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7. Partnership in Crime
Partnership in Crime
I. THE WIDOW GRAS
Report of the trial of the woman Gras and Gaudry in the Gazette des Tribunaux. The case is dealt with also by Macé in his "Femmes Criminelles."
1. THE CHARMER
JENNY AMENAIDE BREACOURT was born in Paris in the year 1837. Her father was a printer, her mother sold vegetables. The parents neglected the child, but a lady of title took pity on her, and when she was five years old adopted her. Even as a little girl she was haughty and imperious. At the age of eight she refused to play with another child on the ground of her companion's social inferiority. "The daughter of a Baroness," she said, "cannot play with the daughter of a wine-merchant." When she was eleven years old, her parents took her away from her protectress and sent her into the streets to sell gingerbread—a dangerous experience for a child of tender years. After six years of street life, Amenaide sought out her benefactress and begged her to take her back. The Baroness consented, and found her employment in a silk manufactory. One day the girl, now eighteen years old, attended the wedding of one of her companions in the factory. She returned home after the ceremony thoughtful. She said that she wanted to get married. The Baroness did not take her statement seriously, and on the grocer calling
A union, so hasty and ill-considered, was not likely to be of long duration. With the help of the worthy Baroness the newly married couple started a grocery business. But Amenaide was too economical for her husband and mother-in-law. Quarrels ensued, recriminations. In a spirit of unamiable prophecy husband and wife foretold each other's future. "You will die in a hospital," said the wife. "You will land your carcase in prison," retorted the husband. In both instances they were correct in their anticipations. One day the husband disappeared. For a short time Amenaide returned to her long-suffering protectress, and then she too disappeared.
When she is heard of again, Amenaide Brécourt has become Jeanne de la Cour. Jeanne de la Cour is a courtesan. She has tried commerce, acting, literature, journalism, and failed at them all. Henceforth men are to make her fortune for her. Such charms as she may possess, such allurements as she can offer, she is ready to employ without heart or feeling to accomplish her end. Without real passion, she has an almost abnormal, erotic sensibility, which serves in its stead. She cares only for one person, her sister. To her Jeanne de la Cour unfolded her philosophy of life. While pretending to love men, she is going to make them suffer. They are to be her playthings, she knows how to snare them: "All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail or are played out, I put them scornfully aside. Society is a vast chess-board,
The early years of Jeanne de la Cour's career as a Phryne were hardly more successful than her attempts at literature, acting and journalism. True to her philosophy, she had driven one lover, a German, to suicide, and brought another to his death by over-doses of cantharides. On learning of the death of the first, she reflected patriotically, "One German the less in Paris!" That of the second elicited the matter-of-fact comment, "It was bound to happen; he had no moderation." A third admirer, who died in a hospital, was dismissed as "a fool who, in spite of all, still respects women." But, in ruining her lovers, she had ruined her own health. In 1865 she was compelled to enter a private asylum. There she is described as "dark in complexion, with dark expressive eyes, very pale, and of a nervous temperament, agreeable, and pretty." She was suffering at the time of her admission from hysterical seizures, accompanied by insane exaltation, convulsions and loss of speech. In speaking of her humble parents she said, "I don't know such people"; her manner was bombastic, and she was fond of posing as a fine lady.
After a few months Jeanne de la Cour was discharged from the asylum as cured, and on the advice of her doctors went to Vittel. There she assumed the rank of Baroness and recommenced her career, but this time in a more reasonable and businesslike manner. Her comments, written to her sister, on her fellow guests at the hotel are caustic. She mocks at some respectable married women who are trying to convert her to Catholicism. To others who refuse her recognition, she makes herself so mischievous and objectionable that in self-defence they are frightened into acknowledging her. Admirers among men she has many, ex-ministers, prefects. It was
Shortly after she left Vittel an event occurred which afforded Jeanne de la Cour the prospect of acquiring that settled position in life which, "practical and foreseeing," she now regarded as indispensable to her future welfare. Her husband, Gras, died, as she had foretold, in the Charity Hospital. The widow was free. If she could bring down her bird, it was now in her power to make it hers for life. Henceforth all her efforts were directed to that end. She was reaching her fortieth year, her hair was turning grey, her charms were waning. Poverty, degradation, a miserable old age, a return to the wretched surroundings of her childhood, such she knew to be the fate of many of her kind. There was nothing to be hoped for from the generosity of men. Her lovers were leaving her. Blackmail, speculation on the Bourse, even the desperate expedient of a supposititious child, all these she tried as means of acquiring a competence. But fortune was shy of the widow. There was need for dispatch. The time was drawing near when it might be man's unkind privilege to put her scornfully aside as a thing spent and done with. She must bring down her
Georges de Saint Pierre was twenty years of age when he made the acquaintance of the Widow Gras. He had lost his mother at an early age, and since then lived with relatives in the country. He was a young man of independent means, idle, of a simple, confiding and affectionate disposition. Four months after his first meeting with the widow they met again. The end of the year 1873 saw the commencement of an intimacy, which to all appearances was characterised by a more lasting and sincere affection than is usually associated with unions of this kind. There can be no doubt that during the three years the Widow Gras was the mistress of Georges de Saint Pierre, she had succeeded in subjugating entirely the senses and the affection of her young lover. In spite of the twenty years between them, Georges de Saint Pierre idolised his middle-aged mistress. She was astute enough to play not only the lover, but the mother to this motherless youth. After three years of intimacy he writes to her: "It is enough for me that you love me, because I don't weary you, and I, I love you with all my heart. I cannot bear to leave you. We will live happily together. You will always love me truly, and as for me, my loving care will ever protect you. I don't know what would become of me if I did not feel that your love watched over me." The confidence of Georges in the widow was absolute. When, in 1876, he spent six months in Egypt, he made her free of his rooms in Paris, she was at liberty to go there when she liked; he trusted her entirely, idolised her. Whatever her faults, he was blind to them. "Your form," he writes, "is ever before my
The widow's conquest, to all appearances, was complete. But Georges was very young. He had a family anxious for his future; they knew of his liaison; they would be hopeful, no doubt, of one day breaking it off and of marrying him to some desirable young person. From the widow's point of view the situation lacked finality. How was that to be secured?
One day, toward the end of the year 1876, after the return of Georges from Egypt, the widow happened to be at the house of a friend, a ballet dancer. She saw her friend lead into the room a young man; he was sightless, and her friend with tender care guided him to a seat on the sofa. The widow was touched by the spectacle. When they were alone, she inquired of her friend the reason of her solicitude for the young man. "I love this victim of nature," she replied, "and look after him with every care. He is young, rich, without family, and is going to marry me. Like you, I am just on forty; my hair is turning grey, my youth vanishing. I shall soon be cast adrift on the sea, a wreck. This boy is the providential spar to which I am going to cling that I may reach land in safety." "You mean, then," said the widow, "that you will soon be beyond the reach of want?" "Yes," answered the friend, "I needn't worry any more about the future." "I congratulate you," said the widow, "and what is more, your lover will never see you grow old."
To be cast adrift on the sea and to have found a providential spar! The widow was greatly impressed by her friend's rare good fortune. Indeed, her experience gave the widow furiously to think, as she revolved in her brain various expedients by which Georges de Saint Pierre might become the "providential spar" in her own
At this point in the story there appears on the scene a character as remarkable in his way as the widow herself, remarkable at least for his share in the drama that is to follow. Nathalis Gaudry, of humble parentage, rude and uncultivated, had been a playmate of the widow when she was a child in her parents' house. They had grown up together, but, after Gaudry entered the army, had lost sight of each other. Gaudry served through the Italian war of 1859, gaining a medal for valour. In 1864 he had married. Eleven years later his wife died, leaving him with two children. He came to Paris and obtained employment in an oil refinery at Saint Denis. His character was excellent; he was a good workman, honest, hard-working, his record unblemished. When he returned to Paris, Gaudry renewed his friendship with the companion of his youth. But Jeanne Brécourt was now Jeanne de la Cour, living in refinement and some luxury, moving in a sphere altogether remote from and unapproachable by the humble workman in an oil refinery. He could do no more than worship from afar this strange being, to him wonderfully seductive in her charm and distinction.
On her side the widow was quite friendly toward her homely admirer. She refused to marry him, as he would have wished, but she did her best without success to marry him to others of her acquaintance. Neither a sempstress nor an inferior actress could she persuade, for all her zeal, to unite themselves with a hand in an oil mill, a widower with two children. It is typical of
Such was the situation and state of mind of Nathalis Gaudry when, in November, 1876, he received a letter from the widow, in which she wrote, "Come at once. I want you on a matter of business. Tell your employer it is a family affair; I will make up your wages." In obedience to this message Gaudry was absent from the distillery from the 17th to the 23rd of November.
The "matter of business" about which the widow wished to consult with Gaudry turned out to be a scheme of revenge. She told him that she had been basely defrauded by a man to whom she had entrusted money. She desired to be revenged on him, and could think of no better way than to strike at his dearest affections by seriously injuring his son. This she proposed to do with the help of a knuckle-duster, which she produced and gave to Gaudry. Armed with this formidable weapon, Gaudry was to strike her enemy's son so forcibly in the pit of the stomach as to disable him for life. The widow offered to point out to Gaudry the young man whom he was to attack. She took him outside the young man's club and
The good fortune of her friend, the ballet-dancer, had proved a veritable toxin in the intellectual system of the Widow Gras. The poison of envy, disappointment, suspicion, apprehension had entered into her soul. Of what use to her was a lover, however generous and faithful, who was free to take her up and lay her aside at will? But such was her situation relative to Georges de Saint Pierre. She remembered that the wounded pigeon, as long as it was dependent on her kind offices, had been-compelled to stay by her side; recovered, it had flown away. Only a pigeon, maimed beyond hope of recovery, could she be sure of compelling to be hers for all time, tied to her by its helpless infirmity, too suffering and disfigured to be lured from its captivity. And so, in accordance with her philosophy of life, the widow, by a blow in the pit of the stomach with a knuckle-duster, was to bring down her bird which henceforth would be tended and cared for by "the Charmer" to her own satisfaction and the admiration of all beholders.
