Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (38 page)

He addressed the crucial question: “Did she commit the crime in a state of suggestion, yes or no?” His answer sought to strike terror into the soul. “If hypnotism explains the crime, if it is a way to deny free will, then we must recognize there is no such thing as human freedom. There will be no conscious choice between good and evil. No criminal will be accountable for the blood he spills. And the book of eternal justice will be closed.”

Science, the prosecutor insisted, rejected this hypothesis. He stressed that while the free will was confiscated during hypnosis, it was not abolished. “Monsieur Charcot told me that very often it’s been suggested to people to steal under hypnosis. They protest: ‘Me steal? But I am not a robber.’ If the hypnotist insists, they have an attack of nerves.”

As far back as 1780, Quesnay de Beaurepaire told the court, the Marquis de Puységur proved that the power of hypnosis was limited. When Puységur asked a hypnotized woman to do something that offended her modesty, he met with invincible resistance. “Do not then say,” the prosecutor thundered, “that one can throw the hypnotic toward the crime like a dog after a scent!”

So how did Michel Eyraud coerce Gabrielle Bompard into joining him in this crime? Was it suggestion? Hypnotism? Not at all, Quesnay de Beaurepaire insisted. Liégeois would have people believe that his theory provided a new understanding of subjugation. “Such theories amaze me,” the prosecutor scoffed. It was simply brutal male domination. “The stronger being always imposes his will on the weaker being,” the prosecutor explained. “This is not something new. This has been happening for six thousand years. The audacious one has always petrified the pusillanimous with his look. This is not the history of hypnotism. This is the history of the world.”

Quesnay de Beaurepaire now came to his most important duty: to persuade the jury to send Eyraud and Gabrielle to the guillotine. Since 1832, juries were empowered to recognize extenuating circumstances in their sentencing decisions—a legal right aimed at offsetting excessively harsh rulings by judges in earlier years. There was a wide range of possible reasons for easing a sentence. The jury was to determine, as one commentator put it, whether
“the individual has committed a crime under such conditions as to mitigate the enormity of the offense.” Which was exactly the argument of Gabrielle’s defense. So Quesnay de Beaurepaire sought to deny Gabrielle any protection and portray the murder in the most heinous light. This crime, he said, was worse than most. Some people commit terrible acts because of a sudden, unexpected temptation. “This was an atrocious ambush planned well in advance,” he reminded the jury. “I ask you, what becomes of public security if you do not
deliver a punishment in proportion to the crime?” Few people were likely to oppose the death penalty for Eyraud. But what about Gabrielle? Should the jury answer in the same way?

“I feel a profound emotion in coming to ask you to render a sentence of capital punishment on a girl twenty-two years old,” he said. “As guilty as she is, as intelligent as she is, as responsible as she is, I have waited for a sign of repentance from her that might have tipped the balance. You must decide what your conscience suggests to you. But I cannot demand for her any special attenuated circumstances. My last word: Jurors, you must be faithful to the oath you took at the start of this trial. You must render a verdict without weakness.”

After Quesnay de Beaurepaire’s summation the court went into a two-hour recess. Most spectators stayed in the courtroom guarding their seats. But as the delay dragged on they grew impatient, then agitated; some stood up on the benches. Finally, at two thirty, Gabrielle and Eyraud were led back to the dock. She was paler than ever but maintained an air of indifference. Dr. Floquet escorted her to her seat and took up his position directly behind her.

Eyraud’s lawyer, Félix Decori, had an impossible task: to win leniency for the strangler. With his Mephistopheles mien, he seemed perfectly cast to try to rescue the devil from the executioner. As he stepped forward, the obvious question hung over the court: How in the world would Decori frame a plausible defense for one as irredeemable as Eyraud? “Gentlemen of the court, gentlemen of the jury, this man comes before you loathed by everyone,” he began, attacking the issue head-on. “People everywhere say he committed an abominable crime and only death should be his penance. The public prosecutor asked you in the name of justice to raise the scaffold and allow his head to fall. Everywhere a gigantic clamor of death rises up, and this elegant mob comes here as to a spectacle and awaits impatiently for this pleasure. But the law demands that at this very moment a voice rises up amid the clamor to speak for moderation and pity. Such is my responsibility, large as it is, and I undertake it without faintness. I will carry out my task to the end.” He asked the jury to overlook the cries of vengeance and to weigh the question of Eyraud’s sentence without passion and with a strong conscience. He then sought to soften the portrait of Eyraud as a pillaging, gun-toting outlaw who sank to the
bloody depths of murder. “I hasten to destroy this legend of Eyraud,” Decori said. “I would like to show him to you from his childhood through his difficult, adventurous life.”

