Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston
In the late 18th century, a German physician named Franz Mesmer used what he initially called "animal magnetism" to hypnotize subjects in order, presumably, to cure their physical and emotional ills.Throughout the following century, hypnotism spread like wildfire through the clinics and drawing rooms of fashionable Europe and North America; part parlor game, part pure charlatanism, and part science. According to the literature of the period, quite ordinary people could easily learn the technique and practice it on their friends, to the amazement and occasional embarrassment of their subjects.
By the 1880s, there were two major reputable schools of thought on the topic. In Paris, the famous neurologist Jenan-Martin Charcot, whose students included the young Sigmund Freud, associated the ability to be hypnotized with hysteria, a mental instability he observed and treated particularly in women. He did not believe, however, that anyone could be coerced to extreme or immoral behavior under hypnotism. Jules Liégeois of the Nancy school had experimented extensively with hypnotism and firmly believed that the personal will of the subject could be completely submerged and directed by the hypnotist. While this view offered startling unpleasant perspectives to religions and the legal system, it had been tested in court only once. In 1879, a dentist had been convicted of rape upon a hypnotized patient, whose helplessness and lack of free will was accepted by the court.
The Belle Epoque period in France paralleled the Gilded Age in the United States, and was every bit as garish. Painters, playwrights, and scientists were producing new sensations every day, even as the seedy, sexy Victorian period grudgingly yielded to the more refined Edwardian Age. In 1889, Paris hosted the largest exhibition ever produced. Mr. Eiffel's marvelous tower (the tallest structure in the world) loomed over the Exhibition and the vast glass Hall of Machines was over four football fields in length.
Into this Parisian stew of lavish sensationalism arrived young Gabrielle Bompard, fleeing from an unhappy home. Her mother had died when she was only five, and her governess was installed in her father's bed even before her mother was buried. Gabrielle had been sent away; first to live with an uncle, then to a succession of convent schools, from all of which she was sent home in disgrace. Neglected, undisciplined, attractive and sexually mature, she was ripe for trouble.
In Paris, she soon ran out of money and became the mistress of businessman and con man Michael Eyraud. Despite his wife and children at home, Eyraud proudly escorted his new young mistress about town. Being very easily hypnotized, Gabrielle provided a reliable bit of amusement in the salons of the jaded city. When Eyraud lost his job for embezzling funds, the pair needed cash, and quickly. Whose idea it was to entrap and rob their wealthy acquaintance Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé is not clear, but on the evening of July 26, 1889, Gabrielle invited Gouffé to visit her rooms. She and Eyraud had laid their plans carefully; installing a pulley to hang their victim and purchasing a large trunk in London to hold the body. But the pulley came loose, and Eyraud was forced to strangle their victim, who the couple had assumed to be carrying a large sum of money. Afterwards, the couple loaded Gouffé's body into a large trunk that they had shipped with them when they fled the city. They dumped the body in a river, and broke up and discarded the trunk farther downstream before hiding out temporarily with Eyraud's brother in Marseille.
It took months and a second autopsy before the stinking corpse pulled from the river was positively identified as Gouffé's. Newly appointed Sûreté chief Marie-François Goron and his staff pursued the criminals for many months over three continents, always barely missing them, before Gabrielle turned up at the Sûreté with her new wealthy lover––another of Eyraud's intended victims. Gabrielle claimed that she had been hypnotized by Eyraud and forced to aid him in the crime. Eyraud was finally captured in Cuba, and brought home to face trial.
The trial was an international sensation, and the French system of justice quite an eye-opener to me. The judge was unabashedly biased in his opening to the jury (this is permitted.) The co-conspirators were tried together, and were permitted to shout out to the court or each other directly during testimony. Gabrielle had been examined by a number of hypnotism experts appointed by the court, but a specialist proposed by the defense was not even permitted to talk to her. There appeared to be no public doubt about Eyraud's guilt, but much about Gabrielle's, who had courted public favor for months before his capture. By US legal standards, it was a circus, not a trial, and newspapers around the world loved it.
If you enjoyed Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, you will very likely enjoy this book, which is also the story of a true crime set in a major city during glamorous and hectic times. It is told in a factual rather than a sensational style, but is by no means dry. Little Demon in the City of Light has no need of added drama; the incredible facts of the case, the extended manhunt, and the dramatic courtroom scenes need no embellishment. Was Gabrielle in fact hypnotized by her lover, as she claimed, during the commission of the murder? If so, to what extent did that erode her free will and affect her complicity? What effect did––or should––her dismal upbringing and circumstances have on determining her responsibility? The author carefully refrains from sharing his opinions, leaving it to the reader to decide. There are easily half a dozen points in this book stimulating enough to engage a book discussion group. Highly recommended!
Note: I received a free advanced readers' copy of Little Demon in the City of Light, which will be released in the US on February 25, 2014 by Doubleday. Similar reviews may appear on various sites under my user names there.
Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger
by Ken Perenyi
For over 30 years, Ken Perenyi, beatnik, thief, and master forger, has been producing copies of paintings by American and British artists so accurate in every detail that they have been accepted as authentic and sold by major galleries and auction houses in both countries. The statute of limitations now having expired on any presumptive illegalities by Mr. Perenyi, he has decided to share his remarkable story with the world. The result is a breezy and unapologetic tour through the New York art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, along with enough hair-raising tales to give any buyer of fine art pause before shelling out serious money for a painting.
As a teenager in Palisades Park, New Jersey, in the late 1960s, Ken was a slacker, an indifferent student whose only interest in painting was decorating the cars he painstakingly rebuilt to cruise the streets with his friends. A chance meeting with a group of hippie artists and low-level mobsters who lived in an old building nicknamed "The Castle" introduced him to an entirely different lifestyle. Along with thousands of his generation, he "tuned in, turned on, and dropped out."
Body Painting
Tom Daly, the originator of psychedelic body painting, introduced him to Max's Kansas City, the nightclub in 1970s New York for the arty set, where Perenyi rubbed shoulders with artists like Peter Max and Andy Warhol and performers like David Bowie and Alice Cooper. Sex, drugs and intense conversation were very much on the menu, and the star-struck boy from Jersey, who wasn't even old enough to order a drink, drank it all in.
His artist friends, horrified at his ignorance, began dragging him to museums and galleries, where he first became fascinated with the work of the artists he would later copy so successfully. From watching Daly paint, he learned that the creation of a work of art is a painstaking process, not some undefinable inspirational bolt from the blue. He was fascinated by the process, and for the first time in his life began to study seriously, although he never took a formal painting or design course. His indifferent degree from a third-rate trade school and the draft classification he managed to obtain––1Y (physically or psychologically unfit)––ensured that he was virtually unemployable for any meaningful work, so he more or less drifted into becoming a painter.
Ken Perenyi after John Peto
His early years in New York read like the often amusing story of any struggling unsuccessful artist, except that the connections Perenyi had forged provided entrée into the circles of the rich and scandalous of the era. In addition to producing his own abstract paintings, he continued to study by painstakingly copying the works of past masters. His own original work was not selling well, and he was financially desperate. When his roommate shoved a biography of Han van Meegeren, the infamous World War II art forger, into his hands and said "Read this," a new career was born.
Artists reuse techniques and images that have worked for them again and again, and Perenyi has an uncanny ability to analyze and imitate these techniques. In his heyday, he could paint several pictures in the style of different artists in the same week. He obligingly shares with the reader how he ages his paintings, often starting with drawer bottoms and panels from 18th or 19th century junk furniture. A restorer for whom he worked for a few years taught him techniques for aging a painting, and a framer whose hand-carved frames were indistinguishable from antiques gave him the secret of an old gesso underpainting solution that simulated the aged cracks that often appear in old paintings. Unlike John Drew and painter John Myatt in Salisbury and Sujo's exposé Provenance, Perenyi never attempted to provide a history for his paintings; he let his work speak for itself. It is apparently that good, and that lack of a false provenance for his work may be what ultimately saved him from criminal prosecution.
Ken Perenyi after James Seymour
The FBI gathered evidence against him for years but could never build a sufficient case, and has finally sealed his file. Imagine the furor in the art world if literally thousands of paintings, many sold by reputable galleries and auction houses and authenticated by experts, were proved to be Perenyi forgeries! Today, visitors to his art gallery in Madeira Beach can buy his exquisite copies, some for only a few thousand dollars. His prices may rise, though, after publication of this book, which the London Guardian reports has been optioned for film by Ron Howard. Perenyi's website even asks "Why spend millions at Christie's and Sotheby's?" and states unequivocally that all the paintings he offers for sale are his own work.
Ken Perenyi after Martin Johnson Heade
Caveat Emptor does not pretend to be great literature. It is written in an engaging conversational style that must make the author a very amusing dinner guest. Perenyi is in no way remorseful or apologetic toward those who may have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his forgeries. His sense of responsibility is entirely to the artists whose work he reproduced or modified. If he has captured their techniques and visions and even carried them forward as they would have, he is satisfied with what he has accomplished. His is a stringent, but very curious and limited, code of ethics, bearing little relation to ordinary morality or legality.
Representative Works by Ken Perenyi
While Perenyi goes into great detail of how he worked and who he knew, we really learn very little of his personal life. Even his sexuality is ambiguous; while he mentions brief relations with many women, his long-term partners are always men. A story in The St. Petersburg Times says that he currently lives with a daughter, but she appears nowhere in the book. In the end, I was both fascinated and horrified by Caveat Emptor, and dissatisfied that it ended without resolution for the reader of this complicated character with his unquestionable genius and his almost nonexistent sense of ethics. And perhaps that is just what the author intended.
Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston
