Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Anatole France is sceptical of the mind doctors and the idea of seduction by hypnotism. He doesn’t deny that the experiments of Charcot, Liégeois and Bernheim show the power of a strong will over a feeble subject. But he doesn’t believe that what takes place in clinics happens in the same way outside them.

  There are no new ‘expert’ secrets in how to seduce women. It would be too strange if contemporary doctors alone had access to such secrets, and if lovers after centuries of wooing had never come across them. ‘It’s wiser to believe a little less in the academies and a little more in nature,’ France advises. ‘For me, the eternal and unique form of hypnosis is love.’ And Madame Grille, like her admittedly neurotic lover, was drunk on literature and on the death in love of the poet Alfred de Vigny’s ‘Les Amants de Montmorency’. Passion trumped Madame Grille’s affiliation to respectability. But Anatole France stops short at glorifying Chambige for his passionate crime – unlike some other young writers and friends. Chambige is a sad and guilty man, whatever his talent or the mitigating circumstances.

  Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), France’s great jurist and criminologist, best known for the distinctions he drew between the crowd and a public, was asked to reflect on the case some years later in the journal of his profession, Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, edited by his friend Alexandre Lacassagne (1843–1924). Lacassagne was a talented forensic doctor and head of the Lyon school of criminology, which emphasized the environment’s influence on crime and the criminal. For him, the criminal was less ‘born’ à la Cesare Lombroso than made, though the making had physiological repercussions. Tarde himself had even less time than Lacassagne for the biological positivism of the Italian. He was a social thinker, but also a psychologist in the classic literary way of the French, and would contend in his Penal Philosophy of 1890 that behaviour, including criminal behaviour, is in part caused by imitation. The poor, a few generations along, imitate the rich, whose vices have descended to them – ‘one kills oneself or does not kill oneself, because of imitation’; and this is especially so in the great tumult of the cities, where that strange phenomenon of the mob – a single unit made up of heterogeneous elements – can rule. Literature, the press and conversation foster imitation and can make the far, near.

  Tarde is clear that Chambige and Magdeleine Grille were caught up in an imitation of the great literary love stories. That Chambige is sincere in the story he tells of the failed double suicide is visible from the style of his written confession: he is a talented youth who suffers from a morbid ideal of extreme and unique sensation. Though he doesn’t express this overtly, Tarde, writing in a professional journal, can allow himself to imply that Chambige experienced the boarding-school homosexuality of the nervously refined youth, which predisposed him to later mystical and ecstatic loves with women. (In one of his confessional remarks, Chambige had bemoaned the fact that he was constituted like a woman and could not stop weeping.) As for Madame Grille, Tarde notes that love itself is a form of hypnosis, and doctors aren’t essential to describing its ways. And though he denies the mind doctors’ views on hypnosis, he uses alternative psychiatric language to describe Madame Grille as a double personality: in this description, she suffers from a hysteria that allows a split between the virtuous mother and the bacchante, so that both coexist without one being aware of the other – in the way of the notorious Felida X diagnosed with a cdoublement de la We’, a doubling of life, and some of Pierre Janet’s famous alters. Whether it’s psychiatrists or sociologists who provide the analysis, women’s passions are unnatural and sometimes fatal.

  The jury were harder on Chambige than the literary men might have liked. After a four-day trial they came back with a verdict of premeditated murder with mitigating circumstances. Chambige was sentenced to seven years’ forced labour in the notorious prison colony of Cayenne, while the family received the compensation they had asked for – a single franc together with the now confirmed assertion that the lovely Madame Grille remained a woman of honour to the end. But when Chambige’s lawyer petitioned the President of the Republic for mercy, the sentence was converted into a simple seven years in prison in Algeria, despite protests from Madame Grille’s husband. In fact Chambige was conditionally freed in 1892. In 1895 he came to see Zola to take advice on how to restart his life: his new name was Marcel Lami, under which he published several books, some of which only appeared after his death in 1909.

  Interestingly for a judge and criminologist, Tarde understands Chambige’s sentence as a response to a psychic need for punishment on the part of the jury, the family and the public. In a fully rational system, he argues, there would be no need to imprison Chambige at all, since he would engage in no further ‘suicide pacts’: his punishment is not preventive but symbolic, as it is in other crimes of passion. This suggests that when the jury acquits, that too may well act as a symbolic assertion that justice needed to be done and has been carried out by the avenging criminal.