For some reason, the natural reluctance of Gaudry, or perhaps a feeling of compunction in the heart of the widow, this plan was not put into immediate execution. Possibly she hesitated before adopting a plan more cruel, more efficacious. Her hesitation did not last long.
With the dawn of the year 1877 the vigilant apprehension of the widow was roused by the tone of M. de Saint Pierre's letters. He wrote from his home in the country, "I cannot bear leaving you, and I don't mean to. We will live together." But he adds that he is depressed by difficulties with his family, "not about money or business but of a kind he can only communicate to her verbally." To the widow it was clear that these difficulties must relate to the subject of marriage. The character of Georges was not a strong one; sooner or later he might
During Jeanne de la Cour's brief and unsuccessful appearance as an actress she had taken part in a play with the rather cumbrous title, Who Puts out the Eyes must Pay for Them. The widow may have forgotten this event; its occurrence so many years before may have been merely a sinister coincidence. But the incident of the ballet-dancer and her sightless lover was fresh in her mind.
Early in January the widow wrote to Georges, who was in the country, and asked him to take her to the masked ball at the Opera on the 13th. Her lover was rather surprised at her request, nor did he wish to appear with her at so public a gathering. "I don't understand," he writes, "why you are so anxious to go to the Opera. I can't see any real reason for your wanting to tire yourself out at such a disreputable gathering. However, if you are happy and well, and promise to be careful, I will take you. I would be the last person, my dear little wife, to deny you anything that would give you pleasure." But for some reason Georges was unhappy, depressed. Some undefined presentiment of evil seems to have oppressed him. His brother noticed his pre-occupation.
He himself alludes to it in writing to his mistress: "I am depressed this evening. For a very little I could break down altogether and give way to tears. You can't imagine what horrid thoughts possess me. If I felt your love close to me, I should be less sad." Against his better inclination Georges promised to take the widow
2. THE WOUNDED PIGEON
ON the afternoon of January 11, Gaudry called to see the widow. There had been an accident at the distillery that morning, and work was suspended for three days. The widow showed Gaudry the bottle containing the vitriol which her nephew had procured for her use. She was ill, suffering, she said; the only thing that could make her well again would be the execution of her revenge on the son of the man who had defrauded her so wickedly: "Make him suffer, here are the means, and I swear I will be yours." She dropped a little of the vitriol on to the floor to show its virulent effect. At first Gaudry was shocked, horrified. He protested that he was a soldier, that he could not do such a deed; he suggested that he should provoke the young man to a duel and kill him. "That is no use," said the widow, always sensitive to social distinctions; "he is not of your class, he would refuse to fight with you." Mad with desire for the woman, his senses irritated and excited, the ultimate gratification of his passion held alluringly before him, the honest soldier consented to play the cowardly ruffian. The trick was done. The widow explained to her accomplice his method of proceeding. The building in the Rue de Boulogne, in which the widow had her apartment, stood at the end of a drive some twenty-seven and a half yards long and five and a half yards wide. About half-way up the drive, on either side, there were two small houses, or pavilions, standing by themselves and occupied by single gentlemen. The whole was shut off
In spite of his reluctance, his sense of foreboding, Georges de Saint Pierre came to Paris on the night of the 12th, which he spent at the widow's apartment. He went to his own rooms on the morning of the 13th.
This eventful day, which, to quote Iago, was either to "make or fordo quite" the widow, found her as calm, cool and deliberate in the execution of her purpose as the Ancient himself. Gaudry came to her apartment about five o'clock in the afternoon. The widow showed him the vitriol and gave him final directions. She would, she said, return from the ball about three o'clock in the morning. Gaudry was then sent away till ten o'clock, as Georges was dining with her. He returned at half-past ten and found the widow dressing, arraying herself in a pink domino and a blonde wig. She was in excellent spirits. When Georges came to fetch her, she put Gaudry into an alcove in the drawing-room which was curtained off from the rest of the room. Always thoughtful, she had placed a stool there that he might rest himself. Gaudry could hear her laughing and joking with her lover. She reproached him playfully with hindering her in her
Meanwhile, at the Rue de Boulogne, Gaudry sat and waited in the widow's bedroom. From the window he could see the gate and the lights of the cab that was to bring the revellers home. The hours passed slowly. He tried to read the volume of Montaigne where Georges had left it open, but the words conveyed little to him, and he fell asleep. Between two and three o'clock in the morning he was waked by the noise of wheels. They had returned. He hurried downstairs and took up his position in the shadow of one of the pavilions. As Georges de Saint Pierre walked up the drive alone, for the widow had stayed behind to fasten the gate, he thought he saw the figure of a man in the darkness. The next moment he was blinded by the burning liquid flung in his face. The widow had brought down her pigeon.
At first she would seem to have succeeded perfectly in her attempt. Georges was injured for life, the sight of one eye gone, that of the other threatened, his face
It was this uncompromising attitude on her part toward the friends of Georges, and a rumour which reached the ears of one of them that she intended as soon as possible to take her patient away to Italy, that sounded the first note of danger to her peace of mind. This friend happened to be acquainted with the son of one of the Deputy Public Prosecutors in Paris. To that official he confided his belief that there were suspicious circumstances in the case of Georges de Saint Pierre. The judicial authorities were informed and the case placed in the hands of an examining magistrate. On February 2, nearly a month after the crime, the magistrate, accompanied by Macé, then a commissary of police, afterwards head of the Detective Department, paid a visit to the Rue de Boulogne. Their reception was not cordial. It was only after they had made known their official character that they got audience of the widow. She entered the room, carrying in her hand a surgical spray, with which she played nervously while the men of the law asked to see her charge. She replied that it was impossible. Macé placed himself in front of the door by which she had entered,
The magistrate insisted on seeing the patient. He sat by his bedside. M. de Saint Pierre told him that, having no enemies, he was sure he had been the victim of some mistake, and that, as he claimed no damages for his injuries, he did not wish his misfortune to be made public. He wanted to be left alone with his brave and devoted nurse, and to be spared the nervous excitement of a meeting with his family. He intended, he added, to leave Paris shortly for change of scene and air. The widow cut short the interview on the ground that her patient was tired. It was inhuman, she said, to make him suffer so. The magistrate, before leaving, asked her whither she intended taking her patient. She replied, "To Italy." That, said the magistrate, would be impossible until his inquiry was closed. In the meantime she might take him to any place within the Department of the Seine; but she must be prepared to be under the surveillance of M. Macé, who would have the right to enter her house whenever he should think it expedient. With this disconcerting intelligence the men of the law took leave of the widow.
She was no longer to be left in undisturbed possession of her prize. Her movements were watched by two detectives. She was seen to go to the bachelor lodgings of Georges and take away a portable desk, which contained money and correspondence. More mysterious, however, was a visit she paid to the Charonne Cemetery, where she had an interview with an unknown, who was dressed in the clothes of a workman. She left the cemetery alone, and the detectives lost track of her companion.
Macé had elicited certain facts from the porter at the Rue de Boulogne and other witnesses, which confirmed his suspicion that the widow had played a sinister part in her lover's misfortune. Her insistence that he should take her to the ball on January 13; the fact that, contrary to the ordinary politeness of a gentleman, he was walking in front of her at the time of the attack; and that someone must have been holding the gate open to enable the assailant to escape it was a heavy gate, which, if left to itself after being opened, would swing too quickly on its hinges and shut of its own accord—these facts were sufficient to excite suspicion. The disappearance, too, of the man calling himself her brother, who had been seen at her apartment on the afternoon of the 13th, coupled with the mysterious interview in the cemetery, suggested the possibility of a crime in which the widow had had the help of an accomplice. To facilitate investigation it was necessary to separate the widow from her lover. The examining magistrate, having ascertained from a medical report that such a separation would not be hurtful to the patient, ordered the widow to be sent back to Paris, and the family of M. de Saint Pierre to take her place. The change was made on March 6. On leaving Courbevoie the widow was taken to the office of Macé. There the commissary informed her that she must consider herself under provisional arrest. "But who," she asked indignantly, "is to look after my Georges?" "His family," was the curt reply. The widow, walking up and down the room like a panther, stormed and threatened. When she had in some degree recovered herself, Macé asked her certain questions. Why had she insisted on her lover going to the ball? She
Taken before the examining magistrate, her attitude continued to be defiant and arrogant. "Your cleverest policemen," she told the magistrate, "will never find any evidence against me. Think well before you send me to prison. I am not the woman to live long among thieves and prostitutes." Before deciding finally whether the widow should be thrown into such uncongenial society, the magistrate ordered Macé to search her apartment in the Rue de Boulogne.
On entering the apartment the widow asked that all the windows should be opened. "Let in the air," she said; "the police are coming in; they make a nasty smell." She was invited to sit-down while the officers made their search. Her letters and papers were carefully examined; they presented a strange mixture of order and disorder. Carefully kept account books of her personal expenses were mixed up with billets dous, paints and pomades, moneylenders' circulars, bella-donna and cantharides. But most astounding of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card, on which was written the last message of a young lover who had
One discovery, however, disturbed her equanimity. In the drawer of a cupboard, hidden under some linen, Macé found a leather case containing a sheaf of partially-burnt letters. As he was about to open it the widow protested that it was the property of M. de Saint Pierre. Regardless of her protest, Macé opened the case, and, looking through the letters, saw that they were addressed to M. de Saint Pierre and were plainly of an intimate character. "I found them on the floor near the stove in the dining-room," said the widow, "and I kept them. I admit it was a wrong thing to do, but Georges will forgive me when he knows why I did it." From his better acquaintance with her character Macé surmised that an action admitted by the widow to be "wrong" was in all probability something worse. Without delay he took the prisoner back to his office, and himself left for Courbevoie, there to enlighten, if possible, her unhappy victim as to the real character of his enchantress.