He ran through the events of Eyraud’s youth: his birth to an industrialist father, education at a boarding school at age ten, then with the Marists, a Roman Catholic order, from age twelve to sixteen. Eyraud’s troubles began, Decori said, when his wanderlust led him into the army at age seventeen and later he became a deserter. “He commits a grave error and, if he deserts,” Decori explained, “it is not fear of death or cowardice that leads him away.” The Spanish-speaking Eyraud was sent on a special mission to a farm, where he met a young woman and became her lover. When she invited him back to the farm for Christmas dinner, Eyraud longed to join her. “He asks for permission and it is refused,” Decori said. But Eyraud slipped out of camp anyway and spent the night at the farm—and for his disobedience he faced a military tribunal. So he ran. “He is only twenty years old,” Decori impressed upon the jury. “This first error was inspired by love. Love would inspire him again in another error.”

That error was murder, a crime Eyraud committed only out of blind love for Gabrielle. “He had a violent passion: It’s a passion for the woman,” Decori said. “He had an inextinguishable need for that woman, for her caresses, for her presence. Before her, he is a child, seduced by her charms, by the softness of her voice. Luck put him in a relationship with a grasping woman lacking in all morality. She would command him, dominate him, and he would obey her. This is what Gabrielle Bompard did to him.”

Decori described how Gabrielle laid the plans for the murder and directed its execution. Here was the crux of Eyraud’s defense: Gabrielle was to blame for the crime. She was, in Decori’s telling, reprehensible in every way. She led Eyraud into evil by her charms. “Without doubt,” the lawyer told the jury, “this opinion will surprise you. But you must ask your conscience because you are the judges.”

As Decori resumed his seat, applause erupted from all corners. By crafty storytelling, heavy on the heartstrings, Mephistopheles had aroused sympathy for the devil.

As he stepped forward to begin his final plea on behalf of Gabrielle, Henri Robert approached one of the thorniest legal challenges of the belle époque. His extraordinary mission was to convince a jury to convict hypnotism rather than his client for a murder she indisputably had a hand in. He needed to show that Gabrielle’s quixotic behavior, poor judgment, and callous actions were none of her own doing but rather the convincing proof of a young woman in a posthypnotic trance. No legal defender had ever tried to absolve a killer of responsibility for her crime by shifting the blame to a manipulative hypnotist. Failure to sway the jury carried fateful consequences—potentially a visit to the Monsieur de Paris.

“I am neither philosopher, nor fool, nor scientist, and I come modestly to present to you the defense of Gabrielle Bompard,” Robert began. He walked the jury through the many allegations against her, the charges from Michel Eyraud that she inspired the crime, advocated for it, participated in its preparations, even attached the
cordelière
to the rope, and then helped with the cadaver and finally fled with him to America. “I have only one true adversary here,” Robert said. “It is not Michel Eyraud. His lies are easily discredited. My adversary is public opinion.”

Who is Gabrielle Bompard really? Robert asked, and set about trying to build sympathy for her because of what she had suffered at the hands of her father. “I do not exaggerate anything,” he promised the jury. He said that Gabrielle never once denounced her father, adding: “I am not constrained by the same formality.” And he vilified the prosperous Lille businessman as an “abominable” father who abandoned his daughter to the streets of Paris, where she had to fend for herself without a scrap of help from him. After she had been in
Paris for nearly a year she wrote to her father several times to beg him to take her back. He didn’t reply. “So she asked one of her friends to write to him,” Robert said. “ ‘If you are not one of
my
friends,’ Monsieur Bompard replied, ‘stay out of my affairs.’ Monsieur Bompard only had to make some sign of affection to save his daughter. But he did not make it. This man, whose daughter’s life plays out before you, has not had a word of pity for her.” His callousness began many years earlier. When Gabrielle was five she watched her mother die, and her father installed his mistress as his housekeeper-governess before the coffin had even left the house. “Who then taught this unfortunate child the difference between good and bad?” Robert asked. “No one, ever, since no one was ever occupied with her. What examples did she find in the paternal home? Some detestable examples. What kind of life did she lead there? An infernal life. This father was the murderer of his daughter’s soul.” Those who had rushed to judgment on Gabrielle, Robert wondered, “Do they all know this—those who call for the supreme punishment?”

