Authors: Steven Levingston
Something told her to turn back, not to go in there, but she was desperate.
Eyraud was more than twice her age, powerfully built, and meaty, with the neck of a bull and large, menacing hands. He had the manner of an overconfident businessman. As she sat down, he ordered her to lift her veil and then stared into her face with his dark, wolflike eyes.
“This man,” she would later recall for the police, “the way he looked at me—he stole my free will.”
Eyraud informed her that if she wanted a job, she had to hand over five thousand francs as a security against employee theft. She had no way of knowing that the security deposit was a ruse—the money was to go directly into Eyraud’s pocket. She told him she didn’t have the funds, she had just left her family and had never been employed, at which point Eyraud barked that he had no job for her.
But that was not the end of it.
“You’re nice,” he told her. “I’ll take you to dinner, would you like that?”
At the brasserie, he was charming, worldly, generous. He’d had an exotic life, serving in the French army in Mexico, working in Argentina, running his family’s vineyard in Sèvres. He spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, English. And my, how he could talk! Gabrielle felt
her powers of resistance slipping away.
“He could do what he wanted with me,” she explained later. “He could make me do anything in an instant.”
He asserted his control over her through a variety of tricks: hypnosis, guile, and terror. The degree to which Eyraud deployed the powers of hypnosis on Gabrielle would become a centerpiece of the later courtroom battle. Eyraud would insist that he was never able to hypnotize Gabrielle, that she fought him and did not once go into a trance under his command. Yet Gabrielle repeatedly argued that she was helpless under his influence, that she followed him like a dog; and her history of extreme hypnotic susceptibility would buttress her contention.
For a while, life as a mistress had its benefits. Though Eyraud had a wife and daughter at home, he lavished attention upon her. She got hats and high fashion, a new coiffure, manicures, fine liqueurs; he paid her rent and took her to cafés and restaurants. She enthralled him, gave him the flesh he craved, and he proudly showed her off on the boulevards.
But gradually the good life unraveled. At Fribourg & Cie, Eyraud was suspected of stealing funds, and then abruptly he was out, and of course, he claimed that the accusations were all lies. That lying Jew Fribourg! Gabrielle soon found herself trapped in her lover’s twisted, claustrophobic world. Eyraud was vicious, a man like many others who subscribed to a popular maxim of the day:
“Women are like cutlets. The more you beat them, the tenderer they are.”
She ran away once but he found her, dragged her home, and nearly strangled her; she bore the red marks on her neck for days. Fear paralyzed her. She could not bring herself to leave him—and besides, where would she go?
One night, she lay at his feet after a pummeling, half naked, her shoulders bruised. She hugged his legs, tearfully apologizing, begging him not to leave her. Then, as usual, she gave herself to him, and sex sealed their reconciliation.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Soon we’ll be rich. It’s my duty to you—so much I would kill someone for it.”
Now, bound by that dead man, their lives were inextricably linked. Together they had killed and together they were to be fugitives. At Gare de Lyon, they got a baggage receipt for the trunk, and the agent attached a label:
“From: Paris 1231. Paris 27/7/1889. Express Train 3.
To: Lyon-Perrache, 1.” They were headed to Lyon, and Gabrielle had no choice but to be the traveling companion of this brute, the murder still fresh in her mind.
After the killing, he had drunk a bottle of cognac in the ground-floor apartment and forced himself on her right beside the trunk containing the corpse. Then he deserted her for the night.
At home, lying in his own bed next to his wife of nineteen years, Eyraud had snored so violently that she grew worried. She touched him lightly and he awoke with a start.
“What do you want?” he growled. “You’re keeping me from sleeping!”
His wife, Louise-Laure, told police later: “He turned over and two minutes later his breathing was calm and measured.”
The Paris Sûreté had its offices opposite the Palais de Justice and Prefecture of Police, a few steps from Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité. Its chief, Marie-François Goron, was a stout bundle of energy, a showy sleuth with a thick mustache that he waxed at the tips. His hair was
“tawny-colored,” as his schoolmate, the novelist Émile Gautier, put it, and “cropped like a rat.”
