On Wednesday, December 19, 2007, Philippe Courroye received a phone call from Olivier Metzner, one of the country’s most famed and feared criminal lawyers.
Courroye was the procureur, or state prosecutor, in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. The two men had worked together on a number of cases in the past, saw each other socially, and spoke on a first-name basis—unusual in the formal context of French professional relations.
Metzner said he had a “sensitive” case to discuss with Courroye and wanted to bring the dossier to him personally. The twenty-minute drive from Metzner’s Left Bank office just off the boulevard Saint-Germain took him through the open expanse of the Place de la Concorde with its imposing fountains and central obelisk stolen from the Egyptians by Napoleon. From there, his chauffeur-driven Jaguar headed up the Champs-Élysées and crossed the traffic-snarled circle around the Arc de Triomphe.
Arriving at La Défense, the Manhattan-like clutch of office towers just west of Paris, the car entered an underground tunnel that led to Nanterre. Ensconced in the backseat, puffing on one of his six daily cigars, half-height glasses posed on the end of his nose, Metzner paid no attention to the scenery. He was focused on the thick folder that lay in his lap.
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Metzner, then fifty-eight, had risen to prominence through a series of high-profile cases that sealed his reputation as a shrewd and ruthless legal strategist, a master of the complex procedural tools of French justice, and a shameless manipulator of the press. Among his many headline-grabbing cases, he had defended rock singer Bertrand Cantat in the fatal battering of actress Marie Trintignant, daughter of Jean-Louis Trintignant (A Man and a Woman), in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in 2003.
Cantat, lead singer for a group prophetically named Noir Désir (Black Desire), had flown into a violent rage and rained nineteen blows on his lover, then left her comatose body in bed overnight. Flown back to Paris, she died four days later after an emergency operation. Metzner got Cantat an eight-year sentence for unintentional homicide instead of the fifteen years he risked for murder. (He was released on conditional liberty in 2007.)
His adversary in that case was his bête-noire, Georges Kiejman, who represented Trintignant’s mother. Metzner had argued that the attack was triggered by the victim’s “hysteria.” Kiejman shot back, “The hysterical fury of women, that’s the classic excuse of the machos who strike them.” Since that face-off, the two men had barely been on speaking terms. Their courtroom encounters in the Bettencourt case would bring them close to fisticuffs.
No less spectacular was Metzner’s successful defense of the dashing former prime minister Dominique de Villepin in the so-called Clearstream Affair, in which de Villepin was accused of trumpeting false claims of corruption against his bitter rival, Nicolas Sarkozy. Courroye thought the Clearstream case had caused his friend to “levitate” with self-satisfaction. “At that point, he left the land of human beings to join that of the gods.”
But Metzner’s previous exploits paled next to the juicy affair described in the dossier he was now holding: the bilking of the world’s wealthiest woman, head of one of France’s proudest industrial icons, by a flamboyant homosexual photographer, artist, and writer who had taken her for hundreds of millions of euros and counting.
Not that Metzner had anything against homosexuals—he was gay himself—but he knew a spectacular case when he saw it, and this one just might seal his reputation as the undisputed king of France’s criminal lawyers. He also, secretly, looked on what would soon be known as the Bettencourt Affair as his last great case. Once it was done and dusted, he planned to retire to his private island off the coast of Brittany and indulge in his real passions: sailing on his yacht and contemplating the sea from his own rocky coastline. He was already a very wealthy man, and his new client, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, had the means to pay him handsomely for the work he was about to do.
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Philippe Courroye, a tall, slender man with thinning gray hair and tired-looking bags under his blue eyes, was a battle-scarred veteran of France’s judiciary bureaucracy. He had started his career as one of the country’s roughly five hundred juges d’instruction, the special magistrates that under the French justice system investigate cases and decide whether to send defendants to trial. Called “the most powerful man in France” by Napoleon (some say it was Balzac), the juge d’instruction has extensive powers to compel testimony, order wiretaps and surveillance, and put defendants in preventive detention for unlimited periods. He is assisted in his probes by an elite corps of detectives from the judiciary police. Once he completes his investigation and sends a case to court, it is up to the procureur to prosecute it before a panel of three judges, who preside over the trial and render the decision. (Juries are used only in cases involving violent crimes.) In France, all magistrates are civil servants.
