Authors: Steven Levingston
The public wanted to know everything about her. Newspaper readers learned that her fine fashions, in which she appeared each day on the staircase of the Palais de Justice, had been supplied by her gentleman friend Georges Garanger.
“We have seen her in black, blue,
tobacco-brown and beige,” reported
L’Écho de Paris.
“Yesterday, she wore a simple and elegant dress in a shade of brown. But always the same hat, a small, velvet toque.”
The reporting was obsessive. Journalists revealed not only what came out of her mouth but also what went into it. After she was interrogated in the morning at the Sûreté, the newspapers published what she had for lunch:
“côtelette de mouton avec de la purée de pommes, un morceau de fromage de Brie et une pomme. Comme boisson, une vulgaire chopine de vin”
(lamb chop with mashed potatoes and a piece of Brie cheese and an apple, along with an ordinary glass of wine). “She ate with a very good appetite,”
Le Figaro
said, “although complaining that her lamb chop, brought in from a neighboring restaurant, was cold and hardly appetizing.”
Isolated in her barren cell at the Dépôt, she managed to cling to some of the finer things in life. She had with her a flask of Eau Circassienne, a special water created by a Dr. Wiloff, which was said to preserve a woman’s skin tone.
In his daily interrogations, Judge Dopffer wrestled with Gabrielle to tease out the truth. On some days he was the harsh inquisitor; on others, a paternal adviser. Gabrielle, he realized, could only be led to the truth through a maze of lies.
“La belle Gabrielle … recounted a new fact to the judge every day, which was often a lie but also sometimes a confession,” Goron wrote in his account of the case.
Piece by contradictory piece, her sordid tale took shape. The concierge at the apartment on rue Tronson du Coudray confirmed that Eyraud and Gabrielle had been seen coming and going. But he found nothing suspicious about the couple.
“I would have never thought that this monsieur and this mademoiselle were murderers,” he told
Le Figaro.
The businessman Fribourg confirmed Gabrielle’s descriptions of Eyraud’s scams to rob the trading company. Her account of how she and Eyraud dumped the body in Millery provided the map for a later trip to the south to retrace the killers’ steps.
There was, however, an unanswerable question that loomed over all the proceedings. Dopffer could amass details; he could create a giant dossier; he could describe every train ride, every shopping trip, every ruse. But no matter how many facts he assembled, the answer to one mystery still was just out of reach: How was it that this young woman from a bourgeois family could have taken part in a series
of dreadful acts that ultimately ended in murder? The plotting. The trips to London. The theatrical killing. To everyone, her conduct was inexplicable. How could she have stayed with the brutal Eyraud for so long and then gone with him on the run across the sea to America? She was either an immoral degenerate or a bullied young woman dragged along like a chained dog by a manipulative older man. Her motives, her adventures, her essence were a mystery.
Whatever frailties lay within Gabrielle’s soul, Inspector Jaume had no sympathy for her. He wanted a conviction and the most severe sentence. His cop’s obsession left little room for mercy and scant understanding of female oppression. Abuse and its crippling impact meant nothing to him.
“Gabrielle tells stories that Eyraud terrorized her,” he wrote in his diary. “He could. But when one lets oneself be terrorized into becoming the conscious instrument of a crime, one does not merit much pity.”
Her volatile emotions suggested something else was at work. Day by day, outburst by outburst, a theory emerged to explain Gabrielle’s submission to Eyraud. In the interrogation room, she laughed one moment, cried the next. She chattered then fell silent. At times she was carefree, oblivious to the gravity of her circumstances, to the fact that she was under arrest for murder. Her utter indifference to the crime was evident in her bizarre language. She said that after killing Gouffé, Eyraud cut the clothes off of the body and trussed it with a rope to make it fit into the trunk. She chirped that they had
“tied up Gouffé like a chicken!” Remarks like that revealed a profound detachment. Gabrielle, it was feared, was separating from reality.
“This woman is a nervous person, sick, with an unstable mind, a broken woman,” reported
Le Gil Blas.
Still, she deserved no leniency, the paper said. “She is far from meriting a light judgment.”
Reporters, doctors, judges, police, and the public dissected the character of this unhinged spirit and soon a new word entered the discussion.
