Authors: Steven Levingston
Gabrielle was allowed to order food from outside the prison at her own expense, and for several months she had money thanks to the kindness of Georges Garanger. By now, he had turned away from her and discreetly left the scene. His absence meant that Gabrielle now had to get meals from the prison canteen like everyone else. Her wardrobe suffered, too. She passed her days in an old black wool dress and with the help of the nun kept her hair properly coifed.
In his cell, Eyraud entertained his guards with his tales of adventure. He was as lewd as a drunken sailor, holding back nothing, joking and swearing in four languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
Throughout July and August both suspects had sessions with Dopffer as he worked to wind up his investigation; they were summoned separately and were kept out of each other’s sight. By the end of August, Dopffer had everything he needed and at last declared he had completed his dossier. The two suspects were to face justice together in a trial set to begin October 27. Félix Decori, a Mephistopheles
look-alike who had a pointed beard and a mustache with twirled tips, was named to represent Eyraud. The formidable Henri Robert was to defend Gabrielle. Dopffer, exhausted and deserving of a rest, set off on an extended holiday.
As the trial approached, Eyraud appealed his arrest, his lawyer offering a flimsy, indeed absurd, argument, but one that nevertheless was taken seriously. The appeal contended that the minister of the interior, Ernest Constans, who headed the national police, had Eyraud arrested to settle a political score. Constans had been instrumental in staving off a potential coup by Georges Boulanger the previous year, forcing the popular general to flee the country under the fear of arrest. Eyraud, who had been a strong supporter of Boulanger, asserted in his appeal that Constans had him arrested because of his political sentiments. Given the evidence of Eyraud’s role in the murder, the appeal of his arrest on political grounds amounted to little more than the ravings of a man with nothing left to lose. Yet the Court of Appeals took up his request and, on October 28, rejected it. The gambit had one effect: It pushed back the start date of the trial to November 25.
Jury selection began in early November. Juries in the French legal system had evolved to offset the power and indiscriminate sentencing of the judge, and therefore played a vital role in the courtroom. The punishment for individual crimes was determined by the French legal code—for instance, the guillotine for murder—but the jury ruled on the existence of extenuating circumstances. For Gabrielle, the jury was entrusted to determine whether some extenuating circumstance—hypnotic control or mental illness—should lessen her punishment or even acquit her. But while the jury had considerable influence, it was hampered by the incomplete picture it got of defendants during a trial. Juries did not read the full dossier prepared by the judge of instruction; and French trials did not reveal all facts related to the case. Often the evidence was not presented in an orderly fashion but was jumbled and confusing. The presiding judge controlled the dissemination of information and tilted it to his own bias, resulting in a lopsided picture for the jury to consider. But juries, to their credit, were often of a fairly high intelligence. The pool for Eyraud and Gabrielle’s trial swiftly narrowed to thirty-six, including
a pharmacist, a retired sea captain, an architect, a fruit seller, and an engineer. From that group twelve were to be chosen to sit in judgment.
The steady march toward the trial halted suddenly two weeks before the opening. The freewheeling press, which had pulled almost every trick to sensationalize the case, now overstepped its legal bounds. On November 13,
Le Matin
published an article titled
“Nos bons jurés” (Our Good Jurors), in which it revealed many of the potential jurors—twenty-one in all—and had polled them on their opinions. Were you inalterably for conviction? Did you want to see Eyraud die? Did you want to send Gabrielle to hard labor for life? Did you believe in leniency? Were you convinced hypnotism played a role in the crime? Did you think Gabrielle should go to an asylum rather than to prison? The article destroyed the juror pool, forcing dismissal of everyone under consideration and requiring a fresh start. Another delay ensued. Now the courtroom doors weren’t scheduled to open until December 16, once a new jury was seated.
In the meantime,
Le Matin
had its own trial to cover. The court went after its editor, Monsieur Moro, for interfering in the judicial process. His case became its own mini cause célèbre. Editors of other newspapers came to his defense. How could the court so blatantly infringe on their press freedoms? Didn’t these freedoms separate the Republic from the monarchy? Moro presented his own arguments on the freedom of the press at his trial on November 26, and the court swiftly rejected them, contending that divulging jurors’ impressions prior to a trial was an assault on the judicial system. The editor got a month in jail, and the court was pilloried in the newspapers. Magistrates, the writers declared, were happy to grant the press its rights only when the papers published material flattering to the magistrates.
