num_pages: 337
description: A delicious account of a murder most gallicthink CSI Paris meets Georges Simenonwhose lurid combination of sex brutality forensics and hypnotism riveted first a nation and then the world.Little Demon in the City of Light is the thrillingand so wonderfully Frenchstory of a gruesome 1889 murder of a lascivious court official at the hands of a ruthless con man and his pliant mistress and the international manhunt sensational trial and an inquiry into the limits of hypnotic power that ensued.In France at the end of the nineteenth century a great debate raged over the question of whether someone could be hypnotically compelled to commit a crime in violation of his or her moral convictions. When Toussaint-Augustin Gouff entered 3 rue Tronson du Coudray he expected nothing but a delightful assignation with the comely young Gabrielle Bompard. Instead he was murderedhanged!by her and her companion Michel Eyraud. The body was then stuffed in a trunk and dumped on a riverbank near Lyon.As the inquiry into the guilt or innocence of the woman the French tabloids dubbed the Little Demon escalated the most respected minds in France debated whether Gabrielle Bompard was the pawn of her mesmerizing lover or simply a coldly calculating murderess. And at the burning center of it Could hypnosis force people to commit crimes against their will?
language: English
title: Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris
publisher: Doubleday