From the father’s iniquities Robert moved on to Eyraud’s barbarity. Since false statements weren’t formally challenged or scratched from the record in the French court, attorneys only had the chance to set the record straight in their summations. So Robert now sought to extinguish Eyraud’s charges against Gabrielle. His task was made easier by Eyraud’s long life of deceit and crime. “I only want you to remember three facts that characterize him accurately,” he said. “He stole at school, he deserted from the army, and he killed at rue Tronson du Coudray. Child—he steals. Young man—he deserts. Old man—he murders.” But what of Eyraud’s allegation that Gabrielle was the dominant figure in their relationship? Did she take the lead in planning and executing the crime, as Eyraud insisted, and was it
she
who drove
him
“like a lapdog,” as he testified? Eyraud had tried to persuade the court that if it weren’t for the perverse Gabrielle, he would still be an exemplary father and loving husband. “Is this possible?” Robert asked. “Is this serious? Was it Gabrielle Bompard who pushed him in 1884 to abandon his wife and daughter? Was it Gabrielle Bompard who pushed him ten years ago when he left for America, taking his wife’s dowry with him?”

The story of their liaison was very simple, Robert explained. “Why did this young, intelligent, pretty girl live with this old man? She gave
him a kiss for a morsel of bread. Then she stayed under the influence of misery and violence. When you hear that here is a woman who was beaten and broken down by his blows, can you seriously pretend that it was she who was the dominant one?” Eyraud controlled the young woman not just by his brutality, Robert said, creeping toward the cornerstone of his defense. As soon as Eyraud discovered she was easily hypnotized, he took her to the home of Madame Marmier, where it quickly became apparent that she was a remarkable subject for hypnosis. Gabrielle was hypnotized repeatedly at Madame Marmier’s salon and that only intensified her susceptibility.

And the stage was set for murder under hypnosis.

At this time Eyraud’s world was collapsing. At Fribourg & Cie his stealing was discovered and his cash flow dried up. He needed money. Worse, Fribourg threatened to have him arrested. “Eyraud had no choice,” Robert said. Either he could go to prison or commit a crime and flee. “He preferred the crime.” So Eyraud hypnotized Gabrielle and gave her her instructions. “Gabrielle Bompard wanted to carry out the order she had been given,” Robert said. “She had the
cordelière
in her hands. She moved toward the bailiff with it but she could not realize the criminal act.” Robert argued that like other hypnotized subjects who recoil from performing an act that offends their moral judgment, Gabrielle resisted. “At that moment,” he continued, “she had an attack of nerves, and then Eyraud threw himself on Gouffé and strangled him.”

Robert knew all this because Dr. Voisin told him. Voisin was the doctor at the Dépôt who had hypnotized Gabrielle and then refused to testify because of what he claimed was professional confidentiality. But he was not so tight-lipped outside of the courtroom. “Monsieur Voisin told the story to anyone who would listen,” Robert said. “I know at least three or four people to whom he confided.” Voisin had placed Gabrielle in a hypnotic state and had her re-create the chilling moment of the murder. “He obtained from her a confession of everything that happened,” Robert explained. “Gabrielle mimed the act of murder in front of him. What I have told you is the truth.”

Robert’s argument that Gabrielle backed away from murder because of her moral strength undercut Liégeois’s testimony that a hypnotized individual goes toward her goal like an unstoppable automaton. By discounting Liégeois’s theory, Robert gave credence
to the doctrines of the Salpêtrière school. But at the same time he counteracted the prosecution’s contention that Gabrielle was an amoral creature. Robert was seeking to convey something that was more subtle than the blunt arguments from either side for or against murder under hypnosis. His purpose was not to prove or negate any academic proposition but rather to save the life of his client. A vigorous hypnotism defense based on Liégeois’s argument was simply impossible to support. His line of reasoning was too murky. Hypnosis was too mysterious, its influence too elusive, to deliver a definitive verdict in a court of law. The judge, the prosecutor, the doctors had all reflected the skepticism that widely greeted the defense’s position. To exonerate Gabrielle on a hypnotism plea seemed to Robert simply unimaginable. Robert understood that she was destined for conviction, but did she have to die? Instead of trying to prove that hypnosis had the remarkable power to direct a murder, Robert retreated from his historic moment and pursued a different goal. He sought to win the jury’s sympathy for her fragile mental state.