  24. Hypnotic Murders 2: L’Affaire Gouffé

  The anxious debate about love, the power of hypnosis to instigate crime (or crowds), and the question of the suggestibility of the hysteric – a figure that could be extended, by slippage, to the female gender as a whole – continued in the French courts in the notorious but unlikely case of Gabrielle Bompard and Michel Eyraud, a twosome who in their aura resembled a belle époque Bonnie and Clyde.

  Theirs was not exactly a crime of passion, though various passions, as well as sex, were involved. It triggered a major confrontation between opposing medics of the mind in both assizes and press of all brows. The medics warred so as to determine whether Bompard could have killed while under the hypnotic suggestion of her lover. Just as in the Myra Hindley and Ian Brady trial for the Moors murders, there was some difficulty in believing that a young woman from a bourgeois family, and not under the sway of a hypnotic male, could have performed the brutal murder, let alone engaged in a great escape that included cross-dressing. After the Eyraud–Bompard trial, all of France and beyond would know that the Paris school and the Nancy school of mind doctors had opposing views on the power of hypnotism and the criminal responsibility of hypnotized subjects.

  It all began in high summer, during the heady days of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, celebrating the centenary of the Revolution. Hundreds of thousands poured into Paris to gaze at the newly completed Eiffel Tower and other wonders of technology. On the evening of 27 July, the womanizing widower and bailiff Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, father of two grown daughters, was lured to a ground-floor flat at 3 Rue Ducoudray in the 8th arrondissement by the pertly attractive twenty-one-year-old Gabrielle Bompard, runaway daughter of a prosperous Lille metal merchant.

  Once there, the forty-nine-year-old Gouffé lay back comfortably in a chaise longue in front of a heavy alcove-dividing curtain, while the enticing négligé-clad Bompard perched on his lap. As he fondled her, he allowed her to loop her red and white silk belt round his neck. Seconds later, the belt was latched into a complicated pulley system manipulated by Bompard’s hidden forty-five-year-old lover, the conman Michel Eyraud, who promptly used it to hang Gouffé to death. Not finding the ample cash he had hoped for on Gouffé’s person, Eyraud then rushed to the Rue Montmartre to the apartment of the man he had occasionally worked with, and searched for the anticipated monies there. To no avail.

  Back at the site of the ambush, Gouffé’s body was folded into a sack, made by Gabrielle. The hapless bailiff was placed in a capacious yellow-trimmed cabin trunk, which Eyraud had bought in preparation in London a few weeks before. This was transported to Lyon by train the next day, and from there some twelve miles by carriage to the remote and hilly outskirts of the town of Millery on the banks of the Rhone. Here the body lay in its sack: it had caught on some acacia bushes instead of tumbling into the river as Eyraud had intended. Its smell eventually alerted passers-by, who found it some three weeks later. A few days after that, snail hunters came upon the broken-up cabin trunk.

  At a first
autopsy the body was not thought to be Gouffé’s but that of a much younger man. It took the investigative persistence of Marie- Franĉois Goron, the Paris Sûreté’s talented chief, who put together evidence of the trunk’s movements and the disappearance of Eyraud and Bompard, to ask for the body to be exhumed four months after it was first found. It also took the scrupulous forensic talents of Alexandre Lacassagne, who performed the examination, to deduce through the new science of anthropometric correlation, plus careful washing, that the short cadaver with the black hair was in fact the taller and auburn-haired Gouffé. The clinching proof came when Lacassagne identified that the cadaver had limped, something that Gouffé’s daughters confirmed.

  Meanwhile, Bompard and her lover had fled to England, then New York, north to Canada and finally across the country to Vancouver and San Francisco. Bompard often dressed very happily as a boy or pretended to be Eyraud’s daughter or niece. The two had no money except for what accrued from the cons they executed along the way. In Vancouver, Gabrielle was paid court to by a rich adventurer, a Monsieur Garanger, whom Eyraud had extracted money from and wanted to persuade into a bigger con by having him invest in a nonexistent cognac distillery. Garanger eventually wooed Gabrielle away, not realizing for some time who she really was. When he did, they returned to Paris and he persuaded her to go to the police to give herself up.