The interview was a painful one. The lover refused to hear a word against his mistress. "Jeanne is my Antigone," he said. "She has lavished on me all her care, her tenderness, her love, and she believes in God." Macé told him of her past, of the revelations contained in the prie-Dieu of this true believer, but he could make no impression. "I forgive her past, I accept her present, and please understand me, no one has the power to separate me from her." It was only when Macé placed in his hands the bundle of burnt letters, that he might feel what he could not see, and read him some passages from them, that the unhappy man realised the full extent of his mistress' treachery. Feeling himself dangerously ill, dying perhaps, M. de Saint Pierre had told the widow to bring from his rooms to the Rue de Boulogne the contents of his private desk. It contained some letters compromising to a woman's honour. These he was anxious to destroy before it was too late. As he went through the papers, his eyes bandaged, he gave them to the widow to throw into the stove. He could hear the fire burning and feel its warmth. He heard the widow take up the tongs. He asked her why she did so. She answered that it was to keep the burning papers inside the stove. Now from Macé he learnt the real truth. She had used the tongs to take out some of the letters half burnt, letters which in her possession might be one day useful instruments for levying blackmail on her lover. "To blind me," exclaimed M. de Saint Pierre, "to torture me, and then profit by my condition to lie to me, to betray me—it's infamous— infamous!" His dream was shattered. Macé had succeeded in his task; the disenchantment of M. de Saint Pierre was complete. That night the fastidious widow joined the thieves and prostitutes in the St. Lazare Prison.
It was all very well to imprison the widow, but her participation in the outrage on M. de Saint Pierre was by no means established. The reputed brother, who had been in the habit of attending on her at the Rue de Boulogne, still eluded the searches of the police. In silence lay the widow's only hope of baffling her enemies. Unfortunately for the widow, confinement told on her nerves. She became anxious, excited. Her very ignorance of what was going on around her, her lover's silence
In the meantime the Widow Gras was getting more and more desperate. Her complete ignorance tormented her. At last she gave up all hope, and twice attempted suicide with powdered glass and verdigris. On May 12
The trial of the widow and her accomplice opened before the Paris Assize Court on July 23, 1877, and lasted three days. The widow was defended by Lachaud, one of the greatest criminal advocates of France, the defender of Madame Lafarge, La Pommerais, Troppmann, and Marshal Bazaine. M. Demange (famous later for his defence of Dreyfus) appeared for Gaudry. The case had aroused considerable interest. Among those present at the trial were Halévy, the dramatist, and Mounet-Sully and Coquelin, from the Comédie Française. Fernand Rodays thus described the widow in the Figaro: "She looks more than her age, of moderate height, well made, neither blatant nor ill at ease, with nothing of the air of a woman of the town. Her hands are small. Her bust is flat, and her back round, her hair quite white. Beneath her brows glitter two jet-black eyes—the eyes of a tigress, that seem to breathe hatred and revenge."
Gaudry was interrogated first. Asked by the President the motive of his crime, he answered, "I was mad for Madame Gras; I would have done anything she told me. I had known her as a child, I had been brought up with her. Then I saw her again. I loved her, I was mad for her, I couldn't resist it. Her wish was law to me."
Asked if Gaudry had spoken the truth, the widow said that he lied. The President asked what could be his motive for accusing her unjustly. The widow was silent. Lachaud begged her to answer. "I cannot," she faltered. The President invited her to sit down. After a pause the widow seemed to recover her nerve.
President: Was Gaudry at your house while you were at the ball?
Widow: No, no! He daren't look me in the face and say so.
President: But he is looking at you now.
Widow: No, he daren't! (She fixes her eyes on Gaudry, who lowers his head.)
President: I, whose duty it is to interrogate you, look you in the face and repeat my question: Was Gaudry at your house at half-past ten that night?
Widow: No.
President: You hear her, Gaudry?
Gaudry: Yes, Monsieur, but I was there.
Widow: It is absolutely impossible! Can anyone believe me guilty of such a thing.
President: Woman Gras, you prefer to feign indignation and deny everything. You have the right. I will read your examination before the examining magistrate. I see M. Lachaud makes a gesture, but I must beg the counsel for the defence not to impart unnecessary passion into these proceedings.
Lachaud: My gesture was merely meant to express that the woman Gras is on her trial, and that under the circumstances her indignation is natural.
President: Very good.
The appearance in the witness box of the widow's unhappy victim evoked sympathy. He gave his evidence quietly, without resentment or indignation. As he told his story the widow, whose eyes were fixed on him all the time, murmured: "Georges! Georges! Defend me! Defend me!" "I state the facts," he replied.
The prisoners could only defend themselves by trying to throw on each other the guilt of the crime. M. Demange represented Gaudry as acting under the influence of his passion for the Widow Gras. Lachaud, on the
The jury by their verdict assigned to the widow the greater share of responsibility. She was found guilty in the full degree, but to Gaudry were accorded extenuating circumstances. The widow was condemned to fifteen years' penal servitude, her accomplice to five years' imprisonment.
It is dreadful to think how very near the Widow Gras came to accomplishing successfully her diabolical crime. A little less percipitancy on her part, and she might have secured the fruits of her cruelty. Her undoubted powers of fascination, in spite of the fiendishness of her real character, are doubly proved by the devotion of her lover and the guilt of her accomplice. At the same time, with that strange contradiction inherent in human nature, the Jekyll and Hyde elements which, in varying degree, are present in all men and women, the Widow Gras had a genuine love for her young sister. Her hatred of men was reasoned, deliberate, merciless and implacable. There is something almost sadic in the combination in her character of erotic sensibility with extreme cruelty.
II. VITALIS AND MARIE BOYER
I found the story of this case in a brochure published in Paris as one of a series of modern causes célèbres. I have compared it with the reports of the trial in the Gazette des Tribunaux.
IN the May of 1874, in the town of Montpellier, M. Boyer, a retired merchant, some forty-six years of age, lay dying. For some months previous to his death he had been confined to his bed, crippled by rheumatic gout. As the hour of his death drew near, M. Boyer was filled with a great longing to see his daughter, Marie, a girl of fifteen, and embrace her for the last time. The girl was being educated in a convent at Marseilles. One of M. Boyer's friends offered to go there to fetch her. On arriving at the convent, he was told that Marie had become greatly attracted by the prospect of a religious life. "You are happy," the Mother Superior had written to her mother, "very happy never to have allowed the impure breath of the world to have soiled this little flower. She loves you and her father more than one can say." Her father's friend found the girl dressed in the costume of a novice, and was told that she had expressed her desire to take, one day, her final vows. He informed Marie of her father's dying state, of his earnest wish to see her for the last time, and told her that he had come to take her to his bedside. "Take me away from here?" she exclaimed. The Mother Superior, surprised at her apparent reluctance to go,
Happily M. Boyer died before he could learn of his daughter's singular refusal. But it had made an unfavourable impression on the friend's mind. He looked on Marie as a girl without real feeling, an egoist, her religion purely superficial, hiding a cold and selfish disposition; he felt some doubt as to the future development of her character.
M. Boyer left a widow, a dark handsome woman, forty years of age. Some twenty years before his death, Marie Salat had come to live with M. Boyer as a domestic servant. He fell in love with her, she became his mistress, and a few months before the birth of Marie, M. Boyer made her his wife. Madame Boyer was at heart a woman of ardent and voluptuous passions that only wanted opportunity to become careless in their gratification. Her husband's long illness gave her such an opportunity. At the time of his death she was carrying on an intrigue with a bookseller's assistant, Leon Vitalis, a young man of twenty-one. Her bed-ridden husband, ignorant of her infidelity, accepted gratefully the help of Vitalis, whom his wife described as a relative, in the regulation of his affairs. At length the unsuspecting Boyer died. The night of his death Madame Boyer spent with her lover.
The mother had never felt any great affection for her only child. During her husband's lifetime she was glad
Marie Boyer when she left the convent was growing into a tall and attractive woman, her figure slight and elegant, her hair and eyes dark, dainty and charming in her manner. Removed from the influences of convent life, her religious devotion became a thing of the past. In her new surroundings she gave herself up to the enjoyments of music and the theatre. She realised that she was a pretty girl, whose beauty well repaid the hours she now spent in the adornment of her person. The charms of Marie were not lost on Leon Vitalis. Mean and significant in appearance, Vitalis would seem to have been one of those men who, without any great physical recommendation, have the knack of making themselves attractive to women. After her husband's death Madame Boyer had yielded herself completely to his influence and her own undoubted passion for him. She had given him the money with which to purchase a business of his own as a second-hand bookseller. This trade the enterprising and greedy young man combined with money-lending and he clandestine sale of improper books and photographs.
Her daughter sent away, Madame Boyer surrendered herself with complete abandonment to her passion for her lover. At Castelnau, close to Montpellier, she bought a small country house. There she could give full rein to her desire. To the scandal of the occasional passer-by she and her lover would bathe in a stream that passed through the property, and sport together on the grass. Indoors there were always books from Vitalis' collection to stimulate their lascivious appetites. This life of pastoral impropriety lasted until the middle of August, when Marie Boyer came home from Lyons.
Vitalis would have concealed from the young girl as long as he could the nature of his relations with Madame Boyer, but his mistress by her own deliberate conduct made all concealment impossible. Whether from the utter recklessness of her passion for Vitalis, or a desire to kill in her daughter's heart any attachment which she may have felt towards her lover, the mother paraded openly before her daughter the intimacy of her relations with Vitalis, and with the help of the literature with which the young bookseller supplied her, set about corrupting her child's mind to her own depraved level. The effect of her extraordinary conduct was, however, the
Marie did not return to the school at Lyons. In the winter of 1875, Madame Boyer gave up the country house and, with her daughter, settled in one of the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft occurred in her household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate with the police. Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her affairs, she was hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and bonds she would hide away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses, even a soup tureen. One of her most ingenious hiding places was a portrait of her late husband, behind which she concealed some bearer bonds in landed security, amounting to about 11,000 francs. One day in January these bonds disappeared. She suspected a theft, and informed the police. Three days later she withdrew her complaint, and no more was heard of the matter. As Marie and Vitalis were the only persons who could have known her secret, the inference is obvious. When, later in the year, Vitalis announced his intention of going to Paris on business, his mistress expressed to him the hope that he would "have a good time" with her bonds. Vitalis left for Paris. But there was now a distinct understanding between Marie and himself. Vitalis had declared himself her lover and asked her to marry him. The following letter, written to him by Marie Boyer in
"I thank you very sincerely for your letter, which has
given me very great-pleasure, because it tells me that you
are well. It sets my mind at rest, for my feelings towards
you are the same as ever. I don't say they are those of
love, for I don't know myself; I don't know what such
feelings are. But I feel a real affection for you which may
well turn to love. How should I not hold in affectionate
remembrance one who has done everything for me? But love
does not come to order. So I can't and don't wish to give
any positive answer about our marriage—all depends on
circumstances. I don't want any promise from you, I want you
to be as free as I am. I am not fickle, you know me well
enough for that. So don't ask me to give you any promise.
