Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris (42 page)

On his departure from the Sûreté, Goron established the first international private investigators’ company in Europe and wrote easy-to-read—and somewhat sensational—tales of his real-life detective adventures for a widening popular audience that craved a good crime story.

His sidekick, Pierre-Fortune Jaume, wrote an engaging memoir in his own idiosyncratic style. Years later,
The Washington Post
described Jaume as a man who followed his own
“peculiar science … called individualist criminology.” Writing in September 1915, six months after Jaume’s death at age sixty-nine, the paper described the inspector as a true original in his manner of sleuthing. He donned disguises with such ease and expertise that “his only boast … was that he never had been mistaken for a detective.” He never carried a gun; his only weapon was a bit of cord to use as handcuffs. He was so averse to being known on the streets that, it was said, only two photographs were ever taken of him, both of those in his youth.

Goron long outlived his friend, dying in February 1933 at age eighty-five. The newspaper
L’Intransigeant
announced the news on February 4 with an exclamation—“M. Goron is dead!”—and, after describing his adventures stalking criminals, ended with: “Curious detail: he loved all kind of birds, and was a member, vice president, or president of a large number of bird-watching societies.”

In her early days in prison Gabrielle Bompard was still a celebrity, her accommodations, diet, and clothing—indeed, her life in jail—matters of intense public interest. Before her transfer to Clermont women’s prison she stayed briefly at the jail at Nanterre where, it was dutifully reported, she was housed in cell number 1 on the second
floor along with a total population of one hundred and sixty women and a hundred and eighty men who were all afforded one bath a month. The fashion-crazy Gabrielle was now garbed in a gray wool camisole, a white bonnet and shawl, and clogs. She ate the institution’s greasy meals and was employed sewing shirts for infants whose mothers were in prison. Her behavior was said to be good
“but her gaiety [was] disappearing under the influence of perpetual solitude.”

After her transfer to Clermont in January 1891, she began to show up less frequently in the press and had to work hard to get some ink. In the summer of her first year, it was falsely reported that she had contracted typhoid fever and later that she had died. She was still drawing attention to herself with dramatic, even hysterical, behavior: In 1894, she complained to a guard that she feared her life would end in prison.
“If only I were sure of not dying here. Ah!” she cried. “If only I could keep the promise I made to God and make up for my faults and rehabilitate myself to my poor father whom I dishonored!” It was a dramatic speech during which,
La Presse
reported, “Gabrielle Bompard fell ill and doctors gave up on her.”

She survived, of course, suffering only from a sudden bout of theatrics, and began a long campaign for a reduction in her sentence. But six years later, she had little to show for it. As
Le Journal des Débats
said of her,
“she is neither resigned nor repentant and seems to be completely unaware of what resignation and repentance are.” Other journalists, however, reported that she was a changed woman. That same year,
Le Figaro
called her
“a model of gentility and resignation” and indicated that she was hard at work as the bookkeeper for the prison’s corset-making operation. By 1901, Gabrielle had convinced her keepers that she had reformed, prompting
Le Journal des Débats
, which had earlier condemned her behavior, to declare she
“had the most exemplary conduct” and that she demonstrated wisdom and gentleness and that her crime had “perhaps been unconsciously committed.”

With her lawyer Henri Robert working diligently on her behalf, Gabrielle finally won her release from prison on June 8, 1903, having served just twelve years of her twenty-year sentence. She was nearly thirty-five and largely forgotten, but her craving for the spotlight was as strong as ever. She needed a sensational spectacle to mark her return to the national eye. Outside the prison, on a beautiful spring
morning, she met with a reporter who noted how small and cheerful she was and that her
“face, pale and round, was lit up by big eyes.” She had an “opulent mass of chestnut hair” and “one could hardly discover any hardness in the outline of her thin lips.” She said that being free felt very natural to her. “My release,” she told the reporter, “didn’t make me emotional at all. I didn’t cry. I didn’t faint.”

