was not very
pleasant for me being thus tete-a-tete with a corpse, I couldn't sleep.
So I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some
respectable gentleman from the provinces. I'd bring him up to the room,
and just as he was beginning to enjoy himself say, 'Would you like to
see a bailiff?' open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover
from his horror, run out into the street and fetch the police. Just
think what a fool the respectable gentleman would have looked when the
officers came!"

Such callousness is almost unsurpassed in the annals of criminal
insensibility. Nero fiddling over burning Rome, Thurtell fresh from the
murder of Weare, inviting Hunt, the singer and his accomplice, to "tip
them a stave" after supper, Edwards, the Camberwell murderer, reading
with gusto to friends the report of a fashionable divorce case, post
from the murder of a young married couple and their baby--even examples
such as these pale before the levity of the "little demon," as the
French detectives christened Gabrielle.

Such was Gabrielle Bompard when, on July 26, exactly one year to a day
before the murder of Gouffe, she met in Paris Michel Eyraud. These two
were made for each other. If Gabrielle were unmoral, Eyraud was immoral.
Forty-six at the time of Gouffe's murder, he was sufficiently practised
in vice to appreciate and enjoy the flagrantly vicious propensities
of the young Gabrielle. All his life Eyraud had spent his substance in
debauchery. His passions were violent and at times uncontrollable,
but unlike many remarkable men of a similar temperament, this strong
animalism was not in his case accompanied by a capacity for vigorous
intellectual exertion or a great power of work. "Understand this," said
Eyraud to one of the detectives who brought him back to France, "I have
never done any work, and I never will do any work." To him work was
derogatory; better anything than that. Unfortunately it could not be
avoided altogether, but with Eyraud such work as he was compelled at
different times to endure was only a means for procuring money for
his degraded pleasures, and when honest work became too troublesome,
dishonesty served in its stead. When he met Gabrielle he was almost at
the end of his tether, bankrupt and discredited. At a pinch he might
squeeze a little money out of his wife, with whom he continued to live
in spite of his open infidelities.

Save for such help as he could get from her