Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (39 page)

“According to the doctors, Gabrielle Bompard is a broken being,” Robert began. “If she is a broken person, then she should be sent to a hospital for her mental health. But no, to the prosecution doctors she is a broken woman but still responsible. I do not understand this at all.” He reminded the jurors of Gabrielle’s unhappy childhood, her abandonment by her father, the brutality of Eyraud—this unconscionable treatment throughout her life left her mentally unstable. “If you have a case of a disturbed person like Gabrielle Bompard, is it possible to pronounce the verdict that is asked of you? Here is the truth. Gabrielle Bompard is sick. You take care of the sick. You cure them, if you can. You do not send them to prison or to the guillotine. Men, you must act in accordance with your heart and your conscience. Let your hearts be touched.”

Robert strode back to his seat amid the embrace of warm applause.

The judge asked if Eyraud or Gabrielle had anything to add in their own defense. They declined. He then reminded the jurors of the charges: voluntary homicide with premeditation involving ambush and robbery. He instructed the jurors in their duty and dismissed them so they could begin their deliberation. It was 6:50 p.m.

Eyraud and Gabrielle were escorted from the courtroom, he looking tense and feral, she sagging. The audience stayed put. No one
expected the jury to be out very long; there would be no haggling over the defendants’ guilt or innocence. The only matter for debate was the question of extenuating circumstances. And yet time ticked by. Amateur experts in the courtroom weighed the performances, the young Henri Robert against the aging Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, nodding their head in favor of Gabrielle or shaking a fist at Eyraud. Some wondered whether a gruesome public spectacle was coming: a pair of early-morning executions by guillotine, his and hers. In his tiny waiting room Eyraud paced like a wild animal. Outside in the street, a festive crowd formed to await the verdict.

Nearly two hours after they began deliberations, the jurors returned. Outside, the darkness was complete. Inside the courtroom, spectators shuffled back to their seats in the subdued light of the gas lamps. As Gabrielle made her way toward the dock she was pallid behind her black veil. Struggling to see her, women stood up with a rustling of skirts. There was some pushing and a few shrill cries that caused the judge to call the women to order.

The denouement finally was at hand for a case that very nearly never came to trial. That the body of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé was positively identified was an achievement of police persistence and modern medical science. Without the brilliance of Marie-François Goron and Alexandre Lacassagne, each striving in his own way, justice might never have been served. Had the putrescent body never been linked to Paris and never whispered its name, Gabrielle and Eyraud might never have stood in the Cour d’Assises.

After months of spectacle and impassioned debate, the jury was ready to speak. The foreman, a wine merchant named Jean-Baptiste Gagnier, delivered the verdict at 8:45 p.m. His first pronouncement came as little surprise: Eyraud, guilty on all counts. No mitigating circumstances. The decision couldn’t have been worse for Eyraud. To the hushed courtroom Gagnier announced the second verdict: Gabrielle, guilty on all counts, with extenuating circumstances. No explanation was given but none was necessary. The jury had accepted Henri Robert’s plea for compassion. Both defendants were also found guilty in the civil case and each was assessed a token one franc in damages.

Judge Robert asked if either of the convicted criminals had anything to say and both replied in strong voices: No.

The judge then retired to his chambers to consider the sentences and in a notably short time was back in the courtroom. In a high-pitched voice that clashed with the severity of his words, he condemned Michel Eyraud to death. A stillness fell over the courtroom as the judge announced Gabrielle’s fate: twenty years of hard labor. She was spared. Eventually she would settle into a cloistered routine in a women’s prison. For Eyraud the future also was clear—and short. As was customary, he was to be marched before the executioner in La Roquette square in full view of the public in about forty days.

Of his fate, Eyraud muttered to a guard: “I was waiting for that.”

Gabrielle was visibly relieved, sighing: “At last, it’s over.”

As the convicts were led from the courtroom, some spectators jumped up for a better view, prompting others behind them to cry out:
“Assis! Assis!”
(Sit down! Sit down!) As the crowd made its way toward the exits like theatergoers after a show, some women were heard muttering their dismay over the final scene. They despised Gabrielle and all she represented: She was a curse on home and hearth, country, and God. The jury’s leniency toward her outraged them. They had been deprived the pleasure of her execution.

