Authors: Steven Levingston
In San Francisco, the couple met a man Eyraud identified as Monsieur Garanger. One day, Garanger asked about the case.
“Did they find the bailiff?” he wondered. The innocent inquiry caused Eyraud’s throat to tighten. But, the fugitive wrote, “Gabrielle broke into a peal of laughter, saying the bailiff was alive—he was right then probably amusing himself with a woman.” From this, Eyraud asserted, it was clear that Gabrielle was the real murderer.
In the letter Eyraud revealed that he was alone, his mistress having set off from San Francisco in the company of Monsieur Garanger. That gentleman was escorting Gabrielle back to France to visit her sick aunt, and Eyraud was to have reunited with them in New York. But now he realized they had ditched him—and he was furious.
Goron understood his rage: Not only had he lost Gabrielle but
he’d lost control of her. But were these histrionics the grief of a wronged lover or the jig of a con man?
“We have not seen each other again,” he informed Goron.
“I wrote more than twenty letters to her. I was a fool. I pleaded with her to return. I cried. I wanted to kill myself. I inhaled chloroform. The manager at my hotel called the doctor.”
One moment he was anguished at losing her, the next he was condemning her for murder.
“Ah! Ah! I am dead,” he wrote to Goron. “I write to refute all the rumors. It’s necessary to find Gabrielle, the most sly woman in the world. What could she have said to Garanger? I don’t know but they have gone. Does she have reason to fear the light? … You must find Garanger. Gabrielle will be with him.
Her hair is now cut like a boy’s and is dyed red.
The sadness of this creature is that she lies too much and has a dozen lovers.”
Continuing his mad ravings, Eyraud wondered: Could Gabrielle have killed Gouffé on her own? It wasn’t likely, but any one of her many lovers could have assisted her. Eyraud vowed he would never return to France to be unjustly accused.
“I am not guilty and will never bear shackles,” he declared. But he promised to rush home as soon as that guilty young woman was arrested, and he would place himself at the disposal of the police to resolve any lingering mysteries.
Goron set the letter down. He was certain it came from the pen of Eyraud. But to make sure, he compared the handwriting with specimens taken from the fugitive’s home, and the match was exact. While it had been impossible to find Eyraud, Eyraud had no trouble finding Goron. The fugitive expressed no remorse, indeed, lacked any conscience whatsoever. He even seemed indifferent to his own fate if he were caught. Goron regarded the letter as a clumsy self-defense—and a supremely stupid undertaking. By writing it the suspect put himself at great risk. While he believed he was turning the spotlight onto Gabrielle, he had instead provided a wealth of clues that heightened the chances of his own capture.
“It was possible that Eyraud did not understand the danger of this letter,” Goron explained, “but he sent it anyway. His jealousy was stronger than reason.”
What disturbed Eyraud the most was that his mistress had run off with another man. He was enraged and would do anything—even send her to the guillotine—to wreak vengeance.
“His Gabrielle was taken from him,” Goron noted. “She was in the arms of another and
he could not abide that. He had only one thought: to prevent his mistress from being the lover of another man. For him, the rest no longer mattered.”
Goron soon received two more letters from Eyraud. One was dated January 9, 1890, postmarked Montreal. The other was written on January 11 and bore a Philadelphia postmark. Eyraud was roaming the East Coast, and his long-winded letters were evidence of a desperate, solitary fugitive. Goron considered the series tantamount to a confession of murder. But just as the trail was heating up, Goron’s health took a turn for the worse. He was still weak from the flu and his eye was irritated. On doctor’s orders, he was forced against his mighty will to retreat to a dark room for a period of recuperation. Inspector Jaume would keep the chief informed.
On the streets, the talk everywhere was of Gabrielle Bompard. Eyraud’s letters had turned her into a figure of fascination. A day didn’t pass without her name shouted in the headlines. At least one newspaper filled its entire front page with an engraving of the infamous new celebrity. Soon everyone was familiar with her saucy, childlike face. Parisians felt they knew her as they might a wayward cousin; they saw her pictured in different poses; they read about her youth, her brutal affair with Eyraud. Some gossipmongers expressed sympathy for the poor girl. But mostly it was her wickedness that mesmerized the city. A woman of her age ought to have been sweet and demure—traits that were attractive to a reputable husband. But Gabrielle ignored the norms. She was France’s greatest fear: a woman on the loose, a dangerous murderess, a threat to the stability of the French family—and precisely for all that, Parisians found her tantalizing.