You may find my letter a little cold. But I know too much of
life to pledge myself lightly. I assure you I think on it
often. Sometimes I blush when I think what marriage means."
Madame Boyer, displeased at the theft, had let her lover go without any great reluctance. No sooner had he gone than she began to miss him. Life seemed dull without him. Mother and daughter were united at least in their common regret at the absence of the young bookseller. To vary the monotony of existence, to find if possible a husband for her daughter, Madame Boyer decided to leave Montpellier for Marseilles, and there start some kind of business. The daughter, who foresaw greater amusement and pleasure in the life of a large city, assented willingly. On October 6, 1876, they arrived at Marseilles, and soon after Madame bought at a price considerably higher than their value, two shops adjoining
Vitalis had opposed the scheme of his mistress to start shop-keeping in Marseilles. He knew how unfitted she was to undertake a business of any kind. But neither mother nor daughter would relinquish the plan. It remained therefore to make the best of it. Vitalis saw that he must get the business into his own hands; and to do that, to obtain full control of Madame Boyer's affairs, he must continue to play the lover to her. To the satisfaction of the two women, he announced his intention of coming to Marseilles in the New Year of 1877. It was arranged that he should pass as a nephew of Madame Boyer, the cousin of Marie. He arrived at Marseilles on January 1, and received a cordial welcome. Of the domestic arrangements that ensued, it is sufficient to say that they were calculated to whet the jealousy and inflame the hatred that Marie felt towards her mother, who now persisted as before in parading before her daughter the intimacy of her relations with Vitalis.
In these circumstances Vitalis succeeded in extracting from his mistress a power of attorney, giving him authority to deal with her affairs and sell the two businesses, which were turning out unprofitable. This done, he told Marie, whose growing attachment to him, strange as it may seem, had turned to love, that now at last they could be free. He would sell the two shops, and with
To Madame Boyer her illness had brought hours of torment, and at last remorse. She realised the duplicity of her lover, she knew that he meant to desert her for her daughter, she saw what wrong she had done that daughter, she suspected even that Marie and Vitalis were poisoning her. Irreligious till now, her thoughts turned to religion. As soon as she could leave her bed she would go to Mass and make atonement for her sin; she would recover her power of attorney, get rid of Vitalis for good and all, and send her daughter back to a convent. But it was too late. Nemesis was swift to overtake the hapless woman. Try as he might, Vitalis had found it impossible to sell the shops at anything but a worthless figure. He had no money of his own, with which to take Marie away. He knew that her mother had resolved on his instant dismissal.
As soon as Madame Boyer was recovered sufficiently to leave her bed, she turned on her former lover, denounced his treachery, accused him of robbing and swindling her, and bade him go without delay. To Vitalis dismissal meant ruin, to Marie it meant the loss of her lover. During her illness the two young people had wished Madame Boyer dead, but she had recovered. Providence or Nature having refused to assist Vitalis, he resolved to fall back on art. He gave up a whole night's rest to the consideration of the question. As a result
On the morning of March 19 Madame Boyer rose early to go to Mass. Before she went out, she reminded Vitalis that this was his last day in her service, that when she returned she would expect to find him gone. It was after seven when she left the house. The lovers had no time to lose; the deed must be done immediately on the mother's return. They arranged that Vitalis should get rid of the shop-boy, and that, as soon as he had gone, Marie should shut and lock the front doors of the two shops. At one o'clock Madame Boyer came back. She expressed her astonishment and disgust that Vitalis still lingered, and threatened to send for the police to turn him out. Vitalis told the shop-boy that he could go away for a few hours; they had some family affairs to settle. The boy departed. Madame Boyer, tired after her long morning in the town, was resting on a sofa in the sitting-room, at the back of the milliner's shop. Vitalis entered the room, and after a few heated words, struck her a violent blow in the chest. She fell back on the sofa, calling to her daughter to come to her assistance. The daughter sought to drown her mother's cries by banging the doors, and opening and shutting drawers. Vitalis,
They were murderers now, the young lovers. What to do with the body? The boy would be coming back soon. The cellar under the kitchen seemed the obvious place of concealment. With the help of a cord the body was lowered into the cellar, and Marie washed the floor of the sitting-room. The boy came back. He asked where Madame Boyer was. Vitalis told him that she was getting ready to return to Montpellier the same evening, and that he had arranged to go with her, but that he had no intention of doing so; he would accompany her to the station, he said, and then at the last moment, just as the train was starting, slip away and let her go on her journey alone. To the boy, who knew enough of the inner history of the household to enjoy the piquancy of the situation, such a trick seemed quite amusing. He went away picturing in his mind the scene at the railway station and its humorous possibilities.
At seven o'clock Vitalis and Marie Boyer were alone once more with the murdered woman. They had the whole night before them. Vitalis had already considered the matter of the disposal of the body. He had bought a pick and spade. He intended to bury his former mistress in the soil under the cellar. After that had been done, he and Marie would sell the business for what it would fetch, and go to Brussels—an admirable plan, which two unforeseen circumstances defeated. The Rue de la République was built on a rock, blasted out for the purpose. The shop-boy had gone to the station that evening to enjoy the joke which, he believed, was to be played on his mistress.
When Vitalis tried to dig a grave into the ground beneath the cellar he realised the full horror of the disappointment. What was to be done? They must throw the body into the sea. But how to get it there? The crime of Billoir, an old soldier, who the year before in Paris had killed his mistress in a fit of anger and cut up her body, was fresh in the recollection of Vitalis. The guilty couple decided to dismember the body of Madame Boyer and so disfigure her face as to render it unrecognisable. In the presence of Marie, Vitalis did this, and the two lovers set out at midnight to discover some place convenient for the reception of the remains. They found the harbour too busy for their purpose, and decided to wait until the morrow, when they would go farther afield. They returned home and retired for the night, occupying the bed in which Madame Boyer had slept the night before.
On the morning of the 20th the lovers rose early, and a curious neighbour, looking through the keyhole, saw them counting joyously money and valuables, as they took them from Madame Boyer's cash-box. When the shop-boy arrived, he asked Vitalis for news of Madame
The next day, the shop-boy and the inquisitive neighbour having consulted together, went to the Commissary of Police and told him of the mysterious disappearance of Madame Boyer. The Commissary promised to investigate the matter, and had just dismissed his informants when word was brought to him of the discovery, in a ditch outside Marseilles, of two parcels containing human remains. He called back the boy and took him to view the body at the Morgue. The boy was able, by the clothes, to identify the body as that of his late mistress. The Commissary went straight to the shops in the Rue de la République, where he found the young lovers preparing for flight. At first they denied all
Vitalis and Marie Boyer were tried before the Assize Court at Aix on July 2, 1877. Vitalis is described as mean and insignificant in appearance, thin, round-backed, of a bilious complexion; Marie Boyer as a pretty, dark girl, her features cold in expression, dainty and elegant. At her trial she seemed to be still so greatly under the influence of Vitalis that during her interrogatory the President sent him out of court. To the examining magistrate Marie Boyer, in describing her mother's murder, had written, "I cannot think how I came to take part in it. I, who wouldn't have stayed in the presence of a corpse for all the money in the world." Vitalis was condemned to death, and was executed on August 17. He died fearful and penitent, acknowledging his miserable career to be a warning to misguided youth. Extenuating circumstances were accorded to Marie Boyer, and she was sentenced to penal servitude for life. Her conduct in prison was so repentant and exemplary that she was released in 1892.
M. Proal, a distinguished French judge, and the author of some important works on crime, acted as the examining magistrate in the case of Vitalis and Marie Boyer. He thus sums up his impression of the two criminals: "Here is an instance of how greed and baseness on the one side, lust and jealousy on the other, bring about by degrees a change in the characters of criminals, and, after some hesitation, the suggestion and accomplishment of parricide, Is it necessary to seek an explanation of the crime in any psychic abnormality which is negatived to all appearances by the antecedents of the guilty pair? Is it necessary to ask it of anatomy or physiology? Is
III. THE FENAYROU CASE
There is an account of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et Mondaines" (1882), and in Macé's book, "Femmes Criminelles." It is alluded to in "Souvenirs d'un Président d'Assises," by Bérard des Glajeux.
THE murder of the chemist Aubert by Marin Fenayrou and his wife Gabrielle was perpetrated near Paris in the year 1882. In its beginning the story is commonplace enough. Fenayrou was the son of a small chemist in the South of France, and had come to Paris from the Aveyron Department to follow his father's vocation. He obtained a situation as apprentice in the Rue de la Ferme des Mathurins in the shop of a M. Gibon. On the death of M. Gibon his widow thought she saw in Fenayrou a man capable of carrying on her late husband's business. She gave her daughter in marriage to her apprentice, and installed him in the shop. The ungrateful son-in-law, sure of his wife and his business and contrary to his express promise, turned the old lady out of the house. This occurred in the year 1870, Fenayrou being then thirty years of age, his wife, Gabrielle, seventeen.
They were an ill-assorted and unattractive couple. The man, a compound of coarse brutality and shrewd cunning, was at heart lazy and selfish, the woman a spoilt child, in whom a real want of feeling was supplied by a shallow sentimentalism. Vain of the superior refinement conferred on her by a good middle-class education, she despised and soon came to loathe her coarse husband, and lapsed into a condition of disappointment and discontent
It was in 1875, when the disillusionment of Mme. Fenayrou was complete, that her husband received into his shop a pupil, a youth of twenty-one, Louis Aubert. He was the son of a Norman tradesman. The ambitious father had wished his son to enter the church, but the son preferred to be a chemist. He was a shrewd, hard-working fellow, with an eye to the main chance and a taste for pleasures that cost him nothing, jovial, but vulgar and self-satisfied, the kind of man who, having enjoyed the favours of woman, treats her with arrogance and contempt, till from loving she comes to loathe him—a characteristic example, according to M. Bourget, of le faux homme à femmes. Such was Aubert, Fenayrou's pupil. He was soon to become something more than pupil.