In the wagon on the trip back to the Dépôt, Eyraud was as garrulous as ever, even as his death loomed.
“Do you think these people imagine I put Gabrielle Bompard to sleep?” he asked. “If I had that power I’d put you to sleep right now and break out.” He wasn’t surprised by the verdict, he said, but he complained bitterly about the lighter sentence for Gabrielle. “She did as much as me,” he insisted. “These jurors didn’t understand anything about this case.”

Already, his lawyer, Félix Decori, was working on an appeal of the death sentence. Of the twelve jurors, five had voted for extenuating circumstances. Decori set out to change the minds of the others in hopes of a favorable appeal hearing.

The Paris newspapers had their editions ready to hit the streets while the jurors deliberated; all that was missing was the verdict. So as soon as the sentences were handed down the presses roared to life and the papers were on the streets before the murderers were back in their cells at the Dépôt. Newsboys on the street corners cried:
“Le verdict de l’affaire Eyraud!”
Parisians swarmed the kiosks, and latecomers found the special editions had quickly sold out, and they had to read over a shoulder.

In her cell that evening, Gabrielle ate only a little soup, leaving the bread on the corner of her bowl. She wrote a letter to Henri Robert, praising him for his eloquence and thanking him for saving her life. Two nuns stayed by her side throughout the night. In the morning she was to be transferred to Saint-Lazare, a prison in the tenth arrondissement.

Eyraud’s night was rougher. By tradition, a condemned man was forced into a straitjacket for his own protection, but Eyraud wanted nothing of it. At the Dépôt, he insisted he had no desire to kill himself; he was perfectly calm, he told his guards, and promised to cause no trouble. His powers of persuasion were still formidable: He spent the night free of the straitjacket.

He ate his dinner in his cell with a hearty appetite but soon came down with a vicious bout of diarrhea, stirring rumors that someone had tried to poison him. No such skullduggery had taken place, however; the culprit was Eyraud’s teapot, which was sent to Dr. Paul Brouardel for toxicological study and found to have been improperly cleaned.

At eight the next morning, Eyraud climbed into a closed black wagon for the journey to La Roquette Prison, a grim stone citadel for convicts awaiting death. On his arrival, he was given a haircut and a shave under the watchful eye of the prison governor, Monsieur Beauquesne. Without his beard and mustache the killer looked small and vulnerable. He was then dressed in the prison garb of beige wool pants, a wool cap, and boots without laces, and was installed in cell number 1, the most spacious of the three reserved for killers awaiting execution. He was watched day and night and was allowed to smoke and play cards with his guards.

By lunchtime, Eyraud was hungry, his raging stomach of the previous night having calmed. Beauquesne sent for some bread, sausage, and wine from the canteen, and the condemned murderer enjoyed a light meal.

Félix Decori worked on Eyraud’s clemency appeal through the end of the year—a thankless, impossible task. Few figures were as reviled as the remorseless Eyraud. To save his neck, Decori needed to convince all twelve jurors to accept a condition of extenuating circumstances. With diligence, he approached each juror, and one by one he was able to get all twelve to sign on to the appeal. On January 6, he submitted the request for clemency and a court date was set for January 15.

Although Eyraud had been horrid to his wife, Louise-Laure nonetheless favored leniency and was ready to do what she could to save him from the guillotine. If the appeal was rejected, she intended to beg Madame Carnot, the wife of the French president, to intercede on her husband’s behalf. By then Eyraud’s last hope would be a commutation by the president. But in all of Paris, the faithful Louise-Laure was virtually a lone voice speaking up for the killer. Describing her husband to a reporter, she said:
“He is not the ferocious criminal” that was portrayed in the press. “This intelligent, shrewd, absolutely immoral woman threw him into this crime.” Louise-Laure insisted he was a good man before all this, adding “I only suffered from his infidelities.” She blamed the newspapers for her husband’s situation. Reporters, she said, used their excessive imagination to sensationalize the case, and she called on them to help her win a reprieve. “Since part of this misfortune was caused by the press, monsieur,” she scolded the reporter, “it’s in your power to have the press aid me in obtaining a pardon.”

But even Louise-Laure’s sympathy had its limits. She was willing to campaign against her husband’s execution for murder, but she drew the line at his adultery. On December 30, she divorced him, citing his
relationship with Gabrielle; she dispensed with her married name and reverted to her pre-Eyraud identity of Louise-Laure Bourgeois.

While Eyraud awaited his hearing, new questions arose over his murky past. The suspicions centered on the disappearance of a Frenchman in America some years before the Gouffé murder. Émile Breuil was a wine merchant who left France for the United States in 1881 and was never heard from again—that is, until Eyraud used his name as an alias in Lyon after murdering Gouffé. Having learned of this alias, Émile’s brother Auguste asked the public prosecutor to investigate, arguing that Émile may have encountered Eyraud in America when the killer visited the country years earlier. Auguste suspected Eyraud murdered his brother and snatched his identification papers for one of his many aliases. The suspicion was taken seriously enough that a guard at La Roquette casually raised the matter in conversation with Eyraud in his cell.
“Why did you change your name so frequently when you traveled—even before the Gouffé case?” the guard asked him. Creditors, Eyraud said, were always after him, so he had to protect himself by adopting new names. “But where the devil did you find all the names you invented?” the guard persisted. “Why did you call yourself Vanaerd when you were with Monsieur Garanger? Why did you pass yourself off as Émile Breuil in Lyon?” The name Émile Breuil caused Eyraud to blanch, and he hesitated before replying.

“By pure chance,” he said. “Breuil, like Vanaerd, were names of people I met here and there.” He paused. “What’s your interest in this? What does it have to do with anything?”

“It’s just a question many people have,” the guard replied. “People are curious what your motive was for taking one name or another.”

“I repeat: Chance alone guided me.”

“Don’t you know what’s happened recently?” the guard said. “Monsieur Émile Breuil has a brother. The other day he was reading about your trial and was struck by a coincidence.” The guard told Eyraud what people were saying: that Émile may have been in America at the same time as Eyraud and, strangely, Émile disappeared while there, and even more strangely, Eyraud used his name as an alias in Lyon.

“I knew someone named Breuil but I don’t remember where I met him,” Eyraud allowed. Then, as if suddenly remembering, he added:
“It was while I was in Paris that we met. Pure chance that I took his name. Perhaps when I arrived in Lyon I found a letter or card from him in my papers.”

“Too bad you can’t remember the exact circumstances,” the guard said pointedly, “because his brother accuses you of having a hand in his disappearance. He says you encountered Émile Breuil in America, and he wants an inquest into the matter.”

Eyraud was annoyed. “What do you want me to do? I’m sure nothing will be found out against me. My conscience is quite clear on this.” He then refused to say another word.

On January 15, Eyraud’s clemency hearing finally arrived. The court of appeals convened and with brutal dispatch rejected the request. Unless President Carnot intervened, Eyraud was to face the executioner in about twenty days. The exact date was not given. The condemned were never informed when precisely they would die; they would know the time had come when early one morning they were awakened in their cell by a parade of officials in top hats and overcoats.

About ten days before the execution Decori personally handed President Carnot the clemency appeal signed by the twelve jurors. The president now had little more than a week to make up his mind. For her part, Madame Carnot refused to see Eyraud’s wife and daughter.

As decision day approached, the French seemed to soften toward Eyraud.
“Strange thing!” declared
Le Figaro.
“A change of heart occurred in public opinion. Those who called the most strongly for a condemnation to death before the trial now found it acceptable, and even just, to commute the penalty.”

If Eyraud rode a wave of sympathy, Gabrielle was vilified. The public seemed to agree that she had exerted a vixen’s influence over the weak-willed, middle-aged Eyraud, who was little more than clay in her young, sexy hands. “When one saw Gabrielle condemned only to twenty years,” the paper said, “one took relative pity on he who alone had to pay the communal debt.”

On Tuesday, February 3, 1891, Eyraud was sitting in his cell on the edge of his bed at 6:45 a.m., waiting. Someone had whispered to him that this was the day: On this chilly morning the men were coming. And so they came: A procession of officials in black frocks and top hats filed into his cell, led by prison governor Monsieur Beauquesne.
The chief of the Sûreté, Marie-François Goron, was there, with his secretary, Soulière. So, too, was the prefect of police, Henri-Auguste Loze, and Father Faure, the prison priest. Others crowded into the cell: Monsieur Hamon, the chief of the municipal police; Monsieur Horoch, a clerk from the court of appeals; and Judge Louiche, a judicial representative.