Courroye had been an aggressive investigator earlier in his career, putting more than one corrupt official behind bars. But ever since he was named as the Nanterre prosecutor in March 2007, he had higher ambitions. For the prosecutors are part of the country’s political power structure: Unlike the nominally independent investigating magistrates, prosecutors are directly responsible to the justice minister, who is responsible to the president. And Courroye, who nursed a burning desire to be named procureur de Paris—the absolute summit of his profession—had a powerful advantage in this quest: He was a personal friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy. His successful handling of a high-profile case, he reasoned, would almost assure him the appointment he craved.
The case that Metzner laid before him that day was a suit against François-Marie Banier, filed on December 19, 2007, for abus de faiblesse—abuse of weakness—committed against Liliane Bettencourt, then eighty-five years old, in the town of Neuilly. (Neuilly being part of the Hauts-de-Seine Department, the matter fell under the jurisdiction of Nanterre.) This was not a simple civil action to recover damages: It was a criminal case punishable by up to three years in prison and a €375,000 fine. Metzner’s eighteen-page complaint accused Banier of having “knowingly abused the state of weakness of [Françoise’s] mother in order to obtain considerable sums and values.”
Courroye saw immediately that this was an important and highly sensitive case. And he was determined to keep it under his wing. Instead of assigning it to an independent magistrate, he decided to carry out his own enquête préliminaire—a preliminary investigation to determine whether the case should be brought to trial. Normally, such a probe would lead a prosecutor to hand the case to an investigative magistrate, who would then undertake an in-depth examination of the facts. Courroye’s insistence on keeping the matter under his control later drew widespread criticism. But to his mind, this case was so important that he did not dare give it to anyone else. To assist him in his own investigation, he turned to the brigade financière—the unit of the judiciary police whose detectives are specialized in financial matters.
Metzner’s dossier was “well supported,” says Courroye, now fifty-eight, looking back on the case nearly a decade later. It contained the affidavits of Claire Thibout and seven other witnesses, medical certificates describing Madame Bettencourt’s health problems, and a detailed accounting of the gifts Banier had allegedly obtained over the years. The total, according to Metzner’s dossier, was more than €500 million.
The witness statements included in Metzner’s file were devastating for Banier, whom they portrayed as a kind of guru bending Liliane to his will and milking her for millions. Dominique Gaspard, Liliane’s personal maid, recounted a scene that had taken place on the Île d’Arros in December 2006. “Monsieur Banier harassed Madame Bettencourt for her to give him a check. When she refused, he did not want to have lunch or dinner with her. Madame Bettencourt was very unhappy, she was not herself. On Christmas Eve, he was with her when she was preparing to go hear the Christmas carols. I was present. He criticized all Monsieur and Madame Bettencourt’s guests. When she was getting ready to put on her lipstick, he took it out of her hands and threw it against the wall saying it was not pretty. Madame was very upset; a half hour later, she had a malaise.”
During the same stay on the island, Liliane’s nurse, Henriette Youpatchou, claimed to have overheard a conversation Between Liliane and Banier. “That’s much too much!” the heiress protested. “It’s not enough,” said Banier, to which Liliane replied, “André is going to find out!” Youpatchou declared: “Their discussions were almost always about money. He demanded a lot from Madame Bettencourt and he obtained what he wanted. I observed scenes where he demanded money with such insistence that she became ill and couldn’t sleep. After each exchange with him, she was melancholic, very nervous. When she resisted (a little bit) his demands for money, he went into terrible temper tantrums.”
Claire Thibout, the one who had first informed Françoise about Banier’s predations, repeated those charges in her attestation. “At the end of 2005, Monsieur Banier telephoned almost every day to ask me to tell Madame Bettencourt that he loved her, that he cared a lot about her, but that he needed two or three million euros to pay for his swimming pool and other work. I remember that when he ran into me at the [Bettencourt] property, he asked for my advice: ‘I’d like to go see Françoise Bettencourt to tell her that there is enough money for two.’ I was staggered.”