Fenayrou as chemist had not answered to the expectations of his mother-in-law. His innate laziness and love of coarse pleasures had asserted themselves. At first his wife had shared in the enjoyments, but as time went on and after the birth of their two children, things became less prosperous. She was left at home while Fenayrou spent his time in drinking bocks of beer, betting and attending race-meetings. It was necessary, under these circumstances, that someone should attend to the business of the shop. In Aubert Fenayrou found a ready and willing assistant.
From 1876 to 1880, save for an occasional absence for military service, Aubert lived with the Fenayrous, managing the business and making love to the bored and neglected wife, who after a few months became his mistress. Did Fenayrou know of this intrigue or not? That is a crucial question in the case. If he did not, it was not for want of warning from certain of his friends
Before his departure Aubert had tried to persuade Mme. Gibon to sell up her son-in-law by claiming from him the unpaid purchase-money for her husband's shop. He represented Fenayrou as an idle gambler, and hinted that he would find her a new purchaser. Such an underhand proceeding was likely to provoke resentment if it should come to the ears of Fenayrou. During the two years that elapsed between his departure from Fenayrou's house and his murder, Aubert had prospered in his shop on the Boulevard Malesherbes, whilst the fortunes of the Fenayrous had steadily deteriorated.
At the end of the year 1881 Fenayrou sold his shop and went with his family to live on one of the outer boulevards, that of Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. He had obtained a post in a shady mining company, in which he had persuaded his mother-in-law to invest 20,000 francs. He had attempted also to make money by selling fradulent imitations of a famous table-water. For this offence, at the beginning of 1882, he was condemned by the Correctional Tribunal of Paris to three months' imprisonment and 1,000 francs costs.
In March of 1882 the situation of the Fenayrous was parlous, that of Aubert still prosperous.
Since Aubert's departure Mme. Fenayrou had entertained
If we are to believe Fenayrou's story, the most critical day in his life was March 22, 1882, for it was on that day, according to his account, that he learnt for the first time of his wife's intrigue with Aubert. Horrified and enraged at the discovery, he took from her her nuptial wreath, her wedding-ring, her jewellery, removed from its frame her picture in charcoal which hung in the drawing-room, and told her, paralysed with terror, that the only means of saving her life was to help him to murder her lover.
Two months later, with her assistance, this outraged husband accomplished his purpose with diabolical deliberation. He must have been well aware that, had he acted on the natural impulse of the moment and revenged himself then and there on Aubert, he would have committed what is regarded by a French jury as the most venial of crimes, and would have escaped with little or no punishment. He preferred, for reasons of his own, to set about the commission of a deliberate and cold-blooded murder that bears the stamp of a more sinister motive than the vengeance of a wronged husband.
The only step he took after the alleged confession of his wife on March 22 was to go to a commissary of police and ask him to recover from Aubert certain letters of his wife's that were in his possession. This the commissary refused to do. Mme. Gibon, the mother-in-law, was sent to Aubert to try to recover the letters, but Aubert declined to give them up, and wrote to Mme. Fenayrou:
"Madame, to my displeasure I have had a visit this
morning from your mother, who has come to my home and made a
most unnecessary scene and reproached me with facts so
serious that I must beg you to see me without delay. It
concerns your honour and mine. . . . I have no fear of being
confronted with your husband and yourself. I am ready, when
you wish, to justify myself. . . . Please do all you can to
prevent a repetition of your mother's visit or I shall have
to call in the police."
It is clear that the Fenayrous attached the utmost importance to the recovery of this correspondence, which disappeared with Aubert's death. Was the prime motive of the murder the recovery and destruction of these letters? Was Aubert possessed of some knowledge concerning the Fenayrous that placed them at his mercy? It would seem so. To a friend who had warned him of the danger to which his intimacy with Gabrielle Fenayrou exposed him, Aubert had replied, "Bah! I've nothing to fear. I hold them in my power." The nature of the hold which Aubert boasted that he possessed over these two persons remains the unsolved mystery of the case, "that limit of investigation," in the words of a French judge, "one finds in most great cases, beyond which justice strays into the unknown."
That such a hold existed, Aubert's own statement and the desperate attempts made by the Fenayrous to get back these letters, would seem to prove beyond question. Had Aubert consented to return them, would he have saved his life? It seems probable. As it was, he was doomed. Fenayrou hated him. They had had a row on a race-course, in the course of which Aubert had humiliated his former master. More than this, Aubert had boasted openly of his relations with Mme. Fenayrou, and the fact
And the wife what of her share in the business? Had she also come to hate Aubert? Or did she seek to expiate her guilt by assisting her husband in the punishment of her seducer? A witness at the trial described Mme. Fenayrou as "a soft paste" that could be moulded equally well to vice or virtue, a woman destitute of real feeling or strength of will, who, under the direction of her husband, carried out implicitly, precisely and carefully her part in an atrocious murder, whose only effort to prevent the commission of such a deed was to slip away into a church a few minutes before she was to meet the man she was decoying to his death, and pray that his murder might be averted. Her religious sense, like the images in the hat of Louis XI., was a source of comfort and consolation in the doing of evil, but powerless to restrain her from the act itself, in the presence of a will stronger than her own. At the time of his death Aubert contemplated marriage, and had advertised for a wife. If Mme. Fenayrou was aware of this, it may have served to stimulate her resentment against her lover, but there seems little reason to doubt that, left to herself, she would never have had the will or the energy to give that
Eight or nine miles north-west of Paris lies the small town of Chatou, a pleasant country resort for tired Parisians. Here Madeleine Brohan, the famous actress, had inhabited a small villa, a two-storied building. At the beginning of 1882 it was to let. In the April of that year a person of the name of "Hess" agreed to take it at a quarterly rent of 1,200 francs, and paid 300 in advance. "Hess" was no other than Fenayrou—the villa that had belonged to Madeleine Brohan the scene chosen for Aubert's murder. Fenayrou was determined to spare no expense in the execution of his design: it was to cost him some 3,000 francs before he had finished with it.
As to the actual manner of his betrayer's death, the outraged husband found it difficult to make up his mind. It was not to be prompt, nor was unnecessary suffering to be avoided. At first he favoured a pair of "infernal" opera-glasses that concealed a couple of steel points which, by means of a spring, would dart out into the eyes of anyone using them and destroy their sight. This rather elaborate and uncertain machine was abandoned later in favour of a trap for catching wolves. This was to be placed under the table, and seize in its huge iron teeth the legs of the victim. In the end simplicity, in the shape of a hammer and sword-stick, won the day. An assistant was taken in the person of Lucien Fenayrou, a brother of Marin.
This humble and obliging individual, a maker of children's toys, regarded his brother the chemist with something like veneration as the gentleman and man of education of the family. Fifty francs must have seemed to him an almost superfluous inducement to assist in the
Nothing remained but to secure the presence of the victim. At the direction of her husband Mme. Fenayrou wrote to Aubert on May 14, a letter in which she protested her undying love for him, and expressed a desire to resume their previous relations. Aubert demurred at first, but, as she became more pressing, yielded at length to her suggestion. If it cost him nothing, Aubert was the last man to decline an invitation of the kind. A trip to Chatou was arranged for Ascension Day, May 18, by the train leaving Paris from the St. Lazare Station, at half-past eight in the evening.
On the afternoon of that day Fenayrou, his wife and his brother sent the children to their grandmother and left Paris for Chatou at three o'clock. Arrived there, they went to the villa, Fenayrou carrying the twenty-six feet of gas-piping wound round him like some huge hunting-horn. He spent the afternoon in beating out the piping till it was flat, and in making a gag. He tried to take up the flooring in the kitchen, but this plan for the
The three conspirators dined together heartily in the Avenue de Clichy—soup, fish, entrée, sweet and cheese, washed down by a bottle of claret and a pint of burgundy, coffee to follow, with a glass of chartreuse for Madame. To the waiter the party seemed in the best of spirits. Dinner ended, the two men returned to Chatou by the 7.35 train, leaving Gabrielle to follow an hour later with Aubert. Fenayrou had taken three second-class return tickets for his wife, his brother and himself, and a single for their visitor. It was during the interval between the departure of her husband and her meeting with Aubert that Mme. Fenayrou went into the church of St. Louis d'Antin and prayed.
At half-past eight she met Aubert at the St. Lazare Station, gave him his ticket and the two set out for Chatou—a strange journey Mme. Fenayrou was asked what they talked about in the railway carriage. "Mere nothings," she replied. Aubert abused her mother; for her own part, she was very agitated—trés emotionnée. It was about half-past nine when they reached their destination. The sight of the little villa pleased Aubert. "Ah!" he said, "this is good. I should like a house like this and twenty thousand francs a year!" As he entered the hall, surprised at the darkness, he exclaimed: "The devil! it's precious dark! `tu sais, Gabrielle, que je ne suis pas un héros d'aventure.'" The woman pushed him into the drawing-room. He struck a match on his trousers. Fenayrou, who had been lurking in the darkness in his shirt sleeves, made a blow at him with the hammer, but it was ineffectual. A struggle ensued. The room was
The murderers had to wait till past eleven to get rid of the body, as the streets were full of holiday-makers. When all was quiet they put it into the goat chaise, wrapped round with the gas-piping, and wheeled it on to the Chatou bridge. To prevent noise they let the body down by a rope into the water. It was heavier than they thought, and fell with a loud splash into the river. "Hullo!" exclaimed a night-fisherman, who was mending his tackle not far from the bridge, "there go those butchers again, chucking their filth into the Seine!"
As soon as they had taken the chaise back to the villa, the three assassins hurried to the station to catch the last train. Arriving there a little before their time, they went into a neighbouring cafe. Fenayrou had three bocks, Lucien one, and Madame another glass of chartreuse. So home to Paris. Lucien reached his house about two in the morning. "Well," asked his wife, "did you have a good day?" "Splendid," was the reply.
