Authors: Steven Levingston
While he was distracted by his lovemaking, she quietly transformed the sash into a noose—Eyraud had doctored it and showed her what to do—and she discreetly reached through a break in the curtain, passed one end of the sash to Eyraud, and he connected it to a clasp on the rope. She was marching through her orders like an automaton, just as Eyraud had instructed her. Now she raised the sash—shaped like a noose—and playfully chirped:
“What a nice necktie it makes.” Gouffé, absorbed in Gabrielle’s body, paid no attention to her chatter.
The moment had arrived: Gabrielle knew what she had to do. Recalling the scene for Dopffer, she sounded distant, as if reciting the actions of someone else. She told the judge that she started to drop the sash over Gouffé’s neck but then froze. She panicked, her mind was exploding, she was paralyzed. Somehow Eyraud sensed her
hesitation and burst out of the alcove, grabbing the noose out of her hands and throwing it over Gouffé’s head. The bailiff was startled but had no time to react. Eyraud was already pulling on the rope and the red sash was tightening around Gouffé’s throat. Eyraud yanked down ferociously and Gouffé slowly rose off the floor. The bailiff’s hands went to his throat, his fingers clawing at the sash, trying to get underneath it. He cried out but he was choking. Eyraud threw all his weight onto the rope, jerking Gouffé upward and draining the color from the bailiff’s face.
Then, Gabrielle said, she heard a loud snap—the pulley had popped out of the crossbeam. Suddenly the rope was cascading down and with it came Gouffé, who tumbled to the floor, still alive. Eyraud dove on top of Gouffé like a panther and grabbed his throat. Gouffé was too winded to resist. Maniacally Eyraud drove his large thumbs into the bailiff’s windpipe, pressing with every ounce of his strength.
To Gabrielle, time stood still—Gouffé’s strangulation took only seconds but the horror seemed to drag on forever.
When it was over, Eyraud fell backward on the floor red-faced and out of breath.
“C’est fait,”
he said. (It’s done.)
A dramatic tale, no doubt. But was it the truth? Eyraud committed the murder, and Gabrielle, she was just a terrified witness. But was she as disengaged as she suggested? What was Eyraud’s story? He was not here to defend himself, he was unable to challenge Gabrielle’s recollection. Dopffer realized it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at an indisputable account of what occurred inside 3, rue Tronson du Coudray on July 26, 1889.
Newspapers reported details of the interrogation: Gabrielle’s intense sobbing, her outbursts of mad hilarity. She was described as a spoiled child, a street urchin, a deranged woman. And there was her aloofness, her detachment, as if she were anywhere else but at the scene of the crime. To Inspector Jaume she displayed
“a disconcerting aplomb.” She was as slippery a wench as he had seen. “To embarrassing questions, she responds with a burst of laughter,” he noted. But he warned that she should not be dismissed as a lightweight. “This woman is not a scatterbrain. She thinks. She calculates. She has extreme self-possession and audacity. A cunning devil, yes. A fool, no!”
She had seduced the masses and prompted a guessing game: Who was Gabrielle really? What drove her? Why did she return to Paris? Why come back if only to face certain prosecution? Paris intellectuals dug deep in search of profound answers. One essay compared her to the tormented souls who populate Russian literature, characters created by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.
“She shows the need for confession which is the pivot in so many celebrated dramas and novels,” the essayist wrote. “It is necessary that she speak, the miserable girl, that she shakes off the load of her crime, that she tells it, perhaps to be able finally to sleep in peace.”
The little demon threw the nation into a frenzy, as
Le Petit Journal
put it:
“She is a suitable heroine in this sad drama that preoccupies all of France.”
Her arrest redeemed Jaume and the ailing Goron. The newspapers had lacerated them for their handling of the case; Parisians had snickered, and some magistrates had publicly scolded them. But the two men stuck to their hunches, risked their reputations—and now who dared to doubt them? They were, in fact, the cleverest of all sleuths. Henri-Auguste Loze, the prefect of police, told Jaume he was pleased by the turn of events.
“I am especially very happy for you because the public was saying that Goron and Jaume are phonies.”
The men were lionized. Without Goron,
L’Écho de Paris
declared, the case had been destined to founder in the hands of incompetents in the provinces. What kind of a man had such courage to stick by his beliefs? It was Goron, the paper said, who
“proved in the Gouffé case the remarkable qualities that others seemed to totally lack.”