As presented in Metzner’s file, these statements made a strong case against Banier. It was up to Courroye to determine whether they were borne out by other witness accounts and independently verifiable facts.
Courroye’s investigative strategy revolved around two questions. “First, we had to verify that the gifts that were listed—life-insurance contracts, paintings, etc., had in fact been granted to Banier. Then there was the central question: Was Madame Bettencourt in fact in a situation of vulnerability? Because the gifts denounced by Françoise Meyers went back to 1997—ten years earlier. So that meant that since 1997, Madame Bettencourt was in a situation of vulnerability. That had to be proven, because otherwise, she can do what she wants with her money.”
Liliane’s vulnerability was indeed the key issue. Article 223-15-2 of the French penal code defines the infraction in these terms: “The fraudulent abuse . . . of the situation of weakness . . . of a person whose particular vulnerability, due to age, illness, or infirmity . . . is apparent or known by the author”; or the abuse “of a person in a state of psychological suggestion . . . resulting from the use of heavy or repeated pressures, or techniques aimed at altering one’s judgment” in order to lead this person “to an act or an abstention that is gravely prejudicial to him or her.”
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As Courroye and the Financial Brigade detectives launched into the investigation in early January 2008, Liliane Bettencourt was unaware of her daughter’s legal action. She had another preoccupation at that moment. On November 19, the very day of her husband’s death, L’Oréal CEO Lindsay Owen-Jones had sent her a letter that infuriated her. Now that André was no longer there to serve as her “unofficial adviser,” Owen-Jones proposed for Liliane to cede the “family representation” on the company’s Management and Remunerations Committee to Jean-Pierre Meyers, her son-in-law, whom she suspected of trying to assert his control over the company and push her aside.
In 2005, Liliane complained to her notary, Jean-Michel Normand, that Meyers had pulled out an actuarial table and said that her “life expectancy was not more than five years! The absence of familiarity that has always characterized our relations excludes the possibility of a trivial or humorous interpretation.” Six years earlier, she had written to Normand to recount a conversation between Owen-Jones and Jean-Pierre Meyers in which her son-in-law gave the impression that “he was merely awaiting my death in order to sell L’Oréal . . . I spoke about this with my husband, who told me that he is obviously waiting . . . He has been waiting for sixteen years.” (With unintended prescience, André had suggested that she might become “gaga” well before her death.)
Now, apparently, Meyers was no longer content to wait. Before André’s body was even cold, Liliane assumed that he had pushed OJ to write that horrid letter asking her, in effect, to kindly begin stepping aside. In her rage, she decided to change her will and make Banier her légataire universel—that is, her legal heir. Unlike adoption, which would need approval by a judge, Banier’s designation as légataire was a simpler procedure that would give him succession rights without bringing him into the family.
Under French law, dating back to the Napoleonic Code, parents are required to leave a certain portion of their estate to their children. In the case of an only child, the amount is one half. The rest—known as the quotité disponible—can be left to anyone. Liliane had already granted most of her L’Oréal stock, comprising 92.6 percent of her personal fortune, to Françoise and her sons as naked, or reversionary, property. But 7.3 percent of her estate remained her exclusive property, to dispose of as she saw fit. And on December 11, 2007, she officially named Banier as the heir to that 7.3 percent. (Martin d’Orgeval was named secondary heir in case Banier should predecease Madame Bettencourt.)
Apparently done out of spite toward Françoise and her husband, Liliane’s designation of Banier as her legal heir could have had major consequences for L’Oréal. Among other things, it put Banier in a position to inherit those L’Oréal shares that had not been designated for Françoise and her sons, making the photographer the owner of 1.2 percent of the firm—a stake that would be worth well over €1 billion today, according to Françoise’s lawyer. Not to mention the buildings, apartments, jewelry, artworks, and liquidities that remained in Liliane’s estate.
Banier’s critics later accused him of manipulating Madame Bettencourt into taking this drastic step at a time when she was emotionally and mentally vulnerable. Jean-Michel Normand, the notary who was enlisted to draw up the act on short notice, considered it “stupidity”—connerie was the more vulgar term he used—and later sought to get it revoked. It was, in his view, “an act of pure violence toward her family,” motivated not by grief over her husband’s death but by “her conflict with her daughter.”