Eleven days passed. Fenayrou paid a visit to the villa to clean it and put it in order. Otherwise he went about his business as usual, attending race meetings, indulging in a picnic and a visit to the Salon. On May 27 a man named Bailly, who, by a strange coincidence, was known by the nickname of "the Chemist," walking by the river, had his attention called by a bargeman to a corpse that
As soon as the police had been informed of the disappearance of Aubert, their suspicions had fallen on the Fenayrous in consequence of the request which Marin Fenayrou had made to the commissary of police to aid him in the recovery from Aubert of his wife's letters. But there had been nothing further in their conduct to provoke suspicion. When, however, the body was discovered and at the same time an anonymous letter received denouncing the Fenayrous as the murderers of Aubert, the police decided on their arrest. On the morning of June 8 M. Macé, then head of the Detective Department, called at their house. He found Fenayrou in a dressing-gown. This righteous avenger of his wife's seduction denied his guilt, like any common criminal, but M. Macé handed him over to one of his men, to be taken immediately to Versailles. He himself took charge of Madame, and, in the first-class carriage full of people, in which they travelled together to Versailles, she whispered to the detective a full confession of the crime.
Macé has left us an account of this singular railway journey. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. In the carriage were five ladies and a young man who was reading La Vie Parisienne. Mme. Fenayrou was silent and thoughtful. "You're thinking of your present position?" asked the detective. "No, I'm thinking of my mother and my dear children." "They don't seem to care much about their father," remarked Macé. "Perhaps not." "Why?" asked M. Macé. "Because of his violent temper," was the reply. After some further conversation and the departure at Courbevoie of the young man with La Vie Parisienne, Mme. Fenayrou asked
After the train had left St. Cloud, where the other occupants of the carriage had alighted, the detective and his prisoner were alone, free of interruption till Versailles should be reached. Hitherto they had spoken in whispers; now Macé seized the opportunity to urge the woman to unbosom herself to him, to reveal her part in the crime. She burst into tears. There was an interval of silence; then she thanked Macé for the kindness and consideration he had shown her. "You wish me," she asked, "to betray my husband?" "Without any design or intention on your part," discreetly answered the detective; "but by the sole force of circumstances you are placed in such a position that you cannot help betraying him."
Whether convinced or not of this tyranny of circumstance, Mme. Fenayrou obeyed her mentor, and calmly, coldly, without regret or remorse, told him the story of the assassination. Towards the end of her narration she softened a little. "I know I am a criminal," she exclaimed. "Since this morning I have done nothing but lie. I am sick of it; it makes me suffer too much. Don't tell my husband until this evening that I have confessed; there's no need, for, after what I have told you, you can easily expose his falsehoods and so get at the truth."
That evening the three prisoners—Lucien had been arrested at the same time as the other two—were brought to Chatou. Identified by the gardener as the lessee of
After a magisterial investigation lasting two months, which failed to shed any new light on the more mysterious elements in the case, Fenayrou, his wife and brother were indicted on August 19 before the Assize Court for the Seine-et-Oise Department, sitting at Versailles.
The attitude of the three culprits was hardly such as to provoke the sympathies of even a French jury. Fenayrou seemed to be giving a clumsy and unconvincing performance of the rôle of the wronged husband; his heavy figure clothed in an ill-fitting suit of "blue dittos," his ill-kempt red beard and bock-stained moustache did not help him in his impersonation. Mme. Fenayrou, pale, colourless, insignificant, was cold and impenetrable. She described the murder of her lover "as if she were giving her cook a household recipe for making apricot Jam." Lucien was humble and lachrymose.
In his interrogatory of the husband the President, M. Bérard des Glajeux, showed himself frankly sceptical as to the ingenuousness of Fenayrou's motives in assassinating Aubert. "Now, what was the motive of this horrible crime?" he asked. "Revenge," answered Fenayrou.
President: But consider the care you took to hide the body and destroy all trace of your guilt; that is not the way in which a husband sets out to avenge his honour;
Fenayrou: Nothing of the kind, I swear it!
President: Do not protest too much. Remember that among your acquaintances you were suspected of cheating at cards. As a chemist you had been convinced of fraud. Perhaps Aubert knew something against you. Some act of poisoning, or abortion, in which you had been concerned? Many witnesses have believed this. Your mother-in-law is said to have remarked, "My son-in-law will end in jail."
Fenayrou (bursting into tears): This is too dreadful.
President: And Dr. Durand, an old friend of Aubert, remembers the deceased saying to him, "One has nothing to fear from people one holds in one's hands."
Fenayrou: I don't know what he meant.
President: Or, considering the cruelty, cowardice, the cold calculation displayed in the commission of the crime, shall we say this was a woman's not a man's revenge. You have said your wife acted as your slave—was it not the other way about?
Fenayrou: No; it was my revenge, mine alone.
The view that regarded Mme. Fenayrou as a soft, malleable paste was not the view of the President.
"Why," he asked the woman, "did you commit this horrible murder, decoy your lover to his death?" "Because I had repented," was the answer; "I had wronged
President: Is that really the case?
Mme. Fenayrou: Certainly it is.
President: Then your whole existence has been one of lies and hypocrisy. Whilst you were deceiving your husband and teaching your children to despise him you were covering him with caresses. You have played false to both husband and lover—to Aubert in decoying him to his death, to your husband by denouncing him directly you were arrested. You have betrayed everybody. The only person you have not betrayed is yourself. What sort of a woman are you? As you and Aubert went into the drawing-room on the evening of the murder you said loudly, "This is the way," so that your husband, hearing your voice outside, should not strike you by mistake in the darkness. If Lucien had not told us that you attacked Aubert whilst he was struggling with your husband, we should never have known it, for you would never have admitted it, and your husband has all along refused to implicate you. . . . You have said that you had ceased to care for your lover: he had ceased to care for you. He was prosperous, happy, about to marry: you hated him, and you showed your hate when, during the murder, you flung yourself upon him and cried, "Wretch!" Is that the behaviour of a woman who represents herself to have been the timid slave of her husband? No. This crime is the revenge of a cowardly and pitiless woman, who writes down in her account book the expenses of the trip to Chatou and, after the murder, picnics merrily in the green fields. It was you who steeled your husband to the task.
How far the President was justified in thus inverting the parts played by the husband and wife in the crime
The submissive Lucien had little to say for himself, nor could any motive for joining in the murder beyond a readiness to oblige his brother be suggested. In his Souvenirs M. Bérard des Glajeux states that to-day it would seem to be clearly established that Lucien acted blindly at the bidding of his sister-in-law, "qu'il avait beaucoup aimée et qui n'avait pas été cruelle à son égard."
The evidence recapitulated for the most part the facts already set out. The description of Mme. Fenayrou by the gentleman on the sporting newspaper who had succeeded Aubert in her affections is, under the circumstances, interesting: "She was sad, melancholy; I questioned her, and she told me she was married to a coarse man who neglected her, failed to understand her, and had never loved her. I became her lover but, except on a few occasions, our relations were those of good friends. She was a woman with few material wants, affectionate, expansive, an idealist, one who had suffered much and sought from without a happiness her marriage had never brought her. I believe her to have been the blind tool of her husband."
From motives of delicacy the evidence of this gentleman was read in his presence; he was not examined orally. His eulogy of his mistress is loyal. Against
It is the custom in certain assize towns for the President, after pronouncing sentence, to visit a prisoner who had been ordered for execution. M. Bérard des Glajeux describes his visit to Fenayrou at Versailles. He was already in prison dress, sobbing. His iron nature, which during five days had never flinched, had broken down; but it was not for himself he wept, but for his wife, his children, his brother; of his own fate he took no account. At the same moment his wife was in the lodge of the courthouse waiting for the cab that was to take her to her prison. Freed from the anxieties of the trial, knowing her life to be spared, without so much as a thought for the husband whom she had never loved, she had tidied herself up, and now, with all the ease of a woman, whose misfortunes have not destroyed her self-possession, was doing the honours of the jail. It was she who received her judge.
But Fenayrou was not to die. The Court of Cassation, to which he had made the usual appeal after condemnation, decided that the proceedings at Versailles had been vitiated by the fact that the evidence of Gabrielle Fenayrou's second lover had not been taken orally, within
Marin Fenayrou was sent to New Caledonia to serve his punishment. There he was allowed to open a dispensary, but, proving dishonest, he lost his license and became a ferryman—a very Charon for terrestrial passengers. He died in New Caledonia of cancer of the liver.
Gabrielle Fenayrou made an exemplary prisoner, so exemplary that, owing to her good conduct and a certain ascendancy she exercised over her fellow-prisoners, she was made forewoman of one of the workshops. Whilst holding this position she had the honour of receiving, among those entrusted to her charge, another Gabrielle, murderess, Gabrielle Bompard, the history of whose crime is next to be related.
IV. EYRAUD AND BOMPARD
There are accounts of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et Mondaines," 1890, and in Volume X. of Fouquier "Causes Célèbres." "L'Affaire Gouffé" by Dr. Lacassagne, Lyons, 1891, and Goron "L'Amour Criminel" may be consulted.
ON July 27, in the year 1889, the Parisian police were informed of the disappearance of one Gouffé, a bailiff. He had been last seen by two friends on the Boulevard Montmartre at about ten minutes past seven on the evening of the 26th, a Friday. Since then nothing had been heard of him, either at his office in the Rue Montmartre, or at his private house in the Rue Rougemont. This was surprising in the case of a man of regular habits even in his irregularities, robust health, and cheerful spirits.
Gouffé was a widower, forty-two years of age. He had three daughters who lived happily with him in the Rue Rougemont. He did a good trade as bailiff and process-server, and at times had considerable sums of money in his possession. These he would never leave behind him at his office, but carry home at the end of the day's work, except on Fridays. Friday nights Gouffé always spent away from home. As the society he sought on these nights was of a promiscuous character, he was in the habit of leaving at his office any large sum of money that had come into his hands during the day.
About nine o'clock on this particular Friday night, July 26, the hall-porter at Gouffé's office in the Rue Montmartre heard someone, whom he had taken at first to be the bailiff himself, enter the hall and go upstairs to
When the office was examined the next day everything was found in perfect order, and a sum of 14,000 francs, hidden away behind some papers, untouched. The safe had not been tampered with; there was, in short, nothing unusual about the room except ten long matches that were lying half burnt on the floor.