Goron devoted himself to his work, rarely slept a full night, grabbed quick meals at odd hours (suffering chronic stomach problems as a result), and did not take a day off unless dropped by illness. He was asthmatic but kept his cigarette case close at hand. He carried a magnifying glass in case he needed it to turn up an obscure clue but never carried a gun, trusting instead in his wits and despising violence. He was a devotee of the latest in criminal forensics and an unapologetic publicity hound—but only, of course, in the interests of stirring up witnesses and flushing out suspects.
When the Gouffé case landed on his desk, Goron had his mind on other pressing matters. Bands of pickpockets, a perennial Parisian annoyance, had multiplied like gnats at the exposition. In addition to putting in overtime at the fairgrounds, the men of the Sûreté routinely fanned out across the city to protect public morals, showing up incognito at café concerts and dance halls and watching for obscenity in song lyrics and indecency in the back rooms.
But those were minor tasks compared with the latest crisis: Gangs of teenage thugs were on the loose, slashing throats and terrifying city revelers. With the newspapers hounding him, Goron had little time to focus on trivial complaints like the weekend disappearance of a well-to-do bachelor. Besides, he’d seen enough in his years on the force to know what that meant.
“Many people momentarily disappear,”
he explained in his memoir, “only to be found later eating frog legs on a lovely beach or at the edge of an azure lake savoring a guilty love affair, or just as likely in a prison cell.”
Growing up in Rennes, the capital of Brittany in northwestern France, Goron had been an explosive young man who realized early that he’d never fulfill his mother’s dream for him: He didn’t have the inner peace for the priesthood. This became shockingly clear one day at school when a priest chastised him for a small infraction and the hot-tempered student erupted in a most ungodly fashion and punched the cleric in the face, smashing his glasses.
Later Goron joined the military and was sent to Mexico where, as a fresh recruit, he made the mistake of cursing at a belligerent sergeant. The outburst left him facing court-martial and a grim future. But he was saved when he happened to come before a benevolent officer who chose to instruct rather than punish him. Captain Deleuze sternly reminded the young Goron that a soldier’s duty was to adhere to strict discipline and accept his inferior role within the ranks; patriotism and chivalry demanded it. Then, to Goron’s astonishment, the captain turned on the sergeant, reprimanding him for neglecting a cardinal precept of the military code: respect for your inferiors.
Lady luck had kissed Goron, as she often would in his life, and he learned a lesson in justice he never forgot. He became a disciplined soldier, rarely reprimanded during his five years of service.
After the army, he came home to Rennes, got married, had two children, and worked briefly as a hospital pharmacist. But he had to leave the job when his superiors discovered he was too generous in dispensing opiates to ease patients’ suffering. He tried his hand in the wine business, then wound up working in Argentina where tragedy struck. When his seven-year-old son became desperately ill, Goron sought every means of treatment but to no avail—the boy died in his father’s arms. Devastated, Goron took responsibility on himself, wailing in his memoir,
“I didn’t have the power to save my son!”
Gathering his family, he fled Argentina and took a job as an officer of the peace in Paris. He was attracted to the work because he liked the uniform, which reminded him of his military days, and because he appreciated the military’s dedication to discipline and mission.
In police work Goron found his calling and moved swiftly up the ranks. In the back alleys of Montmartre among swindlers and prostitutes
he absorbed the ways of the Parisian lowlife, learned the slang, and saw suffering that haunted him.
“Little by little,” he wrote later, “I was initiated into the hideous and sad side of the great city.” He was present when young girls gave up their infants because they couldn’t properly care for them, admitting: “I had to turn my head to hide my emotion.” He arrived at the sites of suicides, cutting down hanged bodies that were still warm. He raided child-prostitution rings, bursting in upon old men still wearing their Legion of Honor decorations.
Goron saw a side of Paris that left ministers and cultural watchdogs desperate over the health of the nation.
“I penetrated behind the scenes of the magical city,” he wrote, “where the outsider primarily perceived the splendor of the lights but did not recognize that the luxury and noisy good cheer hid despair, grief, and anguish.”
