Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (41 page)

Jeanne Richepin, who would grow up to become the famous Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril, spent some time in Charcot’s hysterics ward as a young girl. She revealed years later that the women competed with each other to put on a good show for the doctors. Those who best satisfied the demands of the research got the best treatment in the hospital wards.
“In my tiny brain, I was astonished every time to see how such eminent savants could be duped … when I, as insignificant as I was, saw through the farces,” Avril wrote in her memoir. “I have said to myself since that the great Charcot was aware of what was happening.”

One woman who held the answer to the question of simulation was Blanche Wittman, the queen of the hysterics. She continued to live at the Salpêtrière but her displays of grand hypnotism abruptly ceased after Charcot’s death.
“Like all hysterics of the Belle Époque,” wrote A. Baudoin, an intern under Charcot’s successor, “she seemed to deny her past and, when asked about the smallest detail of that phase of her life, she angrily refused to answer.” Wittman took on a new task, working as a technician in the photography lab. She then moved into the emerging science of radiology, and her handling of radium without proper protection ultimately killed her. Before Wittman’s death Baudoin pressed her to speak on her performances as queen of the hysterics. He said to her,
“They claim all these attacks were faked, that the patients pretended to be asleep and that the whole thing was a joke on the doctors. What’s the truth in all that?” She replied, “None of it is true. It’s all lies. If we fell asleep, if we had attacks, it was because we were helpless to do otherwise. What’s more, it was very unpleasant.” An eccentric full of contradictions to the end,
she then added: “Fakery! Do you think it would have been easy to fool Charcot? Yes, there were tricksters who tried. He used to glance at them and say: ‘Be still.’ ”

Georges Gilles de la Tourette endured some agonizing years after Charcot’s death. The year 1893 was particularly rough: Gilles de la Tourette lost not only his master but also his own son Jean, to meningitis. Then, toward the end of the year, on the evening of December 6, he returned home after visiting a patient to find a respectable-looking woman named Rose Kamper waiting for him. The widow followed him into his consulting room, where she produced a sheet of paper with the names of three doctors from the Salpêtrière, including Charcot. She claimed these doctors had ruined her life, and now she needed fifty francs. Gilles de la Tourette politely declined to give her money but offered to admit her to the Salpêtrière under his care: It was clear to him that this distraught woman had lost her mind.

When she didn’t respond to his suggestion, the neurologist turned his back to walk out of the consulting room as three gunshot blasts shattered the silence. Gilles de la Tourette stopped cold—he was hit. He felt a stinging sensation in the back of his head. A surgeon was summoned and removed a bullet that had lodged under the skin. Gilles de la Tourette would make a full recovery. Right after the shooting, Rose went out into the hall and sat down in a chair.
“I know what I have just done is wrong,” she said, “but it is necessary and now I am satisfied. At least one of them has paid for the others.” Her behavior was mysterious and raised the question: Was she acting under a posthypnotic suggestion? Dr. Paul Brouardel, the medical forensic specialist, was called in to examine Rose after her arrest and declared that hypnosis played no role. He concluded that she suffered from what one day would be known in medical circles as paranoid schizophrenia.
“Within me, there are actually two different people,” Rose told investigators, “one physical and one intellectual. My thoughts no longer belong only to me but also to those who possess me. During the day my intellect allows me to resist the power which enters me without my knowledge but at night I am overpowered. It is to defend myself against these impulses that I bought a revolver.”
Rose wound up in the Institute for the Insane until she tried to kill a nurse with a fork; she was sent to a sanatorium and put under restrictive confinement.

Gilles de la Tourette moved away from neurology and associated himself more closely with Brouardel, finally earning an appointment as a professor of forensic medicine in 1894. He was an unpleasant personality, but his behavior was possibly aggravated by the symptoms of syphilis. In these days before penicillin, he could only ride out the ravages of his disease, although he tried to disguise his condition as a severe case of melancholia. By 1899, he was in the late stages, and his deterioration came rapidly. He became delusional; he stole menus from a hotel restaurant and eventually wound up in a mental hospital. His behavior was so bizarre that he was locked away in a cell, where he suffered from megalomania and stared at visitors through eyes whose pupils had frozen. He eventually lost control of his bodily movements, spoke incoherently, suffered convulsions, and died at age forty-six in 1904.

Although the hypnotism defense expounded by the Nancy school did not prevail at Gabrielle Bompard’s trial, the school’s belief in the primacy of suggestion gained substantial scientific and public acceptance in the following years. The leader of the Nancy school, Hippolyte Bernheim, refined his own views and even moved away from an emphasis on hypnotism in favor of the power of suggestion. It was not necessary, Bernheim believed, to put a patient into a hypnotic sleep to achieve positive therapeutic results. Only suggestion was required. He believed that all the phenomena of hypnosis could be achieved in a waking state through suggestion. And he produced dramatic therapeutic outcomes in the absence of hypnosis—that is, without inducing sleep.