La Presse
explained the diagnosis: Gabrielle, it said,
“offers attentive observers some very curious symptoms of well-developed neurosis.” She was very intelligent and at times was capable of providing thoughtful, precise answers to Dopffer’s probing inquiries. But some other responses revealed a deeply troubled psyche. “It’s the attitude taken by this woman, speaking first in a tone very disengaged, offering a first version, then another, finally a third, a bit closer to
the truth,” the paper wrote. “At times, she was wracked by intense agitation. Then she interrupts herself to laugh without reason and these outbursts of mad hilarity last several minutes.”
La Presse
then offered a diagnosis that began to gain currency: Gabrielle, it stated, was “affected by a sort of hysteria.”
“Hysteria” conjured images of madwomen inside the hysterics ward of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. But hysteria was far more complicated than that, more elusive, not just a flipbook of contortions, convulsions, and frozen states of catalepsy. It could be subtle.
“Like a globule of mercury, it escapes the grasp,” one writer has said. From the earliest days, the irrational behaviors designated as hysterical—ranging from a flare of anger to ravings—were misinterpreted as peculiar to women. The men who first defined hysteria located the problem in women’s reproductive organs. The word itself was derived from the Greek
hystera
, meaning uterus. But in fact it was impossible to locate the seat of the problem: Was it the soul, the passions, the brain, or a mere
“acridity in [women’s] sexual organs,” as one male observer put it?
The hysteric label stuck to Gabrielle and soon defined her. She had what were believed to be the classic traits: She was deceptive, weak-willed, changeable, and she had an insatiable craving for attention.
The psychologist Edgar Bérillon saw in Gabrielle undeniable traits of hysteria—the laughter and tears, the contradictions—all quite typical in a hysteric who otherwise presents a healthy-looking appearance. Bérillon studied her portraits and photographs, read all the newspaper reports, and was fascinated by her moods during her interrogation. Gabrielle, he said, mixed up truth and imagination. She told lies with
“the most unnerving impudence.” In sum, Bérillon said, “I do not doubt we are in the presence of a hysteric.”
Jaume came to accept the popular conclusion.
“Each time I see Gabrielle Bompard,” he wrote in his diary, “I ask myself: How did she help Eyraud to murder Gouffé? How much responsibility falls on her shoulders?” Of one thing, he too was certain:
“I allow that Gabrielle Bompard is a hysteric.”
What came next transformed this grisly murder into a landmark criminal case—a first in legal history. Hysterics, Charcot argued, had a particular susceptibility to hypnosis, and in a hypnotic trance, the law professor Jules Liégeois contended, a person could commit terrible
crimes, even murder. These theories took shape in the person of Gabrielle: Her submission to Eyraud and her participation in the killing now were blamed on the powerful influence of hypnotism.
It was Garanger who first proposed that Gabrielle had fallen prey to a force she could not resist. Whether he had the idea himself or Gabrielle had cunningly placed it in his head is impossible to know. But he suggested a murder defense that had never been introduced in a court of law. The question he put forward for a jury to decided was this: Did Gabrielle engage in murder while under the hypnotic control of her middle-aged lover, Michel Eyraud?
Garanger was an amateur hypnotist himself—he had hypnotized Gabrielle on the transatlantic journey—and he knew what happened to a subject placed into a trance: She surrendered her will, she had no consciousness of her actions, and afterward she had no recall of her behavior. In her telling of the Gouffé murder, Gabrielle consistently asserted that she had acted against her will—in essence, she was sleepwalking through the horrors. She said repeatedly that Eyraud had a bizarre control over her. Garanger knew firsthand how deeply she fell into a hypnotic state. With a woman as susceptible as she, were there any limits to what she might do in a trance?
Once Garanger’s speculation arose, a critical question entered the case: If Gabrielle had committed murder under hypnosis, was she responsible for her actions?
“Monsieur Garanger does not believe in the culpability of his mistress,”
Le Petit Journal
revealed, noting that he contended she was forced into the role of a hypnotic intermediary and therefore not culpable.
“She is, he says, a hypnotic subject of exceptional sensitivity, and if she played a role in the murder of Gouffé, she was pushed by a suggestive force against which the poor girl was incapable of resisting.”
