Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston Page A
Authors: Steven Levingston
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She agreed to hand over the funds but only to Jean-Baptiste. Dismissing Michel, she informed Jean-Baptiste of where she kept her valuables and gave him permission to take the necessary titles to family resources that would cover the amount he needed.
Later, in private, Michel wore Jean-Baptiste down, convincing him that converting the titles into cash required considerable paperwork and that it was best if he handled the task himself. After all, he knew the bailiffs and notaries needed to complete the transactions. Promising to take care of everything, Michel left the apartment with the bundle of titles in his arms—and Jean-Baptiste didn’t see his brother again until he appeared on his doorstep demanding hospitality. Nor did he ever see a franc of his mother’s money. The family vineyard declined, went into bankruptcy, and was sold for a pittance.
Eventually Madame Eyraud moved from her Paris apartment into a hospice in the suburbs and from there to a convent in the south near Marseille, where she died in 1888. Jean-Baptiste brought her body back to Paris and buried it next to her husband’s in a crypt in the tonyPère-Lachaise Cemetery. There the elder Eyrauds shared eternity with the remains of luminaries such as Balzac, Molière, and Chopin.
Meanwhile, Michel was growing anxious in Marseille. After imposing himself on his brother for a couple of weeks, he relieved Jean-Baptiste of three hundred francs and left with Gabrielle for Paris. Michel was still obsessed with his hat, so the first stop was to be the scene of their crime. It was a dangerous, even foolhardy venture. What if the police had traced Gouffé to the apartment and had an agent posted inside or others watching it from the street? But it was a gamble the killer was willing to take.
“A point is clarified for me,” Inspector Jaume later confided to his diary. “I understand now why Eyraud went to find his hat at rue Tronson du Coudray. That hat he’d left at the scene of the crime, it could have served as a terrible piece of evidence against him.”
Chapter 8
On October 6, 1886, the day Marie-François Goron became the deputy chief of the Sûreté, his boss, Hippolyte Ernest Auguste Taylor, warned him,“My dear Goron, you will experience some emotions on your debut.”
That night, two murderers, Frey and Rivière, were to be marched from La Roquette Prison to the guillotine just before dawn with the two Sûreté officials in attendance.
“A little shudder ran through my veins,” Goron recalled.
Taylor felt a pang of terror as well but not from the horror of an imminent beheading; rather he was afraid that he or the Sûreté might be dragged through the mud by the press for some unavoidable gaffe during the ceremony. Taylor lived in fear of the press and warned Goron to maintain the strictest discretion in public. He had good reason to do so.
The Paris press of the 1880s was an unruly mob, kicking a magistrate one day, hoisting a celebrity the next. The newspapers, having burst from the chains of government controls in 1881, were constantly testing the boundaries of their new powers. The“freedom of the press law,” as it came to be known, threw out stamp duties, government deposits, arbitrary trials, and censorship. One observer described the new step as “a freedom law the likes of which the press has never seen in any time.”
From inside their offices along the
grands boulevards
, editors sought to create a splash with every new edition, heralding the birth of the modern sensational media; the antics of the French press in the late nineteenth century pointed toward the yellow journalism of the early twentieth century and the tabloid frenzy of our own time.
In Paris, cheap newspapers blanketed the city, giving rise to whathistorians have called the city’s“golden age of the press.” In 1881, twenty-three newspapers could be had for a sou, equivalent to about an American penny; by 1899, there were sixty.
Le Petit Journal
,
She agreed to hand over the funds but only to Jean-Baptiste. Dismissing Michel, she informed Jean-Baptiste of where she kept her valuables and gave him permission to take the necessary titles to family resources that would cover the amount he needed.
Later, in private, Michel wore Jean-Baptiste down, convincing him that converting the titles into cash required considerable paperwork and that it was best if he handled the task himself. After all, he knew the bailiffs and notaries needed to complete the transactions. Promising to take care of everything, Michel left the apartment with the bundle of titles in his arms—and Jean-Baptiste didn’t see his brother again until he appeared on his doorstep demanding hospitality. Nor did he ever see a franc of his mother’s money. The family vineyard declined, went into bankruptcy, and was sold for a pittance.
Eventually Madame Eyraud moved from her Paris apartment into a hospice in the suburbs and from there to a convent in the south near Marseille, where she died in 1888. Jean-Baptiste brought her body back to Paris and buried it next to her husband’s in a crypt in the tonyPère-Lachaise Cemetery. There the elder Eyrauds shared eternity with the remains of luminaries such as Balzac, Molière, and Chopin.
Meanwhile, Michel was growing anxious in Marseille. After imposing himself on his brother for a couple of weeks, he relieved Jean-Baptiste of three hundred francs and left with Gabrielle for Paris. Michel was still obsessed with his hat, so the first stop was to be the scene of their crime. It was a dangerous, even foolhardy venture. What if the police had traced Gouffé to the apartment and had an agent posted inside or others watching it from the street? But it was a gamble the killer was willing to take.
“A point is clarified for me,” Inspector Jaume later confided to his diary. “I understand now why Eyraud went to find his hat at rue Tronson du Coudray. That hat he’d left at the scene of the crime, it could have served as a terrible piece of evidence against him.”
Chapter 8
On October 6, 1886, the day Marie-François Goron became the deputy chief of the Sûreté, his boss, Hippolyte Ernest Auguste Taylor, warned him,“My dear Goron, you will experience some emotions on your debut.”
That night, two murderers, Frey and Rivière, were to be marched from La Roquette Prison to the guillotine just before dawn with the two Sûreté officials in attendance.
“A little shudder ran through my veins,” Goron recalled.
Taylor felt a pang of terror as well but not from the horror of an imminent beheading; rather he was afraid that he or the Sûreté might be dragged through the mud by the press for some unavoidable gaffe during the ceremony. Taylor lived in fear of the press and warned Goron to maintain the strictest discretion in public. He had good reason to do so.
The Paris press of the 1880s was an unruly mob, kicking a magistrate one day, hoisting a celebrity the next. The newspapers, having burst from the chains of government controls in 1881, were constantly testing the boundaries of their new powers. The“freedom of the press law,” as it came to be known, threw out stamp duties, government deposits, arbitrary trials, and censorship. One observer described the new step as “a freedom law the likes of which the press has never seen in any time.”
From inside their offices along the
grands boulevards
, editors sought to create a splash with every new edition, heralding the birth of the modern sensational media; the antics of the French press in the late nineteenth century pointed toward the yellow journalism of the early twentieth century and the tabloid frenzy of our own time.
In Paris, cheap newspapers blanketed the city, giving rise to whathistorians have called the city’s“golden age of the press.” In 1881, twenty-three newspapers could be had for a sou, equivalent to about an American penny; by 1899, there were sixty.
Le Petit Journal
,
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