La Presse
praised Goron for his relentless pursuit of the truth. Every one of his steps now seemed a masterful stroke. He was
“certainly right” when confronted by the unidentified cadaver in Millery to declare: “That’s the bailiff Gouffé!”
Each day Gabrielle was greeted in her cell by Brigadier Soudais and another Sûreté agent and escorted to Judge Dopffer’s office for her interrogation. She faced the judge alone, without a lawyer. French law did not require that suspects have counsel present during questioning; the investigating magistrate was empowered to interrogate anybody and to do so in private. Gabrielle and the guards climbed several flights of stairs to the top three floors of the Palais de Justice. Along the enormous corridor leading to Dopffer’s office she was able to pause and gaze through the windows at Sainte-Chapelle, home for more than six hundred years to relics from Christ’s crucifixion: a nail, his blood, his crown of thorns.
The vast corridor was thick with people. Here Gabrielle was among the accused who had come to protest their innocence or confess their guilt and the witnesses who had come to provide testimony. On any average day the eye took in a kaleidoscope of impressions:
“Here a cook in a white apron talks lovingly to a municipal guard,” a court reporter wrote of the scene. “There, with their arms folded in the attitude of blind men waiting for alms, the witnesses of some accident bide their time, leaning against the wall … One of them sighs and keeps looking at his watch … another reads his newspaper … another, possessed by an irresistible desire for movement, walks up and down, counting his paces, and feverishly biting the points of his moustache.”
They were each summoned to their session by a clerk in a dark blue uniform with copper buttons who sat officiously at a desk lighted by a gas lamp covered in a green shade. Every so often an electric bell sounded, rousing the clerk, who scrambled into the judges’ quarters for his orders.
Gabrielle sat on a bench to await her turn. Lost in her own thoughts, she did not notice that standing nearby was Georges Garanger, whom she had not seen since her arrest a week earlier, and who was talking with his legal representative, the famed attorney Henri Robert. Since the couple had appeared at the prefect’s office, Garanger had managed to evade the spotlight. For a few days he had been the unnamed mystery man who escorted the young woman on her way to justice. He had been subjected to a round of questioning by police, which revealed he had a business relationship with Michel Eyraud in America—and that revelation had kicked up a swirl of suspicion around Garanger himself. So he had hired the formidable Robert, who at twenty-seven was already considered one of France’s brightest legal minds, and soon any doubt about Garanger’s honesty and integrity vanished.
Le Gil Blas
highlighted the gentleman’s wealth and exotic business ventures in China, Burma, and Cambodia and his membership in the Legion of Honor. It concluded that
“his role in this affair had been in all respects honorable.”
Garanger provided police with a statement that described his initial encounter with Eyraud and Gabrielle in Vancouver, then elaborated on seeing them again in San Francisco, and touring the wine country of Napa for ten days together. He recounted being drawn into a phony distillery project that Eyraud promised would produce staggering returns. He recalled buying a sealskin coat for Gabrielle for $100, advancing Eyraud $200 here, another $300 there, and hearing Eyraud prattle about the huge sums of money needed for the distillery. Garanger told police about setting off with Gabrielle from San Francisco and then avoiding Eyraud on the East Coast and sailing across the Atlantic.
“Eyraud had the real intention of murdering me,” he told police. Gabrielle had told Garanger about threats against him. “The swine had better watch out,” Eyraud had said. “I’ll have to kill him to get his money.” Gabrielle said she warned Eyraud to keep his hands off of Garanger: If he murdered Garanger, she vowed to go to the police.
While Garanger had captured the respect of the nation, he seemed an odd match for a troubled, lost girl. What did he see in this volatile coquette? Could it be that Garanger, who had spent years in remote, mysterious lands, thrived on the exotic and was intrigued by her inconsistencies? Was he the sort of man who found impulsive behavior
amusing? In his statement to police, he was unconcerned that his
“voyage companion was a bit eccentric.” She had charmed Garanger’s wandering soul: She was young and pretty and always surprising.
The writer Émile Zola felt compelled to weigh in on their relationship, seeing in Gabrielle the deadly deceit of the femme fatale. Her conduct, in Zola’s eyes, exemplified the distrustful nature of all women. So easily she turned from one lover to the next, forsaking Eyraud in a heartbeat for Garanger, and then denouncing her former lover to the police.