After docking at Liverpool, Georges Garanger and Gabrielle Bompard made their way to London then crossed the Channel a few days later, arriving in Paris on Saturday night, January 18, 1890, to discover a city abuzz over the Gouffé killing. The elusive suspects—Gabrielle Bompard and Michel Eyraud—were splashed across the newspapers. Obviously Gabrielle could no longer evade the subject. Ensconced in their hotel room she finally acknowledged the truth—at least part of it. She told her lover that Eyraud had murdered Gouffé—and she was there, but she was entirely free of responsibility. If she were guilty of anything, it was the crime of silence—she had kept her terrible secret to herself. She begged Garanger to understand and, full of his affection for her, he accepted her story of innocence. She urged him to go out in the morning and get all the newspapers he could find. He needed to read everything; then, she promised, they would talk.
The next day, Gabrielle hid inside the hotel room while Garanger went about Paris in no great hurry. First he lunched with a friend; then he went to see Eyraud’s brother-in-law, hoping to collect on some of his loans to Eyraud. But the mere mention of Eyraud’s name enraged the brother-in-law: Why in the world would he cover the man’s debts? He was waiting for Eyraud to repay him thousands of francs. Did Monsieur Garanger not realize the cold truth? He too had been swindled.
When Garanger returned to the hotel, his arms were filled with recent editions of
Le Petit Journal.
He read them patiently while Gabrielle watched and waited. Finally it was time to talk. But again Gabrielle only wanted to prove her innocence. She implored Garanger to believe she had no hand in the murder. If she were an accomplice, she was an involuntary one. As Goron later described her attitude:
“In her mind she had erected a system of defense that she thought was infallible.”
Garanger was disappointed, and decided there was only one course of action: Gabrielle had to tell her story to the prefect of police. She agreed, believing in her innocence and trusting in Garanger to protect her. For his part, he placed his faith in French justice. Her innocence would save her.
On Tuesday afternoon, January 21, at about four o’clock, Gabrielle and her gentleman approached the office of the prefect. Her name was in every newspaper and her face stared out from the photos; she was the woman all of Paris wanted to see. But when she presented herself to the bailiff, he asked dryly,
“Do you have a letter of introduction?”
“No,” she replied. “But I am Gabrielle Bompard.”
The name meant nothing to him, and the bailiff had his rules. “Get a letter of introduction,” he told her. “You will not be received otherwise.” And he sent her away. Goron was astounded.
“The prefect’s bailiff was the only person in Paris who was ignorant of the Gouffé case,” he recalled. This daft guard let France’s premier fugitive slip away. “With him,” Goron scolded, “rules took precedence over other observations.”
Gabrielle and Garanger tried again the following day, returning to the prefecture at 10:00 a.m. A cold wind had blown in overnight and rain had come. Gabrielle was in an elegant black dress and veil; she had pushed her dyed-red hair up into a soft fur hat. Garanger at her side was a bearded, distinguished-looking gentleman in a top hat. A different bailiff was on duty but was as much a dullard as the previous one. He, too, mindlessly demanded to see a letter of introduction, and Gabrielle again admitted that she didn’t have one.
“But I need to see the prefect,” she pleaded. “It’s extremely urgent.”
“Please state your name.”
“I am Gabrielle Bompard.”
The stunned look on the bailiff’s face showed he had read the newspapers. He shot to his feet and raced out from behind his station. Staring hard at the young woman, he escorted her into the office of the prefect, Henri-Auguste Loze. Her companion followed closely behind.
That morning Inspector Jaume had visited the ailing Goron, whose recovery was slow and painful. The Sûreté staff was deeply concerned.
“He is sick,” the inspector wrote in his diary. “His eyes haven’t worked since the trip to London, and we are very upset because the doctors do not offer us assurances.”
A short time later, Jaume rushed to Prefect Loze’s office on an urgent summons and found two visitors on the prefect’s sofa: a respectable-looking middle-aged man and a young woman whose face was turned away.
“Tell me, Jaume, do you recognize Mademoiselle?” Loze said.
The woman swiveled toward the inspector.
“Perfectly, Monsieur le Préfet,” Jaume replied calmly. “That’s Mademoiselle Gabrielle Bompard.”
She was a slight woman with pretty eyes and matchstick arms and legs. But the fur hat, Jaume thought, it did nothing for her—it was slightly out of fashion.
“How can you be sure?” the prefect wanted to know.
