “The facts were simple and clear.” He dismissed the defense’s argument. “This idea of possible hypnotism in this case did not move us much,” Ballet said. “That’s because until now not a single crime has been committed under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. There is not one authentic case. Let me make it clear: We are in the presence of the first of these cases. Suffice it to say that we have seen nothing in Gabrielle Bompard that would make hypnotism accountable for this crime.”

The Bompard family physician, Dr. Sacreste, settled into the witness stand. The forty-one-year-old doctor, who had looked after the family since 1883, recently had taken a position as the chief physician at a hospital in the French colony of Algeria. He recalled for the judge that he hypnotized Gabrielle during a visit to the Bompards’ home in Lille around 1887.
“She was almost immediately put to sleep, which seemed curious to me since, according to her, she had never been hypnotized,” Sacreste told the court. He described the experiments he tried on her: he told her a glass of water was champagne and watched her act drunk after drinking it. He recounted his other visit when he anesthetized her through hypnosis to remove a wart, and she showed no signs of pain whatsoever.

Sometime in 1888, Sacreste said, Pierre Bompard showed up at his home distraught over his daughter’s conduct. He was embarrassed by her provocative clothing and her sauciness on the streets, and asked if Sacreste could use hypnotism to alter her behavior. “I placed myself at his disposal, but I did not think one could easily get such a result,” Sacreste informed the judge. When Sacreste went to see Gabrielle, he said she announced: “I know why you’ve come. I don’t want you to put me to sleep and you will not put me to sleep.” Sacreste managed to hypnotize her but it took much longer than usual. While she was under he suggested to her that she conduct herself better and gave her some advice on how to do so. He tried the same procedures on three occasions. “These were absolutely without result,” he said. “However, at the end, she made a veritable confession.” Gabrielle told Dr. Sacreste about her lover in Lille and that he repeatedly hypnotized her. Sacreste understood then why his interventions had little effect; he was unable to break through the hypnotic hold of her lover.
What his efforts showed, however, was that Gabrielle was enormously susceptible to suggestion and that she was being made increasingly vulnerable because of her many hypnotic experiences. This heaping of hypnosis was overwhelming her mentally.

Sacreste informed Pierre Bompard in May or June 1888 that his mission to rescue Gabrielle was over. That was barely a month or so before she fled to Paris. In September, Sacreste said, he got a letter from Gabrielle in Paris telling him that she had to leave Lille because of her unhappiness at home. She asked Sacreste to tell her father she needed money. The doctor talked Pierre Bompard into parting with six hundred francs, which were sent to Gabrielle in four installments. She then wrote asking for ten thousand francs to set up a business in America, but this time her father balked. In conclusion, Sacreste told the court he believed Gabrielle was a hysteric—not one with violent attacks but nonetheless a hysteric. In his view, her hysteria suggested an abnormality in the brain that significantly diminished her responsibility for the crime. “As to the intervention of hypnotism,” Sacreste continued, “I do not think that one can cause a person to commit a crime through hypnotism. To test for that, a decisive experiment is necessary. Unfortunately,” he paused with a laugh, “or fortunately, that is not possible.”

But he did believe that a kind of coercion could occur—whether it was by actual hypnosis or by suggestion didn’t really matter. Without naming Eyraud, he blamed him. “I am convinced,” he concluded, “that by repeated suggestion one can bit by bit habituate a subject to the idea of a crime and lead them there insensibly.”

Returning to the question of hypnosis, Judge Robert reminded the witness of Gabrielle’s own testimony. “Gabrielle Bompard herself,” he said to the doctor, “recollects that Eyraud was never able to put her to sleep.”

“That’s extraordinary,” exclaimed Sacreste. His own experience had shown that Gabrielle was a magnificently easy subject for hypnosis. That Eyraud was the only one who couldn’t hypnotize her seemed impossible. Sacreste then offered his explanation for why Gabrielle would say such a thing: She had been programmed to say it. “I would think then there had been a posthypnotic suggestion,” he asserted.

The judge invited Dr. Brouardel to comment on Dr. Sacreste’s testimony.

“I cannot admit that her criminal experiences were forced under the influence of suggestion,” Brouardel said.

Henri Robert sought a conclusion from the family physician. “Dr. Sacreste knows the character of Gabrielle Bompard. Does he think her capable of such a crime?”

“I was very shocked,” Sacreste recalled. “She was very reserved.”

Henri Robert then pursued Sacreste’s explanation that if Gabrielle were not hypnotized to commit the crime, she might very well have been encouraged by suggestion to do it. “Dr. Sacreste,” he posed, “do you think that one can suggest actions without putting the person to sleep?”

“The theory of the Nancy school seems right to me,” he replied. “Without putting a person to sleep, one can suggest actions.”

“Can you cite a case to support your opinion?” the judge asked.

“I don’t have any at present but they are cited in the works on hypnotism,” replied Sacreste.

Henri Robert returned to another key issue: the question of post-hypnotic memory. “If one had forbidden a person to remember that she had been put to sleep, would she remember?” he asked Dr. Sacreste.

“Certainly not.”

The next witness, Dr. Jules Voisin—the doctor at the Dépôt prison—refused to be sworn in. “Before I take the oath,” he said, “I have to state that I cannot speak.”

Henri Robert quickly interjected: “Gabrielle Bompard could be facing capital punishment,” he reminded the judge. “Dr. Voisin has spent several months at Gabrielle’s side.”