  The French papers were so full of the crime, the identification of the body, the hunt for the alleged killers, that when Gouffé’s body was exhibited in the Paris morgue, as bodies involved in crime customarily were, some twenty thousand people filed past to have a closer look. The international chase required cooperation between police jurisdictions and the dispatch of French officers to North America and ultimately to Cuba. The shady doings of a criminal underworld kept the public entertained for months. The seedy, corpulent Eyraud, evidently a talented and multilingual scammer and masquerader, as well as a fallen prodigal of the middle classes, was finally spotted and stopped in Havana on 20 May 1890, ten months after the crime was committed.

  It may well be that Gabrielle gave herself up in December 1889 not only at the promptings of her new lover, but because she wanted to be fully present at her own sudden fame. Excited modern girl that she was, she thoroughly enjoyed her celebrity both from a distance through the press and, once arrested, through the lengthy pre-trial period. Her fame escalated to new heights when in answer to the charge of murder, her defence lawyer claimed she was innocent. The blame for the murder was all that notorious rogue Eyraud’s. He had hypnotized Gabrielle and implanted a suggestion that she had then acted upon. Under the power of suggestion, she had enticed Gouffé to her apartment and stood by while her lover murdered him.

  Gabrielle’s pre-trial dossier is extensive: witnesses give contesting descriptions. Murder apart, she sounds not unlike a rather wildly rebellious contemporary teenager who, after a childhood partly spent ‘in care’, has fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her penchant for excitement has brought her to sorry ends.

  Daughter of a prosperous widower who took up illicit relations with his housekeeper, Gabrielle was sent as a small child to live with her aunt in Belgium. Here she was schooled by nuns, and seemed to thrive. But her father decided to bring her home to live cheek by jowl with the housekeeper, whom Gabrielle hated. Her wayward behaviour, her flirtatiousness with customers in her father’s shop, her constant reading of romances, saw her expelled once more – this time as a young teenager to the confines of a strict convent for wayward girls in Arras.

  When the sisters tried to have her conform to their rules, they singularly failed. There are complaints of her lewd language and the way she stirred up her mates. She had to be carefully watched at all times. Only one nun noted that Gabrielle had a good heart, if a frivolous one. Sent home, Gabrielle behaved badly once more, openly rebelling against propriety and starting an affair with a local merchant. When this went wrong, she ran off in July 1888 to Paris, stopping at Arras to see a friend whom she convinced to come with her, though the girl stayed with her only a little while.

  Finding work and being a young woman alone in Paris wasn’t easy. Some reports say Gabrielle turned (or fell) quickly to prostitution, later abetted or pimped by Eyraud. Her father had sent a little money, but when she asked to come home, Gabrielle claims, he didn’t reply: his version is that she only ever wanted money. Clearly, this was no Marie Biere. Witnesses talk of Gabrielle’s ‘dubious morality’, her lying, cunning and coquettishness. One landlady says she was clever and read a great deal. Both descriptions are probably true.

  According to her own testimony, Bompard met Eyraud when she answered an ad he had placed for a ‘manager’ in a paper: he had indeed placed the ad, so it could be true, though Eyraud, once the two had fallen out, claimed he had picked her up on the street. He was already married with two children. He had lost his wife’s sizeable fortune in various badly run businesses and in general dissipation. He and Bompard, often passing as uncle and niece, moved in a shady milieu of gangsters, embezzlers and petty thieves. Their eventual victim, Gouffé, though richer, was part of the same circle. The motive for the murder was theft: Eyraud had heard that Gouffé would have a fair sum on him that day. In the event, he didn’t: nor did Eyraud find the money in his late night search of Gouffé’s home – though it was apparently there.

  During the instruction period and in court, each half of the couple blamed the other for Gouffé’s actual murder and for most of the premeditation. Bompard talked of Eyraud’s brutality – he would tie her up and beat her. He talked of her cunning – she had left him because Garanger was richer – and her sexual hold over him. What lifted the case out of the lower depths of ordinary avaricious crime into a realm at least related to passion and the uncontrollable was the hypnotism defence. This brought a new twist to the insanity defence quite in keeping with psychiatric fashion. It also allowed each of the defendants to deny responsibility, since each – Gabrielle through her defence lawyer, and Eyraud acting in his own defence – claimed to have been hypnotized by the other.

