La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century

La Grande Thérèse is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales worthy of classic literature, a story of how Thérèse Daurignac used theatrics and a powerful imagination to become French society hostess Madame Humbert.

As a child in Ausonne, France in the mid-1800s, Thérèse entertained her siblings with her tales of the family's becoming wealthy and their farmhouse a lavish country resort, le Château de Marcotte. She then tried to pass off her fantasies as reality. While she was a teenager, she talked of a legacy, often naming different benefactors. She claimed she would pay her creditors when she received her inheritance. In actuality, the family lived off others' charity.

Thérèse married her cousin, law school student Frédéric Humbert, in 1878. Frédéric's father Gustave was a law teacher at the University of Toulouse and later deputy for Haute-Garonne in the House of Representatives in Paris and the Third Republic's Minister of Justice (France's highest legal office). The Humberts had no money -- they counted on Thérèse's fake inheritance and Château. Gustave Humbert was considered above reproach. Using Thérèse's imaginary bonds, Gustave was able to mortgage the property and a fabricated cork oak plantation in Portugal. The Portuguese property was supposedly given to her (after some variations) by an American millionaire named Robert Henry Crawford, who bequeathed her 100 million francs, today equal to one-third of $1 billion.

The author believes Justice Minister Humbert gathered the initial funds to seed their scheme through embezzling money from the bankrupt Union Générale Bank. The money helped the Humberts buy a newspaper and some properties, in turn enabling them to receive millions of francs in loans and to buy their mansion at 65, avenue de la Grande Armée. There Madame Humbert entertained French presidents and prime ministers, and celebrities, among them Sarah Bernhardt and Emile Zola.

A strongbox at la Grande Armée was said to be where Thérèse kept her inheritance in bearer bonds and the documents to prove it. Few people saw it besides the Humberts. It contained a fake will naming Thérèse beneficiary, one in which Crawford left his fortune to her sister Maria and Crawford's reputed nephews, the nephews' agreement to forfeit their Uncle's fortune to Thérèse until the estate was settled, and finally, the Crawford's deed in which they waived their claim and agreed to a six million franc settlement and that one of them would marry Maria. Supposedly the Crawfords refused the money because Maria wouldn't marry either brother. The case over this matter actually went to trial in October 1885. Legally it stood, as the trial was on whether

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