Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Steven Levingston

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Book design by Maria Carella

  Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Eiffel Tower photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress,

  Prints and Photographs Division

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levingston, Steven.

  Little demon in the city of light: a true story of murder and mesmerism in Belle Époque Paris / Steven Levingston.—First edition.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Murder—France—Paris—Case studies. 2. Gouffé, Toussaint-Augustin, 1840–1889. 3. Eyraud, Michel, 1843–1891. 4. Bompard, Gabrielle, 1868–1920. 5. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—19th century.

  I. Title.

  HV6535.F8P364 2014

  364.152′3092—dc23

  2013020525

  ISBN 978-0-385-53603-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-53604-2

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  v3.1

  FOR SUZANNE, KATIE, AND BEN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  The experiments were chilling. In one, a woman was hypnotized and ordered to shoot a local government official. When handed a gun, she walked directly up to him and pulled the trigger, firing a blank she imagined was a real bullet. After the official—playing along—fell to the floor, she stood calmly over him hallucinating that he was dying in a pool of blood. Under interrogation she admitted to the crime with utter indifference, parroting what the hypnotist-researcher had planted in her head: that she simply didn’t like the man. In another experiment, a hypnotized woman was told to dissolve a white powder she believed was arsenic in a glass of water and offer it to a man nearby. If anyone were to ask, she was to say the glass contained sugar water. She did exactly as she was told, and the man quaffed the tainted drink. After she was brought out of her trance, she dutifully followed the hypnotist’s final command: She told her interrogator that she didn’t remember a thing; she hadn’t given a drink to anyone. Most disturbing, she couldn’t name anyone who had directed her to do anything.

  In the late nineteenth century, doctors, scientists, and professors were desperate to answer an alarming question: Could a person be persuaded under hypnosis to commit a terrible crime, even murder? At risk was the very foundation of law and order. If researchers discovered that hypnotic crime was possible, then who was safe? Thievery, assault, arson, and murder—secretly directed by evil hypnotists—became nightmarish possibilities. And what if a madman launched an army of hypnotized automatons on a presidential palace? Revolution was not out of the question.

  In the Paris of the 1880s, the setting for our tale, hypnosis was in its heyday. Doctors had corralled its mysterious powers to treat a range of complaints. In medical clinics, doctors softly encouraged their patients: “Look at me. Think of nothing but sleep … sleep. Your lids are closing. Your arms feel heavy. You are going to sleep … sleep … sleep.” While concentrating on the doctor’s voice, the patient stared at a bright light, or gazed into his eyes, or watched his hands pass several times in front of her face until she drifted off. When she left the clinic, she was free of back pain, or menstrual cramps, or chronic headaches.

  Hypnotism was an ornament of the city’s daily life. Society ladies, demonstrating that they were au courant, hosted hypnotism salons. Amateurs learned the techniques and threw their friends into trances. Traveling hypnotists wowed audiences with astonishing stage shows. The famous traveling hypnotist Professor Donato put his bejeweled assistant through the human-plank trick, in which she would lie between two chairs stiff as a board, defying gravity. He hypnotized audience volunteers and had them disrobe to their underclothing and dance in imaginary ponds and bite into potatoes that they believed were apples. Europeans delighted in the cures and the endless amusement. But the excitement was tinged with fear. No one really knew how powerful hypnosis was, and whether or not it could lend itself to nefarious uses. Courts already had ruled on a few instances of hypnosis-assisted rape. In one notorious case in 1879, a dentist in Rouen was sentenced to ten years in prison for having sex with a twenty-year-old patient he had hypnotized in the dental chair. No court, however, had yet seen a case in which an accused murderer blamed a hypnotist for his crime. That was about to change.

  The belle époque, stretching from 1871 to the start of World War I in 1914, is remembered for its pleasures and eccentricities, but it was also a time of magnificent ambition and spectacle and unrelenting dread. The Eiffel Tower went up on the Champ de Mars in 1889, at the time the tallest man-made structure in the world, and served as the centerpiece of the Paris International Exposition, then the largest world’s fair in history. Paris was a stage, and its inhabitants were actors, dressed for show and behaving outrageously. There was the theatrical star Sarah Bernhardt, who kept a pet tiger and slept with a coffin at the foot of her bed. There were the throngs who strolled past the recently dead at the Paris morgue as if viewing a museum exhibit; the French had a weakness for the macabre, which Sigmund Freud, a young, cocaine-dependent medical student discovered as he explored the city. At night, bizarre indulgences awaited in the music and dance halls: At the Folies-Bergère there was a boxing match between a man and a kangaroo, and at the Moulin Rouge a sidesplitting act by a vaudevillian in a red silk coat and white butterfl
y tie, who sang “Au clair de la lune” through his anus.