The severity of Bernheim’s break with earlier conceptions of hypnotism was evident at the International Congress of Medicine in Moscow in 1897 when he created a stir by asserting:
“
Il n’y a pas d’hypnotisme.”
(There is no such thing as hypnotism.) By this time, after Charcot’s death and the fragmenting of the Nancy school, hypnotism was losing its popularity and status as a fad. In 1917, shortly before his death, Bernheim framed his belief on hypnosis like this:
“One could have discovered these phenomena directly in the waking state, without passing through the unnecessary intermediary of induced sleep; and then the word hypnotism would not have been invented. The idea of a special induced magnetic or hypnotic state provoked by special maneuvers would not have been attached to these phenomena. Suggestion has been born of the old hypnotism, as chemistry was born of alchemy.” But by now the world was as uninterested in Bernheim’s ideas as it was in hypnotism. He died in Paris in 1919, largely forgotten by his contemporaries.

Although renowned for his clever sleuthing, Marie-François Goron was dismissed from the Sûreté in July 1894 after nearly seven years at the helm. He became the victim of a wide-ranging political and financial scandal centered on the building of the Panama Canal, a massive project under the leadership of the French and guided by the engineering genius of Gustave Eiffel. When the firm building the canal went belly-up and its bond price plummeted, bringing financial devastation to a wide swath of the population, including many bondholding members of the National Assembly, the Panama affair became, as one historian put it,
“the scandal of scandals in contemporary French history.” The scandal singed Goron for the sin of not having chased after the wrongdoers strenuously enough.

Goron had an earlier brush with dismissal in 1887 due to an incident far more bizarre than the Panama Canal scandal. As deputy chief of the Sûreté, he had helped reel in a charming murderer named Henri Pranzini, who was convicted of a sensational triple killing. After Pranzini’s execution, Goron asked one of his detectives to get him a souvenir of the case. Keepsakes were fairly common at the time—Gustave-Placide Macé, who had been the Sûreté chief until 1884, had collected enough artifacts to create a criminal museum. But the efforts of Goron’s detective overstepped the bounds of propriety and forced Goron to launch a charm offensive to save his job. As Goron explained it, the detective thought that
“the souvenir which I should value above all others would be what the murderer valued above all else in the world—namely, his own skin.” Goron and the Sûreté chief, Hippolyte Ernest Auguste Taylor, were presented with business-card cases that, to the unsuspecting eye, appeared to be covered
in white leather. But the material for the casing was, in fact, skin taken from the body of the murderer. Goron tossed the souvenir into his desk drawer and forgot about it until
La Lanterne
created a storm by revealing its existence. Goron, caught off-guard, quipped that
La Lanterne
showed
“a respect for the dead bodies of assassins which I had been very far from suspecting had ever been the case.”

To fend off calls for his and Taylor’s resignations, Goron accepted full responsibility, telling an examining magistrate who was appointed to investigate:
“If in this unfortunate affair anyone is guilty I am that man.” He admitted that he should never have accepted the card cases. But something more dramatic was needed. So the guilty parties—Goron, Taylor, the detective, and the head of the mortuary that supplied the skin—were assembled in front of a judge. A fire was then lighted and the cases were thrown into the flames. Thus the matter was resolved without harm to the participants, except for the lowly assistant at the mortuary who helped remove the skin—he lost his job. Goron noted how unfair this was, because gruesome uses of body parts was a vibrant tradition, particularly among medical students who made tobacco pouches from the bodies they studied and placed bones on their mantelpieces.

Despite the clouds that darkened his tenure, Goron has occupied an honored place in the annals of criminal history, thanks in no small measure to his successes in the Gouffé case. He solved other high-profile mysteries and is remembered for his doggedness, insight, and organizational skills. Some of his unabashed admirers have exaggerated his talents, among them Philip A. Wilkins, who translated and edited some of Goron’s memoirs and who opined that the sleuth
“might perhaps be described as a real-life police official worthy to take his place with Sherlock Holmes, the Poirots, and the Inspector Hornleighs of fiction.”

Goron was rightly praised for his humanitarian streak—he fervently opposed capital punishment and abhorred being present at an execution—
“he was as the French say,
sympathique
,” Wilkins wrote, “a strange quality you will think for a man so much of whose life had been devoted to the apprehension of criminals.”

Goron expanded the ranks of the Sûreté and improved its professionalism by hiring agents of a high caliber; he replaced untrustworthy former criminals of earlier days who knew the haunts and
habits of the underworld with married men, fathers, and others with strong morals who, the historian Clive Emsley has said, had the
“rectitude to avoid the temptations with which they were faced daily.” In his memoir, Goron praised his men for their selflessness and disregard for their own safety; these detectives, he said, were motivated by self-esteem.
“It isn’t personal interest that guides them, and they are of such high professional standards that you will never see one of them accepting a large sum of cash in exchange for not arresting a guilty party.”