  Amongst the ninety or so witnesses, a former lover of Gabrielle’s stated that he could put her easily into a somnambulistic state. More reliably perhaps, her childhood physician, one Dr Sacreste, who was also a friend of her father’s, claimed that Gabrielle was an extraordinarily sensitive hypnotic subject: staring at her for a few seconds precipitated her into a state of catalepsy. Dr Sacreste’s testimony provides fascinating evidence of how, even in provincial France, hypnotism had become something of a craze. He recounts how he once put the girl into trance at the end of dinner and carried out what he called ‘society experiments’. He stuck a pin into Gabrielle’s fist. He had her eat a raw potato, pretending it was a delicious fruit; and drink a glass of water, pretending it was champagne. Another time, he put her to sleep for a very painful operation, which she underwent, completely insensible to the pain.

  Her father, who was interested in these experiments, asked him if he could have recourse to hypnotism to change her character, which seemed already to be veering towards the perverse. Could Gabrielle be inspired to behave more appropriately? Dr Sacreste tried, though the girl wasn’t particularly willing: when she went into what he called a ‘hysterical sleep’, he advised her to stop making rude remarks to the youths in the street and to stop thinking of running away from home. He got no conclusive results. But one day after he had woken Gabrielle from her hypnotic state, she burst into tears and told him she had been hypnotized by a merchant from Lille who had made her his mistress! Perhaps for the youthful Gabrielle, brought up in an atmosphere where feminine virtue was aspired to but nowhere to be found in the family circle, sexual desire and sexual acts always had to be attributed to the other – the hypnotic male.

  Dr Sacreste told the court that though he had largely lost touch with Gabrielle after she had moved to Paris, she had written to him on occasion as a friend to beg him to intervene with her father and have him send some money to her. The doctor was certain that her
confidence in him was linked to his influence as a magnetizer. He was also convinced that Eyraud, who had known Gabrielle so well, could easily have had the power of hypnotic suggestion over her.

  The president of the court intervened in Sacreste’s testimony, to say that it had already been established that Eyraud had never put her under hypnosis. Her lawyer responded: That may be what she says, but how are we to know that what she says here isn’t the result of a command, in other words a post-hypnotic suggestion? Suggestion, invisibly carried out, was a slippery matter for a courtroom, supposedly intent on establishing responsibility for crime. Expert opinion was necessary.

  Gabrielle’s susceptibility to hypnosis was utterly denied by the three expert psychiatric witnesses sent to examine her in prison on several occasions. Dr Gilbert Ballet and Dr Motet were led by the most important of France’s medico-legists, Paul Brouardel (1837–1906), a good friend of Charcot’s as well as Dean of the Paris medical faculty and professor of legal medicine.

  Brouardel was willing to concede that Gabrielle – who had undergone a very visible nervous faint in court – might be ‘a little hysteric’. But she was no full-blown grande hystérique and had experienced no diminishment of intellect. He considered her not only fully responsible, but also highly intelligent and fully aware of what she was doing. True, she was a woman who suffered from the effects of early perversion and debauchery. True, she had a libidinous imagination, always engaged with fictional fantasies. She also wrote with great facility, and had a startlingly good memory. Physiognomically, her development stopped at a boyish thirteen, though her periods had begun when she was eight. Brouardel found nothing peculiar in that.

  With the consent of the accused, the doctors – promising not to make use of what they might thus learn or to attempt a confession along the way – had put Gabrielle into a state of hypnotic sleep. While she was under, they talked of her childhood. But, Brouardel claimed, at no time during her hypnotized sleep state was Gabrielle fully unconscious. This caused a commotion in the courtroom, since popular preconception elided the hypnotized state with unconsciousness. Brouardel’s evidence for Gabrielle’s at least partial consciousness under trance rested in physiology. Using the same physical test as Charcot used at the Salpêtrière, he concluded that there was no lack of sensation on Gabrielle’s skin. In fact it remained highly sensitive: she was downright ticklish, unlike any fully hypnotized grand hysteric, who would suffer from anaesthesia. As regarded what was medically evidenced hypnosis, the Paris school set the bar high.