  Although the period before World War I was an era of champagne bubbles, men in top hats and monocles, and carefree strolls along the boulevards, it was not the golden age people wished to remember years after the carnage. As the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “It was not a time exclusively of confidence, innocence, comfort, stability, security and peace. Our misconception lies in assuming that doubt and fear, ferment, protest, violence and hate were not equally present.”

  Hypnotism reflected not only the era’s giddiness but also the unease. France’s Republican government was fragile, anarchist rage was brewing, syphilis mercilessly attacked the well-born and the underclass alike. Newspapers sensationalized the bloodiest crimes; in some neighborhoods, people went to bed worrying that teenage thugs would slash their throats while they slept. Parisians looked upon the present with uncertainty and gazed toward the new century with a fear that their glorious nation was sliding into degeneracy. Crime under hypnosis added to French anxieties about the fragility of modern life. But just how serious a danger it posed was a matter of intense debate.

  A battle raged between two opposing camps, one based in Paris, the other some two hundred and forty miles east in the city of Nancy. Comforting assurances came from the world’s foremost neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, and his disciples at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the thirteenth arrondissement. The forbidding Charcot, described as “half-Dante, half-Napoleon,” had a smooth beardless face, deep-set dark eyes, and long hair combed back over his head. He asserted that the outcries over hypnotic crime were exaggerated: An individual in a trance could not be coerced into abandoning her moral resolve and led into deviant behavior. Charcot’s research revealed that there were limits to what a hypnotized person would do—dancing like a silly drunk was one thing, murder quite another.

  Charcot had bestowed upon hypnotism a new respectability, rescuing it from the scientific hinterlands. Most scientists had denied legitimacy to hypnotism for a hundred years after the early practitioner Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer destroyed its credibility with his wild claims of medical success. Mesmer was a brilliant eccentric who dressed in a lilac silk coat and believed that a universal magnetic fluid flowed through everything, pulling on the tides, on human blood, on the nerves, and that he could heal suffering by controlling the magnetic currents inside his patients. His powerful personality attracted a passionate following; and his influence was so profound that hypnosis is still sometimes called mesmerism. His claims of curing epilepsy, paralysis, and even blindness were ultimately insupportable, however, and he died alone in disrepute, his only companion being his pet canary which, according to rumor, had been trained to drop lumps of sugar into his coffee.

  Only a scientist of unassailable credentials could have healed the wounds Mesmer inflicted on hypnotism, and now Charcot’s doctrines on the science of hypnosis were accepted as dogma throughout Europe. But on the question of hypnotic crime, he faced a challenge. Professors at the University of Nancy were undaunted by his authority or by the sovereignty of Paris. Among their ranks was the leading expert on hypnotic crime, a professor of law named Jules Liégeois who had poured his findings into a seminal book on the subject in 1884. His conclusions left no doubt about where he stood. A hypnotized individual, in Liégeois’s view, lost her faculties of reason, judgment, morality, and will and became “the plaything of a fixed idea,” in essence, an automaton acting at the whim of the hypnotist. In such a state, she would carry out a criminal suggestion unhesitatingly and then forget who had placed the notion in her head. The hypnotic subject in Liégeois’s scenario is no more culpable than a pistol or knife; the responsible party is the hypnotist who used this human weapon to carry out his evil deed. “All conscience has disappeared in a hypnotized subject who has been forced to commit a criminal act,” Liégeois asserted. “Only he who has given the suggestion is guilty, and only he should be pursued and punished.”

  The battle between the Paris and Nancy camps might have remained just an academic debate if it weren’t for a petite twenty-one-year-old with gray-blue eyes and an adventurous spirit. Gabrielle Bompard was a troubled young woman from a wealthy family in Lille who ran away to Paris in 1888. She was neglected at home: Her mother had died when Gabrielle was five; soon afterward her father sent her away to relatives and convents and boarding school. By the time she returned home at age eighteen, she was a volatile, independent-minded teenager in love with fashion and eager for the spotlight. She was similar to her mother, whom she’d barely known and who was described as “subject to brusque and incomprehensible changes in character.”

  Gabrielle also was an astounding hypnotic subject. When Professor Donato brought his show to Lille, she sneaked away from home and volunteered to go onstage. She also had a secret lover who had learned the hypnotist’s techniques and kept her in a near-perpetual trance. The more she was hypnotized, the easier she fell under the powers. Dr. Sacreste, the Bompard family doctor, had discovered Gabrielle’s special skill one day in the winter of 1887 when he came to look after an ailing housekeeper. When conversation around the dinner table turned to the popularity of hypnosis, Gabrielle’s father, Pierre, challenged the doctor to try it out on his children. Gabrielle’s younger brother resisted; he just laughed at the doctor’s hocus-pocus, refusing to succumb to the powers.

  But Gabrielle was another story entirely. She fell directly into a trance, deeply and fully, with a submissiveness that was startling to behold. She was, Sacreste later recalled, the most extraordinary hypnotic subject he had ever encountered. To test the depth of her spell, the doctor handed her a glass of water and told her it was champagne. No sooner had she taken a few sips than she showed “all the symptoms of drunkenness,” he said. On a subsequent visit, he hypnotized her again before removing a wart. “I put her to sleep and suggested to her that she wouldn’t feel a thing,” he said. During the procedure she showed no sign of pain. The doctor was convinced that her trance was sincere. “It was impossible,” he concluded, “to believe she was simulating.”

  Pierre Bompard was won over to the miracle of hypnosis and asked Sacreste if he couldn’t tame Gabrielle’s obstreperous personality in a few sessions. Sacreste tried but his efforts were fruitless. Conditions deteriorated at home for Gabrielle, and she begged her lover to rescue her but he would not take her in. Finally she ran off to Paris with her lover’s warning fresh in mind. “You have a temperament,” he told her, “that finds pleasure in a labyrinth of intrigue. Be careful—because you will be a victim again and again.”

  Within a year of her arrival Gabrielle took part in a horrific crime, and she became the heroine of a grand Parisian diversion, the darling of the cheap, mass-circulation newspapers. Hers was a tale perfectly rendered for the real-life stage of the belle epoque: an outlandish murder, an amusing and clever gumshoe, a worldwide hunt for the killers, a series of dead ends, and then a remarkable turn of events, aided by a breakthrough in forensic science and capped by a courtroom drama that riveted the nation—and the world. None of it would have taken place had this young bourgeois woman from Lille not been remarkably susceptible to the influence of hypnosis—had she not been, as they say of people easily induced, like “clay in the hands of a potter.”

  Here, finally, was a real-world test for the competing theories of murder under hypnosis. Gabrielle’s case brought the top academics into the courtroom for a showdown over their jealously guarded beliefs. The law professor Liégeois argued on behalf of the defense: that Gabrielle was a hypnotic puppet who acted against her will and therefore was without responsibility. The state brought in experts aligned with the great neurologist Charcot to argue that hypnotism was not to blame; the fault, they contended, lay with the young woman herself: She was an amoral killer, and must answer for her crime with an early-morning march to the guillotine. This courtroom confrontation represented the first time an accused murderer had put forward a hypnotism defense. The outcome of Gabrielle’s case could set
a legal precedent and influence crime and justice for years to come.

  It was a long journey to the courtroom. When Le Figaro first reported in July 1889 that a wealthy gentleman, a widower with a slight limp and an unquenchable libido, had vanished, his absence was just another curious incident in the messy life of Paris. There was no inkling that a year and a half later this small mystery would attract the world’s attention as a sensational hypnotic crime and turn Gabrielle into the prototype of a celebrity killer.

  Her case spilled far beyond its French borders, as she and her accomplice fled Paris for New York, Vancouver, and San Francisco. Gabrielle filled headlines across the United States as Americans avidly followed the detectives’ chase and later the trial, amused by the spectacle but also uneasy about her hypnotism plea. If the French courts ruled in Gabrielle’s favor, then murderers across the world would have a cunning new strategy for escaping justice.

  Chapter 1

  In Paris in 1889, even murder was a form of theater. And what Michel Eyraud had in mind was a brilliant bit of staging: a sexual farce full of suspense and melodrama and then a tragic denouement. Eyraud had a cockeyed sense of himself. In his invented world he fancied himself a romantic, a flaneur at his ease strolling along the boulevards, a raconteur idling at Maxim’s, a ladies’ man, a conjurer who glided like the devil between the light and the dark. And pushed to the edge, he could kill with style.