“Ah, they are all like this, women,” Zola declared. “All! Whatever their social condition, their education, their character, all break up like this—the next day forgetting the one they loved the day before.” Zola believed that Gabrielle’s decision to go to the police was not an act of remorse or courage—there was nothing admirable at all in it. In Zola’s world, women did not behave honorably. “It’s part of a need to create talk about themselves, to occupy the public attention,” he said. “Gabrielle Bompard is delighted to know that her name is in the newspapers every day. It’s the profound indifference they reserve for those who have ceased to please them.”
Inspector Jaume also found Gabrielle about as trustworthy as a starving street cat.
“The rascal knows men well,” he confided to his diary. “She plays the ingénue with the good Garanger to ensure he accepts her innocence—the perverse little woman.” Now that she had revealed her role in the murder, she needed the support of the virtuous Garanger all the more.
“The interest he shows in her is a shield which she has to preserve,” Jaume reasoned. “If he abandons her, her situation before the jury will be infinitely worse.” Once, when Jaume had both of them in his office for questioning, Gabrielle had sweetly begged Garanger to forgive her for failing to tell him the whole truth right from the start. But by this time her honeyed words did not impress Garanger, and he remained stoically silent. Jaume suspected Garanger was seeing Gabrielle for what she was:
“a vulgar prostitute and accomplice in murder.” He recorded in his diary: “Garanger is beginning to understand that Gabrielle has fooled him.”
While awaiting her session with Dopffer, Gabrielle caught sight of Garanger standing several paces away with his lawyer, and she sprang off the bench and raced toward him. With wild abandon she threw herself into his arms, hugging and kissing him. Her display was childish, dramatic, deranged. For his part, Garanger was visibly moved
by her passion, but he maintained his dignity and gently disengaged himself. He held her in his outstretched arms, his voice quavering.
“My child!” he said. “My child, have courage.”
What gave rise to Garanger’s emotions? Genuine affection for Gabrielle, empathy for her plight, sadness at the impossible barriers now between them? “Let me …” he began but then stopped, unable to find the words. Finally all he could manage to say was: “Please.”
Gabrielle clung tightly to him until Brigadier Soudais intervened by tapping his walking stick on Garanger’s leg. Soudais signaled with his head for the gentleman to move away, and Garanger followed orders, delicately extricating himself from her embrace and taking a few steps backward. Soudais then piloted Gabrielle back to the bench.
Was this outburst a contrived performance? Or was Gabrielle a weak child craving attention in the cold confines of the Palais de Justice? Was she fluttering at the edge of psychological disintegration? So many questions: Who was this baffling lost soul? Was Gabrielle the
petit démon
conning the world, or was she a damaged girl facing the wrath of French justice? Jaume had his own answer:
“The play-acting of this young woman,” he groused to his diary, “irritates me more than I can say.”
A world away in San Francisco, Gabrielle Bompard was a local story: The young woman who’d once roamed the city was now implicated in a shocking murder. The
San Francisco Chronicle
carried a page-one story:
“A Criminal Heroine: Gabrielle Enjoys Her Notoriety.” Michel Eyraud also became a figure of fascination. Reporters trekked out to the Napa Valley to retrace his steps, sending back dispatches headlined:
“He Can Tell Good Brandy—One of the Accomplishments of Eyraud, the Paris Strangler.”
In Paris, Gabrielle had the limelight all to herself, and her outbursts and droll observations flooded the papers as if she were a stage star. One day, while eating lunch, she glanced at the scrap of newspaper wrapped around her cheese. Studying the fragment, she saw a few words about the Gouffé case.
“Ah, there’s something here about me,” she commented to Jaume. “What are they saying about me in the newspapers?”
“Woman! The newspapers speak only of you. You are
l’héroïne du jour
,” Jaume told her.
“Ah, that’s very nice.” And she burst out laughing.
Although some worried that Gabrielle’s mental state was deteriorating, Jaume was convinced she was in full control of her faculties and was manipulating a willing Paris audience.
“I do not hide what I believe: that her laugh rings false, that her unconscious gaiety is calculated, and that she does not at all merit in any way to monopolize the attention of the public.”