She boarded a train at the Clermont-de-l’Oise station and rode the fifty miles to Paris for a publicity-generating lunch. At the fashionable Pavillon d’Armenonville restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne she joined the table of the attention-seeking aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont, with whom she had corresponded during her incarceration. While in prison she also had written to the well-known newspaper editor Jacques Dhur
“so he’d be interested in me,” she said. Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian eccentric, a darling of the Paris press, who was in competition with the Wright brothers to become the first to pilot an airplane. He was often pictured in the newspapers floating over Paris in a lighter-than-air flying machine; one of his favorite stunts was to drop in at a café or a friend’s apartment in the cigar-shaped airship, tying it up to a lamppost while he visited inside.

Of her afternoon at the Pavillon d’Armenonville with Santos-Dumont and other celebrated characters, Gabrielle said, dreamily,
“Oh! A good lunch, a bottle of wine, the crowd—it’s nice, it’s gay.”

One observer, however, was disgusted by the sight of
“the petite strangler nibbling her dessert in this elegant milieu … the memory of her crime not seeming to bother her much.” Gabrielle was a little plumper than she had been in her early twenties at the height of her notoriety, but still attractive and well-mannered in a black silk bolero and tight gray skirt pleated in the back. She was a mix of sugar and vitriol, of presumed virtue and real vice, this critic asserted; there was about her a stench of rotting cadaver, fouling the springtime arboreal scent of the Bois de Boulogne.

When news of her release reached San Francisco, the
Chronicle
rebuked celebrities like Santos-Dumont and Dhur for entertaining
“the confessed strangler and woman of shame.” The paper noted that cartoons in the press showed society people telephoning one another, saying: “Do come to my five o’clock tea. Gabrielle Bompard will be there. She is too sweet for anything.” Indeed, the
Chronicle
concluded, Gabrielle was having “the gayest time of all her wicked life.”

Several days after her Santos-Dumont lunch, she traveled to Nancy, where she stayed with her brother and visited with one of her staunchest defenders, Jules Liégeois of the University of Nancy. The law professor who had begged the court—in vain—for permission to hypnotize Gabrielle now had his chance, with her willing consent. Only in this way, Liégeois believed, could he get at the indisputable truth of the crime. Only in a hypnotic state would Gabrielle be free to reveal what really happened.

The professor grasped her wrists, looked into her eyes, and said,
“You must fall into a deep sleep and act out the crime again.” She was still an easy subject after twelve years in prison, and she fell quickly into a trance. “There you are,” Liégeois urged, “it is the moment before the murder. Go on.”

Acting out the scene, an anguished Gabrielle sank to her knees and refused to assist Michel Eyraud in the murder. She mimed a horrific quarrel in which her lover went for her throat with his powerful hands. Writhing, she cried, “He’s strangling me!” He kept at it while she begged him to stop until finally she promised to do his bidding: She agreed to lure the victim to the apartment and seduce him so Eyraud could rob and murder him. Moving into the next phase of the crime, Gabrielle got to her feet and acted it out: She conducted an imaginary person to the corner of the room and removed a sash from around her waist. Then she froze, unable to take the next step, and went into convulsions, falling to the floor. After several minutes of hysterics Gabrielle got back onto her feet shrieking, “Murderer! Murderer!” and calling out the name of Eyraud. When Liégeois pressed her to describe what Eyraud had done, Gabrielle took several steps forward and closed her fingers around the professor’s throat.

It was a dramatic and revealing demonstration, one that Liégeois believed should have been delivered in court. If jurors had seen Gabrielle in the throes of the crime, the outcome of the trial might have been quite different.