La Presse
chimed in:
“Gabrielle submitted her free will to a spirit much stronger than her own.”
The hypnotism theory rapidly gained credence—and in no small measure because of Garanger’s impeccable standing. What’s more, he had a special intimacy with the suspect—he was her lover and he had hypnotized her. He knew about her hypnosis obsession while a teenager in Lille and about her performances at the hypnotism salon in Paris. No one knew Gabrielle quite as well as Garanger: He was endowed with unique insight into her character. All this lent weight
to his pronouncements. And so it came to be accepted that Gabrielle had killed a man while under hypnosis. All at once Garanger had introduced the notion and legitimized it. Soon it stood at the center of the case. Exerting its bizarre power, hypnosis in the Gouffé murder investigation took on a life of its own.
Gabrielle herself didn’t have to press the hypnotism issue—the men around her leapt to her cause. Once the possibility of a hypnotism defense was raised, lawyers and academics converged on the question, seeking to enhance their own positions or win their medical and scientific battles. With her history, Gabrielle was the perfect candidate to bring the criminal aspect of hypnosis to the courts and to the public; but she spoke rarely, if at all, of her role as a hypnotic in the commission of the crime—the men were ready to speak on her behalf, positively or negatively, shoving her into the expected role of a passive woman. Her own life was on the line but doctors, lawyers, and professors were to determine her fate.
Garanger’s attorney, the wunderkind Henri Robert, sensed the potential of a spectacular courtroom drama. What better way to enhance one’s fame than to test the boundaries of justice with an unprecedented hypnotism defense? If Robert should prevail in such an endeavor, it would not only influence court proceedings for years but also assure him a place in legal history. Even if he failed, his celebrity would be guaranteed. His decision to take on the case raised the stakes by putting the state on notice that Gabrielle would come to court with a brilliant legal mind at her side.
Though still young, Robert was a formidable opponent. Few attorneys were as intellectually nimble and as eloquent on their feet. If he escorted you into the courtroom, you had an excellent chance of walking out free. He had once considered entering the priesthood if only for the chance to address a congregation inside Notre Dame cathedral, but he chose the law instead. He brought clarity into the courtroom; he had no patience for the esoteric language of the law. He was eloquent and had a quickness of repartee.
“For this reason he is the favorite advocate of the criminal classes,” one observer said. He had saved many men from the guillotine, “to say nothing of having secured the acquittal of a large number of the most thorough rascals in the capital.”
Eyraud was still on the run and the state’s case against Gabrielle
was yet to be completed. But Paris was already eagerly anticipating an extraordinary trial in criminal court, the Cour d’Assises, focused with great fanfare on the question of hypnotism.
“It’s a new theory, very much in favor at this time, which opens a large door for the defense attorneys,”
Le Figaro
wrote.
Le Petit Journal
considered the historic nature of the case:
“For the first time, the mysterious question of suggestion will find itself clearly posed in the course of a criminal investigation.”
Jaume was disgusted by all the hoopla. Gabrielle was, in his view, a degenerate liar who stuck by Eyraud’s side by her own choice and took part in the vile murder with her eyes wide open.
“These stories of hypnotism get on my nerves,” he complained. “They take on a greater importance day by day.”
He found it impossible to accept that Eyraud had hypnotized Gabrielle to act out his every command to the point of killing Gouffé. How then did she suddenly awake from her stupor to run off with the tall blond adventurer Garanger? One moment Gabrielle was Eyraud’s hypnotic pawn, the next she is fighting him to protect her new lover—such contradictions revealed her ugly duplicity. “Gabrielle, inert thing when it’s about the life of Gouffé, suddenly recovers her lucidity when it’s about Garanger,” Jaume said. “She resists, she refuses, she threatens. She yells at Eyraud: if you touch Garanger, I’ll tell.”
The investigation, Jaume protested, was spinning out of control. “There is truly hypnotism in the air,” the inspector bristled. “Only it’s Gabrielle who magnetizes public opinion.”
If hysteria and hypnotism were the topics of the day, then the man of the hour had to be the formidable Jean-Martin Charcot. What would the world’s leading neurologist make of Gabrielle Bompard’s condition—and, more important, her chances of a successful hypnotism defense?