All the hyperbole, however, was a mere sideshow to the main event that lay ahead. The French were turning nearly as one toward the coming performance at the Cour d’Assises, with the expectation of grand theatrics. Everyone knew the characters, the grisly details, the major questions to be resolved.
L’affaire Gouffé
had been so mythologized it needed no introduction. The case had dragged on so long some people were eager for the denouement.
“Everyone has had
enough,” groused
Le Petit Journal.
“It is necessary to have it finished.” One Frenchman clearly had had enough. On December 12, a man burst into a newspaper office in Bordeaux, claiming he was Eyraud and the editors were Gabrielle. Armed with a baton, he swung out crazily, knocking some of the journalists to the ground before police carted him away. Others sought to capitalize on the trial. A tailor on the
grands boulevards
approached Eyraud’s lawyer, Félix Decori, with a proposition. He would make the accused a fine suit for his appearance in court. He would deliver the ensemble at a very reasonable price for the cachet of having his handiwork displayed on the famous murderer during the proceedings.
As the trial neared, the lawyers met with their clients to review strategy and coach them on their public appearances. Decori impressed upon Eyraud that he must behave in the courtroom, or he would make things worse for himself. The biggest risk, in Decori’s view, was that his client would lose control when he caught sight of his nemesis Georges Garanger. Eyraud despised the man who stole his mistress and became livid whenever his name was mentioned. He wanted nothing more than to exact revenge.
Henri Robert advised Gabrielle to strive for proper decorum whenever in public view. She was widely regarded as a degenerate and, far worse, a murderer, so she had to project an image of virtue and innocence. Gabrielle promised she would be well-behaved. For his historic defense, Robert would strive to convince the jury that Gabrielle was not conscious of her actions during the murder because she was under the hypnotic control of her lover. Experts from the Nancy school would explain to the jury how a person in a trance submitted their will to another being and how it was the hypnotizer—in this case Eyraud—who was the guilty party. The contention would be that Gabrielle was a victim, used by Eyraud in the same way a gun was used to commit a crime. And if Gabrielle failed to remember her hypnotization, the explanation was simple: Eyraud had ordered her to forget everything once she was out of her trance.
Inspector Jaume was dismayed that the defense strategy was gaining credibility among Parisians. How could learned, respectable people believe that Gabrielle acted against her will? Her defenders, Jaume wrote in his diary,
“make Gabrielle not responsible.” He ridiculed
their attempt to present her as hypnotized by Eyraud, her will crippled. “For them, one should not punish Gabrielle any more than one should punish the dagger of a murderer. Do these philanthropists, who deplore the horrors of war, lock up cannons, bayonets and bullets in prison?”
The trial was scheduled to take four days, beginning on Tuesday, December 16, with the reading of the charges and interrogation of the accused. The following day was for testimony of the witnesses. On the third day came the experts: doctors Brouardel, Motet, Ballet, and Lacassagne for the prosecution; Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim, the leader of the Nancy school, on behalf of Gabrielle and the role of hypnotism in the murder. Friday was set for the verdict.
A trial in the Cour d’Assises was presided over by three judges, ostensibly to prevent any one of them from imposing his own whimsical justice. But in practice only one judge guided the proceedings—the president of the court—and the other two sat mute and ineffectual. In the trial of Eyraud and Gabrielle, the president of the court was Judge Robert, a querulous, red-robed figure with a high-pitched voice and sagging, fatigued posture. Yet he asserted a fearsome authority.
“The president of the Court of Assize was not a simple man,” explained Albert Bataille, an influential journalist who reported on the courts for
Le Figaro.
“He was a demigod.” Once he assumed his throne in the courtroom, Bataille said, “an aureole appeared around his brow. He no longer walked, he advanced; he no longer spoke, he pronounced.”
