A historical true crime murder mystery in Paris ,1889. I enjoyed this book, easy to read with lots of detail of the trial as it became a huge media sensation, partly due to one of the defendants pleading not guilty due to being hypnotized to participate in the murder. ( )

" Little Demon in the City of Light," by Steven Levingston, tells the true story of the 1889 murder of a wealthy womanizer in Paris by a con man and his mistress. Gabrielle Bompard was a young troubled woman who came under the spell of Michel Eyraud, a long-time fraudster and con man. Together, they lured Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé to an apartment, where they murdered him and stuffed his body into a trunk, which they later dumped in a river near Lyon. From there, they traveled to North America, where Gabrielle found a new lover who took her back to France. Meanwhile, the chief of police had been working hard to track down the killers and bring them to justice, but when he did, he found that Gabrielle’s surprising defense rests on the idea that she only committed the crime under the influence of hypnosis. All of Paris wondered if this could possibly be true, and the City of Light was gripped by the possibility….This is a very entertaining tale, told well by Steven Levingston. One of the more intriguing parts of the story concerns how French courts worked, at least at that time; North Americans would be quite surprised at how much bias there was, with the defendants openly disparaging each other during the proceedings and the judge encouraging them! Quite a different form of justice there, indeed! ( )

I'm dismayed with the average rating. This book - though a non-fiction - reads like a thriller, and, at the same time, it paints the Belle Epoque Paris in all its many aspects. Packed with facts yet ultimately readable. Five stars with all my heart. ( )

With the title an obvious play on/reference to Devil in the White City, I was hoping this book would be at least half as interesting and entertaining as that one had been. And in the end, I'd say it was just about exactly that - half as interesting.

This true story takes place in Paris not long before the turn of the 20th century. Gabrielle Bompard, a young lady of somewhat flexible morals meets Michel Eyraud, an older man of no apparent morals at all. They begin a relationship, and eventually lure another man into a room in Paris to rob and kill him. They dispose of his body, and make their getaway to their new lives, stealing from people with scams instead of killing them. But of course, there would be no story if this were the perfect crime, and eventually their victim's body is found and identified. When they are put on trial, Gabrielle tries to use a hypnotism defense - she is so weak and suggestible that Eyraud was able to exert his will over her completely enough to force her to participate in the murder against her will.

You can probably guess how that went over from the dearth of modern cases using the same defense. The best part of the narrative, for me, involved the pioneering forensic work in identifying the victim's body. This was cutting-edge stuff at the time, and it's intriguing to learn how far outside the box this scientist had to think to connect the body to this case. The weakest part was just about everything involving hypnotism. That there were two schools of thought about the practice, that there was disagreement about whether or not hypnotism could really convince anyone to do something truly against their will, these are important to know. But the author goes on and on about these divergences, and talks in excruciating detail about the testimony given at the trial about it all. I feel like maybe the hypnotism angle was the wrong place to hang the story. Perhaps the hook should have been the police work involved, or the svengali-like personality of Eyraud instead. ( )

When Michel Eyraud met Gabrielle Bompard in Paris in 1889, both of them were in desperate financial circumstances. Eyraud, a middle-aged habitual con man and thief, was about to lose his respectable job at a trading company due to his shady dealings. Twenty-year-old Gabrielle was estranged from her well-to-do family and had no means of supporting herself. The two "became lovers" (to borrow the narrative's most overused phrase), and Eyraud soon hatched a plan: they would lure a wealthy man to their apartment with the promise of sex, then rob and murder him. The unfortunate Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé was their unwitting victim. Gabrielle, of course, was the bait, but was she a willing accomplice? At their subsequent murder trial, the defense claimed that Eyraud used hypnosis "to take her free will away."

Little Demon in the City of Light is impeccably researched, but the writing is pedestrian. I didn't find the hypnosis angle, described in great detail in terms of the conflict between the rival "Paris" and "Nancy" schools of thought, all that compelling. Far more intriguing were the descriptions of crime scene investigation before the development of modern forensic techniques. By the time the putrefied corpse was found, it was almost unidentifiable. The chief investigator, Marie-Francois Goron, went to great lengths to establish a link between the accused couple and the massive trunk in which the corpse was found, going so far as to have the damaged wooden box reconstructed. An early forensic scientist, Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, used Gouffé's medical and dental records, along with samples of the dead man's distinctive chestnut hair, to identify the corpse.

The author's sympathies are clearly with Gabrielle, but I didn't feel sorry for either of the murderers. Gabrielle, the "little demon" of the title, reminded me of Charles Manson's female followers--sexy but childlike, terrified but devoted to their substitute father-figure. Unlike the Manson girls, however, Gabrielle did not remain loyal to her man when her own life was at stake.

Despite its flaws, this book is definitely worth reading, especially if you are interested in the beginnings of forensic science. ( )