Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (40 page)

Keeping with tradition, Governor Beauquesne delivered the news to Eyraud: President Sadi Carnot had rejected his petition for clemency.

“Very well,” Eyraud replied.

Judge Louiche asked if the condemned had any statement to make before being escorted to the guillotine. Eyraud declined. When he stood up to begin the march, he bore none of the glamour and romanticism that the press had attached to him: He was bowlegged, bull-necked, and broad-shouldered; his large hands were white and pudgy; and his eyes were small. There was a lump on the left side of his forehead.

Beauquesne handed Eyraud the black dress pants he had worn at his trial, and the murderer changed out of his wool prison pants. He pulled off his dark socks and put on a pair of white ones that had been passed to him.

Father Faure offered to convey a message to Eyraud’s wife and daughter.

“Tell them that I bid them adieu and hope they’ll be happy.”

When the priest offered Eyraud a traditional last glass of cognac the convict pushed it aside, mumbling, “No, that will do me no good.”

The entourage led Eyraud from his cell to the dressing room, where the executioner awaited him. Louis Deibler was a stout sixty-year-old with a graying tuft on his chin. By custom he slept at the prison the night before an execution. He’d already been out in the square at 4:30 a.m. with two assistants to meet the wagon delivering the guillotine. By then barricades were up around the perimeter, and two divisions of police were in place. There were also two detachments of Republican Guards: a hundred on foot and another fifty on horseback, all fighting the cold. The activity had alerted the carousers in the cafés and hotels around the square, and word had filtered out: An execution was at hand. By early morning the drunks lifted their voices in song, their bloodlust drifting over the square:
“C’est Eyraud
qu’il nous faut. C’est sa tête qu’il nous faut.”
(It’s Eyraud we must have. It’s his head we must have.) A throng had wandered toward the barricades but there was nothing to see. Just a few men with lanterns ablaze clustered at a spot marked by five stone slabs. The night was extremely cold and there was a drizzling rain, but still the curious lingered. At 5:00 a.m. a wagon had pulled into the square, and a cheer rose from the crowd: The guillotine had arrived.

Deibler and his assistants had assembled the device, working in a damp fog, their lanterns casting a dull light on the red uprights. With one hand Deibler fidgeted with the bolts and fussed over the cords and pulleys, while with his other hand he held an umbrella over his head. At 5:45 a.m., he tested the instrument, sending the almost ninety-pound blade shrieking downward in its grooves at lightning speed, completing its descent in three-quarters of a second. Deibler, a fastidious man, ran the blade back up into place and let it go again, and then he tested it one more time. It was his duty—indeed, his obsession—to carry the bloody ceremony off without a hitch.

Now, inside the dressing room, Deibler sliced off Eyraud’s shirt collar to expose his neck. He pinioned the murderer’s arms behind his body to prevent any last-minute flailing. Eyraud asked Governor Beauquesne to ensure that his body would not go to the medical school. Goron had promised it to the school to be carved up by students.
“Your body will be given to your family,” Father Faure assured Eyraud. When the priest then offered to embrace Eyraud’s wife and daughter for him, Eyraud didn’t react, and when the priest repeated himself Eyraud again was silent. Then suddenly he erupted. Looking around wildly, the condemned man cried:
“Constans has won his case! Now his prize!” Ernest Constans was the minister of the interior and head of the nation’s police and security. As though possessed, Eyraud shouted: “He will be with Gabrielle tonight!” And he jerked away as Deibler was pinioning his wrists, causing the executioner to pinch him. “You’re hurting my fingers!” Eyraud cried. To calm him down, Father Faure again offered him a glass of cognac, and Eyraud shook his head:
“I told you no.”

The time had arrived for the march to the
bois de justice
, the wood of justice. When Father Faure began to pray, Eyraud growled and demanded silence. Tradition called for the priest to bestow a final kiss upon the condemned before the procession moved into the square,
and the condemned by convention was to return the gesture. But when Father Faure leaned toward him, Eyraud dodged his lips.

At 7:20 a.m., the men left the dressing room and entered the square, passing through a stone arched gate. As he approached the block, Eyraud scanned the crowd looking right and left, then fixed his eyes on the guillotine. Suddenly he swung his body to one side, attempting to break away, and shouted angrily toward the mob:
“Constans is a murderer. He is more of a murderer than I am!” It was a mystery what inspired his rage at the minister of the interior. In his twisted mind Eyraud had reason to hate the country’s top police and security official. When arrested, he had complained that Constans had captured him to settle a political score: Eyraud had idolized the dashing General Georges Boulanger, who had posed a coup d’état threat that Constans was instrumental in eliminating. But Eyraud’s reasoning had no basis in reality.
“What a bizarre manifestation!” Jaume exclaimed in his diary. “What a singular way to express your last thoughts. Up to the threshold of death, Eyraud remained an incomplete being, his head full of gaps.”

With Eyraud raging, Deibler had no time for reflection; he had to prevent the execution from spiraling out of control. But he also knew he faced a danger if he acted too precipitously. In 1829, an executioner’s assistant lost three fingers when he had to force an unruly murderer’s head onto the lunette. To a critic who once chided Deibler for taking too long to release the blade, the executioner said,
“I’d like to see you there. I have no desire to have two or three fingers eaten by the blade.”

Now he acted quickly. He and his assistants seized the thrashing murderer as he shouted “Constans is—” and threw him against the inclined plank and locked his head in the lunette. An execution at times became a rough ballet and Deibler had been criticized for manhandling the condemned.
“On one or two occasions Deibler has been taken to task by the Parisian journals, who have accused him of unnecessary roughness,” the
London Globe
wrote a few years before Eyraud’s execution. However, the paper came to Deibler’s defense: “His looks hardly bear out such a charge, for there is nothing of the bully about him, and those who meet him of a Sunday afternoon, when he takes his wife out for a walk with him along the boulevards, would take him to be an ordinary workingman bent on enjoyment.”

Eyraud had no chance to finish his outburst. With a swift motion, Deibler pressed the knob that released the blade suspended over the murderer’s neck. The knife whistled downward and in less than a second sliced through Eyraud’s fourth vertebra and his head separated from his body, dropping onto a tin pan filled with straw at the bottom of a basket.

In a surge of bloodlust the mob pushed forward but was driven back by soldiers on horseback.

News of the execution quickly hopped across the world. American newspapers were ablaze with the headlines. “Eyraud’s Head Fell Off” cried the
Milwaukee Journal.
“His Head in the Basket” proclaimed Chicago’s
Daily Inter Ocean.

After the execution, the body was snatched from the scaffold, placed in a coffin, with the head between the feet, and the wagon drove off at a full gallop toward the cemetery, escorted by mounted gendarmes. Deibler cleaned up the site and disassembled the guillotine. He packed the large, bright blades into their leather cases, to be kept out of sight under lock and key at his home until called upon again. With his task accomplished and the uprights safely back in the wagon, Louis Deibler, the executioner of Paris, turned his thoughts toward a cup of coffee, a rolled cigarette, and his traditional post-execution
petit verre
—a small glass of wine.

In August 1893, Jean-Martin Charcot set off on a tour of the Morvan region, a quiet expanse of meadows and lakes and pine trees in Burgundy. His traveling companions were two former students and Louis Pasteur’s son-in-law, Pierre Vallery-Radot. Were there portents of doom? Vallery-Radot would recall certain remarks made by the great neurologist that in retrospect seemed ominous. Did Charcot have an inkling he might not return from this journey? On the party’s departure from Gare de Lyon, Charcot offered a bit of somber advice to Vallery-Radot:
“When saying good-bye, one must avoid the expression of sentimental feelings as much as possible.” Charcot was not religious. By some accounts, he was even hostile to the Catholic church. But on a visit to a cemetery while on this holiday, he commented to Vallery-Radot: “Ill will to him who has no faith.” In an earlier conversation he had offered:
“For me there is a God, but distant and vague.”

Four days into the trip, on August 15, the group spent the night at a rural inn called L’Auberge du Lac des Settons after a day of considerable activity. Early in the evening Charcot excused himself from his companions and went to his room. That night, in a letter to his wife he confided that he didn’t feel well. After midnight on August 16, Charcot’s condition turned desperate; the innkeeper was summoned. By 3:00 a.m., Charcot’s fellow travelers, roused from their sleep, were ushered into his room. The great man was sitting in an armchair, perspiring and pale, his breaths short and noisy, his lungs sounding moist. His medical companions diagnosed pulmonary edema. Gradually Charcot’s breathing improved, he felt better, he rested awhile. But then suddenly he took a turn for the worse.

Before dawn, Charcot was dead.

Several days later the Salpêtrière’s incurable patients—humbly
dressed, some on crutches—filed by his coffin in the hospital’s chapel, side by side with luminaries in medicine, literature, and government. At Charcot’s request, the funeral was simple. His coffin was draped in black cloth woven with the letter
C.
Mourners heard Beethoven’s “Funeral March” and selections by soloists from the Paris Opera.