Believing it was important to bring his discovery to the public, Liégeois invited the press to witness the demonstration. In both Nancy and Paris the professor and Gabrielle repeated her hypnotic portrayal of the crime. As she performed the reenactment, reporters busily jotted down her cries and writhings while photographers captured still images of the emotional scene. But there was little interest
in rectifying a potential wrong in this old case. It was a
“very weird spectacle,” one reporter wrote, adding “many terrible things are done in France in the name of science.” He described Gabrielle’s “mental torture” and “the severe ordeal she’d been through” during the crime, but he was unmoved. “It was a horrible exhibition,” the reporter concluded, “and it is difficult to see any justification for it.”

Undeterred, Gabrielle sought to force herself on the public. She published a brief memoir in a new journal created by her admirer Jacques Dhur. To promote her life story, Dhur circulated autographed postcards on the streets bearing Gabrielle’s photograph in a ball gown with a high collar.
“Curious about my life?” the murderess wrote across the card. “Read my confession.” The editor inscribed a note intended to excite the public: “She recounts the death as if she had simply been an accidental spectator of the crime.” This caused one cynic to sneer: “She is a star upon which the Barnums could count to make themselves rich.”

Indeed, there were riches to be had, or so Liégeois and Gabrielle believed. They rehearsed their hypnotic exhibition and prepared to take it on the road as a traveling show. It would serve two purposes: to prove that she was unjustly convicted of the crime; and to attract a paying audience in large entertainment halls. But Parisian moralists were appalled:
“As Christians we must observe the law of forgiveness but this does not extend to glorifying rogues,” one critic wrote. “Let’s not confuse a mother who steals bread to feed her children with a seductress who lures a client home so her lover can rob and strangle him.” These keepers of French virtue scorned the press for playing along, for “deprecating the public,” for providing a “new job opportunity for a romantic female criminal.” Critics worried that Gabrielle’s return would be a scourge on French honor. “We are in an age of rehabilitations,” lamented
La Presse
, voicing a complaint that echoes oddly into our day.

Before their bizarre tour began, however, Gabrielle and Liégeois had a falling-out, and the professor was suddenly out of the picture. In his stead came a dentist named Gaston Cardos, who fancied himself an impresario and hypnotist and who recognized this rare and promising opportunity. But in Paris sentiment was strongly opposed to the return of the little demon—the public had lost its fascination with her—and an audience could not be found. Another venue was
needed, so the pair turned their sights on America. Gabrielle and Cardos set sail, traveling in second class aboard the luxury steamer
Lucania
, and arrived at the port of New York on January 17, 1904.

Immigration officials, alerted by cable, awaited the steamer at the Cunard pier. Chief Inspector Jackson came aboard, confirmed Gabrielle’s identity, interviewed the couple, and learned the purpose of the trip. Although the pair vigorously pleaded their case, Jackson denied them entry to America on the grounds that Gabrielle was a convicted criminal and Cardos was an undesirable immigrant; they were taken to Ellis Island to await deportation. Gabrielle was described as calm throughout the ordeal, while Cardos became enraged and demanded their release, declaring he would appeal the matter to the highest levels in Washington. Gabrielle’s appeal was quickly denied, and when the
Lucania
left New York a week later on its return trip, it stopped near Ellis Island to pick her up. She was on her way back to Europe on her own while her companion was marooned on Ellis Island, awaiting the resolution of his own appeal.

The traveling show was Gabrielle’s last chance at redemption and celebrity, and after its collapse, she drifted into obscurity. Her glamour had faded; no one was interested in her hysterics or in the hypnotism defense. Liégeois, too, had never fully recovered from his botched performance in court. After the trial he dropped out of sight for a while under a barrage of ridicule. A Nancy newspaper had mocked his disappearance, noting that his former students jokingly wondered whether he hadn’t become the victim of a new Eyraud and his diabolical hypnosis skills. Even his colleague Hippolyte Bernheim disparaged him. Writing to another Nancy scholar, Bernheim was dismayed by Liégeois’s clumsy handling of the case. Instead of establishing the predominance of the Nancy school, Bernheim lamented, Liégeois had exposed the school’s doctrines to ridicule.