On hearing of the bailiff's disappearance and the mysterious visitor to his office, the police, who were convinced that Gouffé had been the victim of some criminal design, inquired closely into his habits, his friends, his associates, men and women. But the one man who could have breathed the name that would have set the police on the track of the real culprits was, for reasons of his own, silent. The police examined many persons, but without arriving at any useful result.
However, on August 15, in a thicket at the foot of a slope running down from the road that passes through the district of Millery, about ten miles from Lyons, a roadmender, attracted by a peculiar smell, discovered the remains of what appeared to be a human body. They were wrapped in a cloth, but so decomposed as to make identification almost impossible. M. Goron, at that time head of the Parisian detective police, believed them to be the remains of Gouffé, but a relative of the missing man, whom he sent to Lyons, failed to identify them. Two days after the discovery of the corpse, there were found near Millery the broken fragments of a trunk, the lock of which fitted a key that had been picked up near the body. A label on the trunk showed that it had been dispatched from Paris to Lyons on July 27, 188—, but the final figure of the date was obliterated. Reference
The judicial authorities at Lyons scouted the idea that either the corpse or the trunk found at Millery had any connection with the disappearance of Gouffé. When M. Goron, bent on following up what he believed to be important clues, went himself to Lyons he found that the remains, after being photographed, had been interred in the common burying-ground. The young doctor who had made the autopsy produced triumphantly some hair taken from the head of the corpse and showed M. Goron that whilst Gouffé's hair was admittedly auburn and cut short, this was black, and had evidently been worn long. M. Goron, after looking carefully at the hair, asked for some distilled water. He put the lock of hair into it and, after a few minutes' immersion, cleansed of the blood, grease and dust that had caked them together, the hairs appeared clearly to be short and auburn. The doctor admitted his error.
Fortified by this success, Goron was able to procure the exhumation of the body. A fresh autopsy was performed by Dr. Lacassagne, the eminent medical jurist of the Lyons School of Medicine. He was able to pronounce with certainty that the remains were those of the bailiff, Gouffé. An injury to the right ankle, a weakness of the right leg, the absence of a particular tooth and other admitted peculiarities in Gouffé's physical conformation, were present in the corpse, placing its identity beyond question. This second post-mortem revealed furthermore an injury to the thyroid cartilage of the larynx that had been inflicted beyond any doubt whatever, declared Dr. Lacassagne, before death.
There was little reason to doubt that Gouffé had been the victim of murder by strangulation.
But by whom had the crime been committed? It was now the end of November. Four months had passed since the bailiff's murder, and the police had no clue to its perpetrators. At one time a friend of Gouffé's had been suspected and placed under arrest, but he was released for want of evidence.
One day toward the close of November, in the course of a conversation with M. Goron, a witness who had known Gouffé surprised him by saying abruptly, "There's another man who disappeared about the same time as Gouffé." M. Goron pricked up his ears. The witness explained that he had not mentioned the fact before, as he had not connected it with his friend's disappearance; the man's name, he said, was Eyraud, Michel Eyraud, M. Goron made some inquires as to this Michel Eyraud. He learnt that he was a married man, forty-six years of age, once a distiller at Sévres, recently commission-agent to a bankrupt firm, that he had left France suddenly, about the time of the disappearance of Gouffé, and that he had a mistress, one Gabrielle Bompard, who had disappeared with him. Instinctively M. Goron connected this fugitive couple with the fate of the murdered bailiff.
Confirmation of his suspicions was to come from London. The remains of the trunk found at Millery had been skilfully put together and exposed at the Morgue in Paris, whilst the Gouffé family had offered a reward of 500 francs to anybody who could in any way identify the trunk. Beyond producing a large crop of anonymous letters, in one of which the crime was attributed to General Boulanger, then in Jersey, these measures seemed likely to prove fruitless. But one day in December, from the keeper of a boarding-house in Gower Street, M. Goron received a letter informing him that the
The year 1889 came to an end, the murderers were still at large. But on January 21, 1890, M. Goron found lying on his table a large letter bearing the New York postmark. He opened it, and to his astonishment read at the end the signature "Michel Eyraud." It was a curious letter, but undoubtedly genuine. In it Eyraud protested against the suspicions directed against himself; they were, he wrote, merely unfortunate coincidences. Gouffé had been his friend; he had had no share what
He was to have an early opportunity of redeeming his pledge, for on the day following the receipt of his letter a short, well-made woman, dressed neatly in black, with dyed hair, greyish-blue eyes, good teeth, a disproportionately large head and a lively and intelligent expression of face, presented herself at the Prefecture of Police and asked for an interview with the Prefect. Requested to give her name, she replied, with a smile, "Gabrielle Bompard." She was accompanied by a middle-aged gentleman, who appeared to be devoted to her. Gabrielle Bompard and her friend were taken to the private room of M. Lozé, the Prefect of Police. There, in a half-amused way, without the least concern, sitting at times on the edge of the Prefect's writing-table, Gabrielle Bompard told how she had been the unwilling accomplice of her lover, Eyraud, in the murder of the bailiff, Gouffé. The crime, she stated, had been committed in No. 3 in the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray, but she had not been present; she knew nothing of it but what had been told her by Eyraud. After the murder she had accompanied him to America; there they had met the middle-aged gentleman, her companion. Eyraud had
According to Eyraud's letters, if anyone knew anything about Gouffé's murder, it was Gabrielle Bompard; according to the woman's statement, it was Eyraud, and Eyraud alone, who had committed it. As they were both liars—the woman perhaps the greater liar of the two—their statements are not to be taken as other than forlorn attempts to shift the blame on to each other's shoulders.
Before extracting from their various avowals, which grew more complete as time went on, the story of the crime, let us follow Eyraud in his flight from justice, which terminated in the May of 1890 by his arrest in Havana.
Immediately after the arrest of Gabrielle, two French detectives set out for America to trace and run down if possible her deserted lover. For more than a month they traversed Canada and the United States in search of their prey. The track of the fugitive was marked from New York to San Francisco by acts of thieving and
At another time he was lodging in the same house as a young American actor, called in the French accounts of the incident "Sir Stout." To "Sir Stout" Eyraud would appear to have given a most convincing performance of the betrayed husband; his wife, he said, had deserted him for another man; he raved and stormed audibly in his bedroom, deploring his fate and vowing vengeance. These noisy representations so impressed "Sir Stout" that, on the outraged husband declaring himself to be a Mexican for the moment without funds, the benevolent comedian lent him eighty dollars, which, it is almost needless to add, he never saw again. In narrating this incident to the French detectives, "Sir Stout" describes Eyraud's performance as great, surpassing even those of Coquelin.
Similar stories of theft and debauchery met the detectives at every turn, but, helped in a great measure by the publicity the American newspapers gave to the movements of his pursuers, Eyraud was able to elude them, and in March they returned to France to concert further plans for his capture.
Eyraud had gone to Mexico. From there he had written a letter to M. Rochefort's newspaper, L'Intransigeant, in which he declared Gouffé to have been murdered by Gabrielle and an unknown. But, when official inquiries were made in Mexico as to his whereabouts, the bird had flown.
At Havana, in Cuba, there lived a French dressmaker and clothes-merchant named Puchen. In the month of February a stranger, ragged and unkempt, but evidently
By one of those singular coincidences that are inadmissable in fiction or drama, but occur at times in real life, there happened to be in Havana, of all places, a man
Next day, the 20th, the search for Eyraud was set about in earnest. The Spanish authorities, informed of his presence in Havana, directed the police to spare no effort to lay hands on him. The Hotel Roma, at which he had been staying, was visited; but Eyraud, scenting danger, had gone to an hotel opposite the railway station. His things were packed ready for flight on the following morning. How was he to pass the night? True to his instincts, a house of ill-fame, at which he had been entertained already, seemed the safest and most pleasant refuge; but, when, seedy and shabby, he presented himself at the door, he was sent back into the street. It was past one in the morning. The lonely murderer wandered aimlessly in the streets, restless, nervous, a prey to apprehension, not knowing where to go. Again the man from Sévres met him. "It's all up with me!" said Eyraud, and disappeared in the darkness. At two in the morning a police officer, who had been patrolling the town in search
On June 16 Eyraud was delivered over to the French police. He reached France on the 20th, and on July 1 made his first appearance before the examining magistrate.
It will be well at this point in the narrative to describe how Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard came to be associated together in crime. Gabrielle Bompard was twenty-two years of age at the time of her arrest, the fourth child of a merchant of Lille, a strong, hardworking, respectable man. Her mother, a delicate woman, had died of lung disease when Gabrielle was thirteen. Even as a child lying and vicious, thinking only of men and clothes, Gabrielle, after being expelled as incorrigible from four educational establishments, stayed at a fifth for some three years. There she astonished those in authority over her by her precocious propensity for vice, her treacherous and lying disposition, and a lewdness of tongue rare in one of her age and
This girl of twenty had developed into a supreme instance of the "unmoral" woman, the conscienceless egoist, morally colour-blind, vain, lewd, the intelligence quick and alert but having no influence whatever on conduct. One instance will suffice to show the sinister levity, the utter absence of all moral sense in this strange creature.
After the murder of Gouffé, Gabrielle spent the night alone with the trunk containing the bailiff's corpse. Asked by M. Goron what were her sensations during this ghastly vigil, she replied with a smile, "You'd never guess what a funny idea come into my head! You see it was not very pleasant for me being thus tête-à-tête with a corpse, I couldn't sleep. So I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some respectable gentleman from the provinces. I'd bring him up to the room, and just as he was beginning to enjoy himself say, `Would you like to see a bailiff?' open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover from his horror, run out into the street and fetch the police. Just think what a fool
Such callousness is almost unsurpassed in the annals of criminal insensibility. Nero fiddling over burning Rome, Thurtell fresh from the murder of Weare, inviting Hunt, the singer and his accomplice, to "tip them a stave" after supper, Edwards, the Camberwell murderer, reading with gusto to friends the report of a fashionable divorce case, post from the murder of a young married couple and their baby—even examples such as these pale before the levity of the "little demon," as the French detectives christened Gabrielle.