More than seventy eulogies were published around the world. In Sigmund Freud’s words,
“the ‘school of the Salpêtrière’ was, of course, Charcot himself.” Freud praised his teacher for his voluminous contribution to the understanding of neuropathology. The Charcot method fascinated Freud.
“He was not much given to cogitation, was not of the reflective type,” Freud wrote, “but he had an artistically gifted temperament—as he said himself, he was a
visuel
, a seer. He himself told us the following about his method of working: he was accustomed to look again and again at things that were incomprehensible to him, to deepen his impression of them day by day, until suddenly understanding of them dawned upon him … He was heard to say that the greatest satisfaction man can experience is to see something new, that is, to recognize it as new.”

Freud praised Charcot for giving legitimacy to hypnotism. Charcot’s experiments allowed advances to be made in understanding the
“hitherto neglected and despised” phenomena of hypnotism. None of it would have been possible without the weight of Charcot’s reputation—he “put an end once and for all to doubts of the reality of hypnotic manifestations.” But Charcot’s research into hypnotism and hysteria, Freud reminded his readers, met with “violent opposition.” Charcot was denounced for his unyielding belief in the stages of a hysteric attack and for insisting that only hysterics could be hypnotized. Charcot denied the broad psychological foundation of hypnosis—to his detriment, Freud said.

Apparently Charcot himself recognized some of his failings near the end of his life. Evidence emerged later that he was close to reworking his beliefs before death intervened. Georges Guinon, Charcot’s last private secretary, recalled conversations he had shortly before Charcot took off on his final journey to Morvan.
“He told me that his concept of hysteria had become decadent and his entire chapter on the pathology of the nervous system must be revised,” Guinon wrote. Charcot, speaking with his secretary in his library, indicated a stack of papers on the desk. Guinon recalled that Charcot then told
him “he had already begun to collect the essential elements for the accomplishment of this task.” The revisions to a lifetime’s work were to begin soon.

With Charcot’s death, the doctrines of the Salpêtrière school floundered. Alan Gauld, author of the massive and authoritative
A History of Hypnotism
, noted that the process in fact had begun several years earlier.
“From 1887 onwards, it became increasingly apparent that the Salpêtrière was rapidly losing ground in its disputes with Nancy,” he wrote. The Salpêtrière faithful were defecting, and the Salpêtrière viewpoint was looking increasingly absurd in light of the results at Nancy. “No effective answer was found to [the Nancy school’s] arguments,” Gauld explained, “and the somewhat numerous foreign and other visitors to the Salpêtrière could hardly have been impressed by the demonstrations.”

By the time of Charcot’s death, Freud had come to accept the Nancy teachings of Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, which stressed the influence of suggestion and the capacity for hypnotism to heal the afflicted. Freud did not spare his mentor:
“Only the opponents of hypnotism who content themselves with hiding their own lack of experience behind some recognized authority still cling to Charcot’s pronouncements, and like to quote an expression uttered in his last years denying that hypnosis has any therapeutic efficacy whatever.”

Charcot’s notions on hypnotism and hysteria had become antiquated. In his eulogy Freud sought to place Charcot in an appropriate historical light. “The progress our science has made in additions to its knowledge will inevitably diminish the value of much that Charcot has taught us,” he concluded, “but neither the passing of time nor the changing of ideas will diminish the glory of the man whom we—in France and elsewhere—are mourning today.”

After Charcot’s death, scientists at the Salpêtrière turned away from the study of hypnosis and returned to pure neurology. In his absence the famed three stages of hypnosis disappeared, lending credence to accusations that the performances of the women were, if not staged, less than honest. But how could such fakery have occurred on such a grand scale? Years later Charcot still had his defenders. In 1910, Joseph Babinski, one of his leading disciples, insisted that a massive deception was impossible because it required a kind of collusion
among the hysterics that could not have been maintained: The truth would inevitably have leaked out. Charcot may have been complicit not so much in willful fakery but in fostering an atmosphere of mimicry, coaching, and imitation. His students, who often hypnotized his star patients, were eager to please their master, and the women themselves wanted nothing more than to put on a good show for him. This desire to please fed a willingness to perform in a style that supported the established doctrines. The students encouraged it and the women acquiesced. Once the plotline had been written—catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism—the stage was set for grand theatrics.