e to
report on her mental state came unanimously to the conclusion that,
though undoubtedly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, there was no
ground for thinking that she had been acting under such influence when
she participated in the murder of Gouffe. Intellectually the medical
gentlemen found her alert and sane enough, but morally blind.

The trial of Eyraud and Bompard took place before the Paris Assize Court
on December 16, 1890. It had been delayed owing to the proceedings of an
enterprising journalist. The names of the jurymen who were to be called
on to serve at the assize had been published. The journalist conceived
the brilliant idea of interviewing some of these gentlemen.

He succeeded in seeing four of them, but in his article which appeared
in the Matin newspaper said that he had seen twenty-one. Nine of them,
he stated, had declared themselves in favour of Gabrielle Bompard, but
in some of these he had discerned a certain "eroticism of the pupil of
the eye" to which he attributed their leniency. A month's imprisonment
was the reward of these flights of journalistic imagination.

A further scandal in connection with the trial was caused by the lavish
distribution of tickets of admission to all sorts and kinds of persons
by the presiding judge, M. Robert, whose occasional levities in the
course of the proceedings are melancholy reading. As a result of
his indulgence a circular was issued shortly after the trial by M.
Fallieres, then Minister of Justice, limiting the powers of presidents
of assize in admitting visitors into the reserved part of the court.

The proceedings at the trial added little to the known facts of the
case. Both Eyraud and Bompard continued to endeavour to shift the blame
on to each other's shoulders. A curious feature of the trial was the
appearance for the defence of a M. Liegeois, a professor of law at
Nancy. To the dismay of the Court, he took advantage of a clause in
the Code of Criminal Instruction which permits a witness to give his
evidence without interruption, to deliver an address lasting four hours
on hypnotic suggestion. He undertook to prove that, not only Gabrielle
Bompard, but Troppmann, Madame Weiss, and Gabrielle Fenayrou also, had
committed murder under the influence of suggestion.(18) In replying
to this rather fantastic defence, the Procureur-General, M. Quesnay de
Beaurepaire, quoted a statement of Dr. Brouardel, the eminent medical
jurist who had been called fo