Trials of Passion (31 page)

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.

The dependence on a physical test to determine the patient's state – to diagnose that hysterical illness of which hypnotizability is one sign – points to the underlying difference between the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools: the first is ultimately neurophysiological in its explanations. Hysteria or insanity are mental states based on neurological disorder. The Nancy school is more psychological: for them, ideas can influence the patient's body, her physical state. Freud, though he studied with
Charcot and admired him, was to be more greatly influenced by Bernheim, the leader of the Nancy school, whose work he also translated and went to see in 1889. The experiments he witnessed in Nancy gave him ‘the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man'.

In court, when asked whether Gabrielle had told him that she sometimes simulated hypnotic sleep, Dr Brouardel smiled and answered: ‘That's what all the women we put to sleep say. They seem to be both capable of being put to sleep and capable of pretending to be asleep.'

BrouardePs reply teases: he wants to suggest that all women are hysterics to a degree – though not necessarily
grandes hystériques
– and that all women lie, which would also seem to devalue the use of hypnosis as a diagnostic tool for hysteria. But Brouardel was a follower of Charcot's, and adamantly opposed the Nancy doctrine that everyone was hypnotizable. To a jury member's question about whether it was absolutely necessary to put a person to sleep in order to impose one's will on her, Brouardel responded in the affirmative. He did not hold with the Nancy school's notion that suggestion could secretly be practised on people who were fully conscious – that is, in a state of alertness. At the Salpêtrière, they had never seen a person who was awake and alert succumb to suggestion. It might be that a person in a somnambulistic state could be asked to perform a very simple act once she was awake – for example, kissing someone or pulling his ears, an act that was in no absolute contradiction with her temperament. But no more than that. Even patients under hypnosis sometimes refused the suggestion that they should undress. Their modesty, their inner morality, trumped the suggestion.

Dr Motet backed up BrouardePs comments: Gabrielle Bompard was not insane. She had a lively intelligence, neat and precise, and could perfectly well distinguish good from evil. Only her moral sense was perverted: it was her desires, not her intelligence, that had made her a prostitute. Dr Gilbert Ballet added that no morbidity, no hallucination
or delirium, had been found in Gabrielle. She might suffer from a
petite hystérie
, which manifested itself in a nervous disposition, exacerbated by lasciviousness. But there had been no crime committed under the influence of suggestion.

The Paris doctors were emphatic in their testimony. They could also impress the jury and the public with the fact that they had had access to Gabrielle over five months. Charcot, interviewed before the trial by the popular paper
L'Intransigeant
, could of course say all the same things without ever once examining Gabrielle in the flesh. ‘A priori Pm sceptical about her and for the moment, I think of her as a mischievous and cunning woman, who suffers from what the English were first to call moral madness.' The public, according to Charcot, had an altogether mistaken idea of hypnosis. There was no proof that crimes were, or could be, committed under hypnotic suggestion, whatever the Nancy school claimed. Under laboratory conditions it might be possible to give a hypnotized woman a paper-knife and order her to strike the man across the room – as Gilles de la Tourette had shown – but if she did, she wouldn't strike very hard.

Charcot emphasizes in his interview that there is an underlying ‘honest instinct' in most people which can't be turned to crime while they're in a hypnotized state. Even amongst some of his most extraordinary somnambulistic patients at the Salpêtrière – who had a predisposition to be
la chose de quelqu'un
(someone's (controlled) thing), mere puppets who went off with charlatan hypnotists to be exhibited in fairgrounds because they needed to lean on someone – he had heard of none who had been turned to crime. If Eyraud really was a hypnotist and Bompard as susceptible as had been claimed, he would never have had any need to hit her. Violence, Charcot implies, sways far more adequately than hypnosis.

Finally, Charcot states that perhaps Bompard suffers from a
folie lucide
, a madness without delirium that entails excessive emotion and perhaps some delusion, though whether this is severe enough to undermine ‘responsibility' he very much doubts. He's not saying she should have her neck severed, but she does merit punishment. As for
what the interviewer calls her
monomanie de mensonge
, her mania for lying, Charcot reaches for the accepted common knowledge about ordinary ‘little' hysterics: Gabrielle's lying can simply be attributed to her need to make herself interesting, to be talked about, to play a part.

If Charcot was to have his say out of court and before the trial, the French press thought it only fair that Hippolyte Bernheim, should also have his. Asked to give an expert opinion from Nancy for
L'Intransigeant
on 28 January 1890, Bernheim noted that he could have no firm view, since he hadn't interviewed Mile Bompard personally. He could only give an impression, which he might have to modify when more material came to light. He compared Bompard to Madame Fenayrou, the accused in a recent murder case, who under her husband's influence had set a trap for her lover, after which her husband had brutally killed him. Like this woman, Bompard might have no underlying moral sense that could serve as a counterweight to any implanted suggestion.

Bompard's psychic state, like that of a sleepwalker, was one that would easily succumb to any external forces. She suffered from an
imbécilité instinctive –
an imbecility of the instincts to which, from an early age, she had abandoned herself. She had no sense of the monstrosity of her crime. She had spent a night with a murdered corpse. She was astonished that she was to be held in prison until her trial. She had no moral conscience. Her suggestibility was evident in the fact that she – a young, personable woman who could have succeeded in the demi-monde – gave herself up to the domination of a man who beat and exploited her. She followed his lead. Submissive to Eyraud's suggestions, she brought the bailiff to him, helped or collaborated in his murder, wasn't haunted by any regrets. She followed her lover across two continents, allowed him to throw her into other men's arms, and finally found herself in the arms of an intelligent man who captivated her in turn, and who, having learned of her crime, had her deliver herself to the Paris police. A woman who wasn't suggestible would never have accepted this last suggestion.

Bernheim elaborates the broad force of the suggestibility he understands as underlying Gabrielle's acts. It is a suggestibility that has no
need of hypnotic sleep. Tn a state of perfect wakefulness, by simple affirmation, I obtain anaesthesia, contracture, and hallucinations from my patients,' Bernheim states; he adds that, like Gabrielle, ‘sug- gestibles' lie all the time because they are the dupes of their own imagination. If he suggests a false memory to them – which he dubs a ‘retroactive hallucination' – they develop that theme, which has been accepted by their imagination as their own. They really think it happened to them. It's quite possible that Gabrielle, prodded by the interrogation first one way, then another, and also instinctively animated by her desire to wipe out any criminal part she may have played, creates memories in her imagination that she accepts as realities. She can no longer untangle the lived truth from the falsified truth, as she sees it through the autosuggestion of her labile imagination.