“Very simple, Monsieur le Préfet. I have close to three thousand photos of Mademoiselle Bompard on my desk. It is not surprising her features would be engraved in my memory.”
Gazing at her companion, Jaume wondered privately
“who the devil the bearded man was.”
If Gabrielle was innocent, Jaume didn’t see it. She had a sly, kittenish look and, when she smiled at him, Jaume was inspired to exclaim in his diary:
“O monstre!”
For weeks, the inspector had carried a document inside his portfolio, hoping for this day. He smiled back at Gabrielle and dipped into his case, saying, “Mademoiselle, I have something for you.”
It was a warrant for her arrest.
Gabrielle Bompard’s entrance was, in the words of
Le Petit Journal
, a
coup de théâtre
, a dramatic turn of events, a scene only a novelist could invent, but in this case “the reality … surpassed fiction.”
Gabrielle was a real-life character who fed the public’s fascination with the criminal mind. Encouraged by the lurid press, the French had a passion for the otherness of killers popularized by the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, who claimed to have discovered a new human subspecies: the born criminal. After first focusing on men, Lombroso turned his attention to criminal women, and later he would draw on Gabrielle as proof of his theories (which are now largely discredited). Her confession to Garanger fit the Lombroso model.
“We find that while [criminal women] often obstinately deny their guilt,” the criminologist wrote, “they also often spontaneously reveal it. This complex psychological phenomenon is caused in part by that need to gossip and that inability to keep a secret which are characteristic of females.” In recounting Gabrielle’s case, Lombroso described her travels with Georges Garanger, their arrival in Paris, the newspapers’ vigorous coverage of the crime, concluding that “she could not refrain from revealing her own and her accomplice’s identity.” Lombroso distinguished born killers by their physical defects, and Gabrielle, he said, had
“all the characteristics,” noting her tiny stature and small breasts and hips. Furthermore, Lombroso deduced, “she had an asymmetrical and flattened face as in Mongolians.”
None of it, however, detracted from her allure to Parisians. Her charm and unpredictability only enhanced the mystery of her criminal nature. She took to her public role instinctively, stepping eagerly into the spotlight and playing to the masses; her life suddenly acquired meaning thanks to the glare of the press and the readers’ obsessive
curiosity. Shamelessly self-promoting, she laid the foundation for the modern criminal celebrity.
“Her biggest concern,”
Le Petit Journal
marveled, “is to know, Is she getting good press?” She repeatedly asked her keepers what journalists were saying about her and when she heard they were portraying her as a spoiled child, “she could not suppress a smile of satisfaction.”
From the prefect’s office she was taken in a hackney to the home of Judge Dopffer, with Inspector Jaume and Garanger at her side. She seemed lighthearted, even happy. Rolling along the Paris streets, she delighted at the sights while Jaume and Garanger sat in silence.
“No one said a word,” Jaume recorded in his diary. “Only Gabrielle Bompard from time to time let out a joyous exclamation at seeing some lovely ornament of Paris. Were we on a pleasure outing? The devil take me if I’d ever seen a similar arrest.”
Her behavior was mystifying: Did she not realize the gravity of her situation? Was she a child overjoyed at being the center of attention? Was she relieved her long flight from justice was over? Was she mentally unstable? Or did she possess the indifference of a born criminal?
In front of Dopffer’s residence, a flower girl thrust a bouquet of violets at Jaume, mistaking his relationship with Gabrielle:
“Flowers for your madame, my good monsieur. It will bring you happiness.” Quickly seizing on the peddler’s confusion, Gabrielle turned puppy-dog eyes on Jaume, trapping him between embarrassment and disgust.
“Voilà,” he wrote later, “Gabrielle addressed a mute prayer to me, and I was compelled to read the desire in her eyes. I paid for the violets.”
Gabrielle gaily pinned the flowers to her bodice and the trio went up the steps to the door. But Dopffer, who had not been informed of the big news, was out at lunch. So, with time to kill, Jaume walked his charges to the nearby Café de l’Observatoire on boulevard de Port-Royal. The place was in high spirits. Four young men played a noisy round of billiards, and a group of students and some
“pretty ladies from the Latin quarter” were laughing and singing together, Jaume wrote. To his great relief, no one so much as glanced at the notorious murderess. Happily, he wrote, “they had no more care about us than might Queen Victoria or the Grand Mughal.” Gabrielle slipped into the mood of the place and was as animated as a girl out for lunch with friends.