Such was Gabrielle Bompard when, on July 26, exactly one year to a day before the murder of Gouffé, she met in Paris Michel Eyraud. These two were made for each other. If Gabrielle were unmoral, Eyraud was immoral. Forty-six at the time of Gouffé's murder, he was sufficiently practised in vice to appreciate and enjoy the flagrantly vicious propensities of the young Gabrielle. All his life Eyraud had spent his substance in debauchery. His passions were violent and at times uncontrollable, but unlike many remarkable men of a similar temperament, this strong animalism was not in his case accompanied by a capacity for vigorous intellectual exertion or a great power of work. "Understand this," said Eyraud to one of the detectives who brought him back to France, "I have never done any work, and I never will do any work." To him work was derogatory; better anything than that. Unfortunately it could not be avoided altogether, but with Eyraud such work as he was compelled at different times to endure was only a means for procuring money for his degraded pleasures, and when honest work became too troublesome, dishonesty served in its stead. When he met Gabrielle he was almost at the end of his tether, bankrupt and discredited. At a pinch he might
Save for such help as he could get from her small dowry, he was without resources. A deserter from the army during the Mexican war in 1869, he had since then engaged in various commercial enterprises, all of which had failed, chiefly through his own extravagance, violence and dishonesty. Gabrielle was quick to empty his pockets of what little remained in them. The proceeds of her own immorality, which Eyraud was quite ready to share, soon proved insufficient to replenish them. Confronted with ruin, Eyraud and Gompard hit on a plan by which the woman should decoy some would-be admirer to a convenient trysting-place. There, dead or alive, the victim was to be made the means of supplying their wants.
On further reflection dead seemed more expedient than alive, extortion from a living victim too risky an enterprise. Their plans were carefully prepared. Gabrielle was to hire a ground-floor apartment, so that any noise, such as footsteps or the fall of a body, would not be heard by persons living underneath.
At the beginning of July, 1889, Eyraud and Bompard were in London. There they bought at a West End draper's a red and white silk girdle, and at a shop in Gower Street a large travelling trunk. They bought, also in London, about thirteen feet of cording, a pulley and, on returning to Paris on July 20, some twenty feet of packing-cloth, which Gabrielle, sitting at her window on the fine summer evenings, sewed up into a large bag.
The necessary ground-floor apartment had been found at No. 3 Rue Tronson-Ducoudray. Here Gabrielle installed herself on July 24. The bedroom was convenient for the assassins' purpose, the bed standing in an alcove separated by curtains from the rest of the room. To the
The victim was chosen on the 25th. Eyraud had already known of Gouffé's existence, but on that day, Thursday, in a conversation with a common friend, Eyraud learnt that the bailiff Gouffé was rich, that he was in the habit of having considerable sums of money in his care, and that on Friday nights Gouffé made it his habit to sleep from home. There was no time to lose. The next day Gabrielle accosted Gouffé as he was going to his déjeuner and, after some little conversation agreed to meet him at eight o'clock that evening.
The afternoon was spent in preparing for the bailiff's reception in the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray. A lounge-chair was so arranged that it stood with its back to the alcove, within which the pulley and rope had been fixed by Eyraud. Gouffé was to sit on the chair, Gabrielle on his knee. Gabrielle was then playfully to slip round his neck, in the form of a noose, the cord of her dressing gown and, unseen by him, attach one end of it to the swivel of the rope held by Eyraud. Her accomplice had only to give a strong pull and the bailiff's course was run.
One writer on the case has suggested that the story of the murder by rope and pulley was invented by Eyraud and Bompard to mitigate the full extent of their guilt, and that the bailiff was strangled while in bed with the woman. But the purchase of the necessary materials in London would seem to imply a more practical motive for the use of rope and pulley.
At six o'clock Eyraud and Bompard dined together, after
"At a quarter past eight there was a ring at the bell. I hid myself behind the curtain. Gouffé came in. `You've a nice little nest here,' he said. `Yes, a fancy of mine,' replied Gabrielle, `Eyraud knows nothing about it.' `Oh, you're tired of him,' asked Gouffé. `Yes,' she replied, `that's all over.' Gabrielle drew Gouffé down on to the chair. She showed him the cord of her dressing-gown and said that a wealthy admirer had given it to her. `Very elegant,' said Gouffé, `but I didn't come here to see that.'
"She then sat on his knee and, as if in play, slipped the cord round his neck; then putting her hand behind him, she fixed the end of the cord into the swivel, and said to him laughingly, `What a nice necktie it makes!' That was the signal. Eyraud pulled the cord vigorously and, in two minutes, Gouffé had ceased to live."
Eyraud took from the dead man his watch and ring, 150 francs and his keys. With these he hurried to Gouffé's office and made a fevered search for money. It was fruitless. In his trembling haste the murderer missed a sum of 14,000 francs that was lying behind some papers, and returned, baffled and despairing, to his mistress and the corpse. The crime had been a ghastly failure. Fortified by brandy and champagne, and with the help of the woman, Eyraud stripped the body, put it into the bag that had been sewn by Gabrielle, and pushed the bag into the trunk. Leaving his mistress to spend the night with their hateful luggage, Eyraud returned home and, in his own words, "worn out by the excitement of the day, slept heavily."
The next day Eyraud, after saying good-bye to his wife and daughter, left with Gabrielle for Lyons. On the 28th they got rid at Millery of the body of Gouffé and the trunk in which it had travelled; his boots and clothes they threw into the sea at Marseilles. There Eyraud borrowed 500 francs from his brother. Gabrielle raised 2,000 francs in Paris, where they spent August 18 and 19, after which they left for England, and from England sailed for America. During their short stay in Paris Eyraud had the audacity to call at the apartment in the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray for his hat, which he had left behind; in the hurry of the crime he had taken away Gouffé's by mistake.
Eyraud had been brought back to Paris from Cuba at the end of June, 1890. Soon after his return, in the room in which Gouffé had been done to death and in the presence of the examining magistrate, M. Goron, and some fifteen other persons, Eyraud was confronted with his accomplice. Each denied vehemently, with hatred and passion, the other's story. Neither denied the murder, but each tried to represent the other as the more guilty of the two. Eyraud said that the suggestion and plan of the crime had come from Gabrielle; that she had placed around Gouffé's neck the cord that throttled him. Gabrielle attributed the inception of the murder to Eyraud, and said that he had strangled the bailiff with his own hands.
Eyraud, since his return, had seemed indifferent to his own fate; whatever it might be, he wished that his mistress should share it. He had no objection to going to the guillotine as long as he was sure that Gabrielle would accompany him. She sought to escape such a consummation by representing herself as a mere instrument in Eyraud's hands. It was even urged in her defence that,
The trial of Eyraud and Bompard took place before the Paris Assize Court on December 16, 1890. It had been delayed owing to the proceedings of an enterprising journalist. The names of the jurymen who were to be called on to serve at the assize had been published. The journalist conceived the brilliant idea of interviewing some of these gentlemen.
He succeeded in seeing four of them, but in his article which appeared in the Matin newspaper said that he had seen twenty-one. Nine of them, he stated, had declared themselves in favour of Gabrielle Bompard, but in some of these he had discerned a certain "eroticism of the pupil of the eye" to which he attributed their leniency. A month's imprisonment was the reward of these flights of journalistic imagination.
A further scandal in connection with the trial was caused by the lavish distribution of tickets of admission to all sorts and kinds of persons by the presiding judge, M. Robert, whose occasional levities in the course of the proceedings are melancholy reading. As a result of his indulgence a circular was issued shortly after the trial by M. Falliéres, then Minister of Justice, limiting the powers of presidents of assize in admitting visitors into the reserved part of the court.
The proceedings at the trial added little to the known
Moll in his "Hypnotism" (London, 1909) states that, after Gabrielle Bompard's release M. Liégeois succeeded in putting her into a hypnotic state, in which she re-acted the scene in which the crime was originally suggested to her. The value of such experiments with a woman as mischievous and untruthful as Gabrielle Bompard must be very doubtful. No trustworthy instance seems to be recorded in which a crime has been committed under, or brought about by, hypnotic or post-hypnotic suggestion, though, according to Moll, "the possibility of such a crime cannot be unconditionally denied."
In sheer wickedness there seems little enough to choose between Eyraud and Bompard. But, in asking a verdict without extenuating circumstances against the woman, the Procureur-Général was by no means insistent. He could not, he said, ask for less, his duty would not permit it: "But I am ready to confess that my feelings as a man suffer by the duty imposed on me as a magistrate. On one occasion, at the outset of my career, it fell to my lot to ask from a jury the head of a woman. I felt then the same kind of distress of mind I feel to-day. The jury rejected my demand; they accorded extenuating circumstances; though defeated, I left the court a happier man. What are you going to do to-day, gentlemen? It rests with you. What I cannot ask of you, you have the right to accord. But when the supreme moment comes to return your verdict, remember that you have sworn to judge firmly and fearlessly." The jury accorded extenuating circumstances to the woman, but refused them to the man. After a trial lasting four days Eyraud was sentenced to death, Bompard to twenty years penal servitude.
At first Eyraud appeared to accept his fate with resignation. He wrote to his daughter that he was tired of life, and that his death was the best thing that could happen for her mother and herself. But, as time went on and the efforts of his advocate to obtain a commutation of his sentence held out some hope of reprieve, Eyraud became more reluctant to quit the world.
"There are grounds for a successful appeal," he wrote, "I am pretty certain that my sentence will be commuted. . . . You ask me what I do? Nothing much. I can't
But his hopes were to be disappointed. The Court of Cassation rejected his appeal. A petition was addressed to President Carnot, but, with a firmness that has not characterised some of his successors in office, he refused to commute the sentence.
On the morning of February 3, 1891, Eyraud noticed that the warders, who usually went off duty at six o'clock, remained at their posts. An hour later the Governor of the Roquette prison entered his cell, and informed him that the time had come for the execution of the sentence. Eyraud received the intelligence quietly. The only excitement he betrayed was a sudden outburst of violent animosity against M. Constans, then Minister of the Interior. Eyraud had been a Boulangist, and so may have nourished some resentment against the Minister who, by his adroitness, had helped to bring about the General's ruin. Whatever his precise motive, he suddenly exclaimed that M. Constans was his murderer: "It's he who is having me guillotined; he's got what he wanted; I suppose now he'll decorate Gabrielle!" He died with the name of the hated Minister on his lips.
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