Banier claims that he was unaware of his designation as heir until several days after the fact. “I was gutted. I told [Liliane] I’m not a punching ball between her and her daughter. I didn’t need this war in a family I didn’t belong to.” Liliane’s decision to make him her heir was “absurd” and “ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not crazy and it would have been impossible to accept it.”
Banier’s after-the-fact protests are subject to caution. A week before the act was signed, he invited a lawyer and a notary to lunch at his house to discuss Liliane’s “testamentary options” with a view to securing her gifts against any future legal challenges. Both of these jurists later told investigators that the légataire designation was evoked on this occasion, yet Banier claims that he “never understood that I was to be [Liliane’s] heir.”
For the moment, Françoise knew nothing about her mother’s testamentary juggling. And Liliane knew nothing about the legal whirlwind her daughter had just unleashed. Françoise was reluctant to tell her mother directly—partly for fear of encountering Banier in the house, and partly because her mother’s deafness made verbal exchanges awkward. So on January 14, 2008, she wrote a letter informing her mother of her suit and the reasons for it.
Liliane tore open the envelope and read the first line: “I know ahead of time that you will be upset . . .” Françoise’s letter went on to announce the legal action she had taken against Banier and, in a tone that Liliane found unbearable, presumed to lecture her mother on her choice of friends. There would be no problem if her relationship with the photographer were “truly friendly,” wrote Françoise, “but that is not the case, considering what I have lived through personally, and what Papa endured deep down in his heart, discreetly confiding in me about his concern over [Banier’s] intolerable behavior, which sooner or later must not be left unanswered. The one who pretends to be your ‘friend’ . . . has sought to separate you from us in order to control you for his own purposes . . . I find it unbearable to think for a single instant that a so-called ‘friend’ can be so malicious towards you and our family.” She signed the letter “your daughter who loves you, and because she loves you, I kiss you with all my heart.”
The tender closing words left Liliane cold. “Your letter is absurd,” she wrote on January 16. “Your problems with me do not date from a friendship with this or that person. Let’s be honest, the friendship that you reproach me for has been essential to me and even did a lot of good to your father and me. I will not enter into the details—that concerns only me.” Two days later Liliane wrote again. “Françoise, I really cannot digest your letter. You have no right to judge my relations and the choice of my friends . . . A suit against François-Marie is a suit against me. Have you thought of that?”
In a blistering follow-up letter, written as usual in green ink, Liliane threatened to launch a “revocation procedure” to claw back the L’Oréal stock that she had reserved for her daughter and grandsons. Defending her relationship with Banier, she wrote, “It’s thanks to him that I did not remain locked in the conventional milieu that I seemed destined to by my situation and fortune . . . If all these gifts are the sign of my weakness, then what about the gift I made to you of my L’Oréal shares, considering that all the rest is quite modest compared to the value of that.” In closing, she wrote: “This letter is a final warning.”
On January 30, Liliane wrote directly to Courroye asking him to “put an end to this procedure.” Her daughter’s suit against Banier was “in reality a manifestation of jealously towards me.” All her gifts to Banier were willingly offered “out of friendship” and “patronage,” Liliane insisted. “If the amounts are substantial in the absolute, they are perfectly reasonable in relation to my fortune.” For good measure, she sent the prosecutor copies of her irate letters to Françoise, along with reports from two doctors certifying her mental soundness.
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Banier and d’Orgeval were off skiing at the chic Alpine resort of Courchevel when Liliane first learned of the suit. In the late afternoon of January 14, as dusk was descending on the mountainside, Banier had just finished his last run down the white-powdered slope and racked his skis. When he went to the hotel desk to fetch his keys, the clerk handed him a fax that had just arrived from Madame Bettencourt. That in itself was not unusual: He and Liliane sometimes exchanged two or three faxes a day. But this one sounded ominous. It announced a “disagreeable surprise” from her daughter.
