it of having laid by the heels, ten months
after the commission of the crime, Michel Eyraud, one of the assassins
of the bailiff Gouffe.

On June 16 Eyraud was delivered over to the French police. He reached
France on the 20th, and on July 1 made his first appearance before the
examining magistrate.

It will be well at this point in the narrative to describe how Eyraud
and Gabrielle Bompard came to be associated together in crime. Gabrielle
Bompard was twenty-two years of age at the time of her arrest, the
fourth child of a merchant of Lille, a strong, hardworking, respectable
man. Her mother, a delicate woman, had died of lung disease when
Gabrielle was thirteen. Even as a child lying and vicious, thinking only
of men and clothes, Gabrielle, after being expelled as incorrigible from
four educational establishments, stayed at a fifth for some three years.
There she astonished those in authority over her by her precocious
propensity for vice, her treacherous and lying disposition, and a
lewdness of tongue rare in one of her age and comparative inexperience.
At eighteen she returned to her father's house, only to quit it for a
lover whom, she alleged, had hypnotised and then seduced her. Gabrielle
was singularly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Her father implored
the family doctor to endeavour to persuade her, while in the hypnotic
state, to reform her deplorable conduct. The doctor did his best but
with no success. He declared Gabrielle to be a neuropath, who had not
found in her home such influences as would have tended to overcome her
vicious instincts. Perhaps the doctor was inclined to sympathise rather
too readily with his patient, if we are to accept the report of those
distinguished medical gentlemen who, at a later date, examined carefully
into the mental and physical characteristics of Gabrielle Bompard.

This girl of twenty had developed into a supreme instance of the
"unmoral" woman, the conscienceless egoist, morally colour-blind, vain,
lewd, the intelligence quick and alert but having no influence whatever
on conduct. One instance will suffice to show the sinister levity, the
utter absence of all moral sense in this strange creature.

After the murder of Gouffe, Gabrielle spent the night alone with the
trunk containing the bailiff's corpse. Asked by M. Goron what were her
sensations during this ghastly vigil, she replied with a smile, "You'd
never guess what a funny idea come into my head! You see it