Gabrielle’s lawyer, Henri Robert, suffered a setback just a few days before the trial’s start when his hypnotism expert, Hippolyte Bernheim, fractured his leg and was unable to travel to Paris. It was a huge loss for the defense. Bernheim’s name carried prestige in legal and medical circles; that, along with his eloquence and incisiveness, had been expected to carry considerable weight with the jury. In his stead, the Nancy school put forward the legal scholar Jules Liégeois, a shift that meant a vastly different presentation for the defense. Liégeois was a rambler, obsessive about details, an easily distracted professor
of law. But there was a benefit to his substitution. He was recognized as the world’s leading authority on hypnotism and crime. No one had conducted more experiments. No one had written more voluminously on the subject. No one—not even Bernheim—could put together a more thorough demonstration of the subject.
Le Petit Journal
praised his
“veritable passion for hypnotism.” It was Liégeois who had legitimized the study of crime and hypnotism with a groundbreaking lecture before the Academy of Sciences in 1884. “We wait with great curiosity to hear the explanations given by Liégeois,” the newspaper added. “He is a specialist whose competence one cannot contest and with whom one must reckon.”
Some commentators weren’t waiting for Liégeois’s seminar to reach their conclusions. The
Figaro
reporter Bataille had had enough of the Gouffé case and the suppositions about the role of hypnotism.
“The public waits for the denouement … like it waits for the last episode of a serial that has been dragged out for eighteen months,” he wrote the day the trial opened. In Bataille’s eyes, Gabrielle was a perverse child whose corrupt nature explained her actions. It was no surprise to him that the doctors who prepared her medical report rejected the influence of hypnotism. Gabrielle had succumbed to evil, Bataille contended, an evil that existed long before Liégeois or Bernheim or Mesmer ever experimented with hypnosis.
As the day neared, a severe cold snap gripped Paris. Giant blocks of ice choking the Seine were a threat to river traffic. Clocks on storefronts stood idle, their internal mechanics frozen. In the wooded Bois de Boulogne skaters glided across an ice-solid pond, the women ditching their usual cumbersome attire and ridiculous large hats in favor of sensible wool skirts and small caps. Counts, viscounts, and barons braved the cold to snack at a rink-side restaurant nestled in the trees.
On the morning of the trial, the sky was gray and misty, the temperature at twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The curious, ignoring the chill, streamed toward the courthouse, where police and soldiers were in place.
“What a spectacle!” declared Jaume. “All of Paris came—a mélange of bizarre personalities.”
Le Matin
denounced the frivolity, declaring that it detracted from the gravity of the occasion and stained France’s reputation:
“They must laugh abroad at the mental state of a society where such spectacles are possible!”
There was intense competition for seats. Judge Robert had received
two thousand requests in a single week. The lucky spectators were ambassadors—Lord Lytton, the British ambassador, and his wife, Lady Lytton; the Italian ambassador and the Turkish ambassador—and members of the French Chamber of Deputies, actors and actresses, luminaries from the worlds of literature and science, representatives of the French elite: dapper men and their much-perfumed women in extravagant hats toting opera glasses. Some ticket holders were less interested in sitting through the trial than in turning their seats into gold; they circulated among the crowd offering entry at a scalper’s price, which had shot up as much as 500 percent in the final days, according to some accounts. The British sneered at the rush for tickets.
“Few people of real refinement would care to intrigue, wheedle, or pay, a heavy sum for admission to the Old Bailey during a murder trial,”
The Royal Gazette
wrote. “Here it is different. The
procès
is looked upon as a kind of comedy, which fashionable people attend, just as they would the first night of a new play, with the exception that their behaviour in the theatre is much more decorous than their conduct in the Assize Court.”
The ticketed spectators arrived at around ten, munching on their breakfast, and jostled their way inside when the doors opened. Lawyers eager to witness the proceedings were required to come dressed in their legal robes and ready to prove they weren’t ordinary citizens masquerading to steal a seat. Journalists settled on their benches next to the dock, along with the sketch artists, pads in hand. There was standing room at the back for the riffraff, packed in shoulder to shoulder, unwashed, stinking of sweat and onions.