This year’s visit for the Petroleum Economics & Management Program at IFPEN fell a bit later than usual – early July – but that was really quite fortunate, because a lot has been happening recently in both the US and China. Chongqing launched its carbon trading market on June 19th, covering 254 companies and generating 4.45 million RMB worth of transactions during the very first half-hour of operation – and now all seven pilot emissions trading programs in China are up and running. The Obama administration’s EPA issued draft greenhouse gas rules for existing power plants on June 2nd – and introduced a very creative scheme that will foster multi-state emissions markets while still keeping within the legalistic “command/control” framework of the original clean air legislation.  That legislation was passed almost 45 years ago, and was never designed for such a massive problem as GHG control, so this new approach is quite encouraging.  There will be lawsuits, of course – but still, we now have the two major GHG emitting countries undertaking domestic control programs…. something they both scrupulously avoided under the Kyoto Protocol. And even more promising, both utilize emissions trading – some truly good news after a very, very long period of woeful tidings on this topic.

And speaking of woeful tidings….. with the numerous references over the years to Qiu Xiaolong and Donna Leon novels (as well as last year’s obsession with Midnight in Peking), I’m sure many of you must think that I’m an avid reader of murder mystery & crime stories — but I can assure you that that’s not actually the case. I probably haven’t read any more Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes than the average person, and I don’t follow most of today’s best-selling purveyors of the craft. All this by way of introducing, for this Paris trip – yes, yet another “true crime” book! Steven Levingston’s Little Demon in the City of Light is subtitled ‘A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris,’ and it certainly makes for fascinating reading…. all the more so because it tackles an interesting period of Paris’ history, and presents a very difficult medical question.

Back in 1889, a few months after the Eiffel Tower had opened, a pretty young lady from Lille enticed a wealthy Parisian gentleman to a flat on the rue Tronson du Coudray – where he was murdered. His body (only identified much later) was dumped along a river bank near Lyon. The book follows all of the major players in this criminal tale, across continents and intricate schemes, to the courthouse where the young lady (the ‘Little Demon’ of the title) was put on trial for murder, along with her middle-aged, con-man accomplice. In a trial that foreshadowed future media sensations about brutal crimes, the key question was an important one: Could she have committed murder while under hypnosis?

Salpêtrière entrance

The young lady’s defense team argued that the con-man was fully responsible, for he had held her under just such a spell — and the French medical community was split. Professor Jean-Martin Charcot (often called the “founder of modern neurology,” and Sigmond Freud’s teacher) had become head of medical services at Salpêtrière in the 13th arr., a vast hospital that was then home to nearly 5,000 live-in patients – most of them women, a third of them fully insane, and the rest quite dysfunctional. Women at that time were thought to suffer from “hysteria”, and the young lady in question clearly had such symptoms, according to the Salpêtrière team; however, she was only a ‘petite’ hysteric rather than a ‘grand’ hysteric, and accordingly was still responsible for her actions. Doctors at the medical school in Nancy, however, believed her ‘suggestibility’ introduced serious questions about culpability.

I was extremely fortunate that this year’s IFPEN visit coincided with an exhibit at the Église Saint-Louis at Salpêtrière (which you can see through the portal of the hospital’s entrance, above) about Charcot and his methods. The exhibit included notebooks, drawings, letters, etc., and offered a fascinating look at a previous world which existed at this famous institution. Salpêtrière was one of the sites of the September massacres during the French revolution, and before that – as its name implies – hosted a gunpowder factory. (In my Pollution Markets book, I noted the considerable difficulty that Philadelphians & others in the original US colonies had in manufacturing saltpeter, a crucial ingredient in gunpowder; the American Revolution was saved by the timely and generous contributions of gunpowder supplies by the French).

I’m certainly not going to spoil things by telling you how the trial ended – but Little Demon in the City of Light made this quite a remarkable trip!