Banier immediately called the Bettencourt residence. Obliged by her deafness to use a maid as an intermediary on the telephone, the heiress avoided specifics but said she would explain everything upon his return. Banier and d’Orgeval wrapped up their Alpine holiday and headed back to Paris two days later. When they finally saw Liliane over dinner on Wednesday, January 16, she pulled out Françoise’s letter and showed it to her guests, along with her reply. “I turned white as death,” Banier recalls.
The next day, d’Orgeval went to see Liliane “to reassure her,” as he wrote in his journal. She was still seething, and said she had slept badly because of Françoise’s letter. “It’s a story of mother-daughter jealousy,” she told him. “She wanted to be Madame Bettencourt . . . What’s sad is to do that just after the death of André.”
Three weeks later, on February 6, police detectives descended on the rue Servandoni and rang Banier’s doorbell at six a.m. “It was horrible,” d’Orgeval recalls. “A dozen policemen searched the house for twelve hours.” They were looking for documents related to Liliane’s gifts, as well as Banier’s correspondence with the heiress and his personal journals. D’Orgeval says they returned four or five times over the course of the investigation, and also searched Banier’s country house in the south of France. “For the next five years, I went to sleep each night with the idea that they could return the next day.”
Banier had actually done the investigators a great service by classifying all the relevant documents in color-coded folders. The papers they seized at his residences helped them determine the extent of the gifts he received. The detectives also discovered that the photographer had a complete record of Liliane’s gifts to Françoise over the years, along with copies of correspondence between the heiress and her daughter. Banier later claimed that Liliane had insisted on giving him these documents so that he could defend himself if Françoise ever took him to court.
Banier was not the only one to receive a morning visit from the Financial Brigade. On Friday, February 1, detectives arrived at ten a.m. at the Meyers apartment in Neuilly to question Françoise about the facts surrounding her suit.
Why had she waited until André Bettencourt’s death before taking steps to protect her mother? “I didn’t want my action to further weaken my father, who had been very sick for months,” she said. “My father knew many things about Banier. He even told me last June, ‘He’s a crook, and these things will be known sooner or later.’” She said she had finally decided to file the suit when Claire Thibout reported to her what Liliane’s maid claimed to have overheard concerning Banier’s adoption project.
Françoise called Banier “a professional of manipulation,” who sought to “penetrate the intimacy of the family to the point of having a real control over my mother” and making himself “indispensable” to her. He worked to “isolate my mother from the rest of the family and from her friends” via a fifteen-year campaign of “denigration.” Concerning her mother’s vulnerability, Françoise described various episodes of confusion, memory lapses, and physical weakness over the years and accused Banier of trying to control her medical care in order to achieve his ends.
Under interrogation by Financial Brigade detectives, all the witnesses who had provided attestations in support of the suit repeated their charges against Banier and their claims about Madame Bettencourt’s mental confusion. Other employees, however, provided contradictory accounts, describing Banier as a respectful and affectionate friend of “Madame” and attesting to her lucidity. Throughout the ensuing years of labyrinthine legal procedures, this dichotomy would persist.
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On May 13, 2008, Courroye took the unusual step of personally accompanying the detectives when they went to interrogate Liliane at the Bettencourt home. “This was an elderly person, eighty-five years old at the time, quite elegant, who presented herself very well, in spite of the deafness she had suffered since childhood,” he recalls. “She absolutely did not give me the impression of someone incoherent, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and saying whatever popped into her head.” The bottom line, says Courroye, was that she appeared lucid and had willingly bestowed gifts on Banier, but he “sensed a very strong conflict between mother and daughter.”
Under Courroye’s questioning, Madame Bettencourt described her relationship with Banier and her reasons for sponsoring him: “I have known Monsieur François-Marie Banier for twenty-five years. In the beginning, I knew the name. I knew he was an artist and that he wrote books. After two years, observing that this Monsieur was interested in art in general, a domain that is dear to me, I decided to help him financially.”
When the prosecutor asked if she knew the total amount of her gifts to Banier, she admitted that she did not, but added: “The amount of the liberalities I gave him matters little to me in relation to my personal fortune. . . . The amount is certainly important but I must tell you that it gave me great pleasure to offer this money.”