Although he witnessed extremes of depravity, he never lost sight of the humanity he saw in many criminals; he understood that they were beings scarred by their grievous personal lives and by the lashes of society. If a suspect was hauled in and looked hungry, Goron fed him. In the antics of the criminal he may have seen vestiges of his own troubled youth.
“I must confess,” he explained, “that I have often felt pangs of genuine pity—such as have often surprised me—for men who have stolen or murdered and yet, at the same time, have retained in the depths of their souls some spark of good feeling which is often most touching.”
That was not to say he went easy on evildoers. When he had a suspect in his grasp, Goron was a ruthless interrogator. Gautier said that Goron’s eyes had
“a look as sharp as a needle, penetrating, inquisitorial, a kind of Röentgen ray under which … criminals were to find themselves impotent to hide their secrets.”
However much that description owed to friendship, or a novelist’s imagination, Goron achieved spectacular success while tirelessly working the streets of Montmartre, and soon became the head cop in the Paris suburbs, first in Neuilly, then in Pantin. In October 1886, at age thirty-nine, he was named the deputy chief of the Sûreté.
Barely a year after his appointment, the head of the Sûreté, Hippolyte Ernest Auguste Taylor, an upright but choleric leader, was booted out of his job in the aftermath of a government scandal. In the shake-up, the position of Sûreté chief went to the once hotheaded youth from Rennes. As Goron settled into the job, he was noted for
his honesty and for the amusing objects on display in his office. This
“veritable museum” had a superb collection of weapons, according to one observer, and a “large frame filled with the photographs of a crowd of celebrated criminals.”
If Goron hesitated at first over the Gouffé case, he had ample reason. No sooner had he solved one gruesome throat slashing in March than a second killing on July 15, shortly before Gouffé disappeared, sent another shock wave through the capital. In the latest murder, an elderly concierge was discovered in her apartment on rue Bonaparte slumped in an armchair with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth and her throat sliced from ear to ear. Her rooms had been ransacked. A servant returning from an errand had stumbled upon the ghastly sight and was nearly knocked over by three young toughs fleeing the scene.
Goron was under intense pressure to capture the killers. Recognizing the need for a quick result, he sent two of his most wily detectives on a high-risk mission to infiltrate the criminal gangs. If the undercover agents were found out, the gang members would butcher them on the spot. As the days passed and no word came, Goron anxiously smoked many cigarettes. Then one day Sûreté agents hauled in five suspects. Three of them were young thugs aged seventeen to nineteen; the two others were older, filthy hooligans speaking the slang of the streets. But where were Goron’s men? If these were the possible killers, what had happened to his detectives?
As Goron eyed the suspects, it dawned on him: What brilliant acting! What authentic disguises! The older gang members were his own men, so realistic in their thuggery they had fooled the arresting agents and the chief himself. Careful not to blow their cover, Goron questioned all five suspects hard, in his own demonstration of play-acting, until he wrested confessions from the teenagers and they were led away.
His own men, Goron learned, had been accepted as comrades by the younger men, and soon the teenagers were bragging of the concierge’s murder, revealing vivid, incriminating details. The detectives then subtly provoked their own arrest along with the teenagers, bringing the case right into Goron’s hands. The chief couldn’t have been more delighted and, after sending his men off to get cleaned up, lavished them with handsome rewards for a job well done.
The Gouffé case, meanwhile, had moved into the hands of a
juge d’instruction
, or investigating magistrate. It had been three days since Gouffé vanished and, while Goron had hesitated, the investigating magistrate, a tireless Alsatian named Paul Dopffer, had already set to work.
“Patriotic and conscientious, he is honesty itself,” Paris court reporters said of him. He was noted for his quiet determination; he had “the steadiness of a pack horse, which moves slowly, but never stops to take rest on the way.” His job was to root out the facts of a crime, working with police, detectives, doctors, forensic specialists, witnesses, and eventually the suspects themselves, to prepare the case for prosecution. He was free to carry out searches and seizures, call witnesses, order expert testimony, issue orders and warrants. Working out of an office on the upper floors of the Palais de Justice, Dopffer had unlimited powers.
“The judge of instruction,” the Paris court reporters said, “should leave no stone unturned that may lead to a discovery of the truth.”