Why had she been so generous? “I wanted Monsieur Banier to be able to pursue his artistic activity and considered it normal to help him financially in order to provide the necessary means.”
Did Banier ask for money? No, she replied emphatically, “however when I saw him looking at artworks, I remembered them and sometimes I would buy them for him later. I never attempted to calculate Monsieur Banier’s needs.”
As for her relationship with her daughter, Liliane Bettencourt was scathing: “My daughter cannot abide Monsieur Banier. This animosity also results from her jealousy. She was jealous of the place that Monsieur Banier had at my side and of the friendship I had for him.”
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Françoise Meyers’s suit presented a paradox: It sought to protect her elderly mother from exploitation, but the supposed victim loudly denied her victimhood.
Thus it became increasingly important to determine the state of Madame Bettencourt’s vulnerability. During the May 13 interrogation, Courroye tried to convince Madame Bettencourt to undergo an examination by a neurologist. She flatly refused, saying she didn’t “want to see a doctor just to give satisfaction to my daughter.”
That became a constant refrain during the months and years that followed, and constituted the main stumbling block to the prosecutor’s investigation. The conundrum was that Liliane’s vulnerability could not be proven without an examination by a psychiatrist or neurologist, but there was no legal means to force her to accept that. And the people around her—Banier, de Maistre, and her lawyers—pushed her to resist an independent exam that might allow her daughter to put her under guardianship. The question of Liliane’s mental health thus became a major battleground in the case.
The documents filed with the suit included accounts of Madame Bettencourt’s mental confusion by the domestic employees and friends who had provided attestations to Françoise’s lawyers. The nurse Henriette Youpatchou, for example, stated that “after her hospitalization at the beginning of September 2006, Madame Bettencourt was very confused, she was disoriented in time and space. She regularly thought she was in a clinic, or in a foreign country.” Chantal Trovel, secretary to André Bettencourt, declared that during the same period, Liliane Bettencourt was “extremely fragile,” “completely disoriented,” and made “incoherent statements.” Nicole Berger, a longtime family friend, recounted that after a two-week visit to the Bettencourt home in 2007, she left with “the feeling that [Liliane] had completely lost her head.”
But these anecdotal accounts were of limited value to investigators without the backup of professional medical opinions that could prove her vulnerability. There was little doubt that Liliane Bettencourt had faced some serious health challenges in her life, going back to the childhood attack of tuberculosis that had originally caused her deafness (due to a bad reaction to the Streptomycin antibiotic used to treat her). She suffered a relapse of tuberculosis at the time of her daughter’s birth, later underwent breast-cancer surgery, a colectomy (partial removal of the colon), and a double hip replacement that made walking difficult. In addition, she suffered from chronic osteoporosis that at times caused her excruciating pain. “My head is OK,” she would say, “but my body doesn’t follow.”
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The refusal of Madame Bettencourt and her entourage to accept an independent neurological examination made it difficult to determine the state of her mental health. But her medical record pointed to possible problems:
Seeking to clarify these conflicting opinions, Courroye ordered an independent neurological examination in February 2009. Liliane refused, but instead underwent a half-hour oral examination by Dr. Hubert Rémy, a neurologist handpicked by her lawyer, Fabrice Goguel. Rémy declared that the heiress “disposes of her total will and discernment” and therefore, “needs no measure of protection.” But Rémy’s opinion was perhaps not disinterested: He was paid €1,000 for the thirty-minute consultation, which was attended by Goguel. Five months later, Goguel sought to obtain a new certificate from Rémy, but the doctor was appalled by the diminished state of the patient. He said she was “not the same person” he had seen in February and refused to provide the document. He subsequently destroyed all records of his consultations with Madame Bettencourt.
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Hoping to avoid a public scandal that would damage the image of L’Oréal and the Bettencourt family, Liliane had earlier proposed a reconciliation accord with her daughter. In February 2008, she asked L’Oréal CEO Lindsay Owen-Jones, Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy, and Xavier Fontanet, a L’Oréal board member, to serve as mediators in a tripartite negotiation involving her, Françoise, and Banier. It is interesting to note that it was Jean-Pierre Meyers, not Françoise herself, who spoke for his wife’s interests. The talks continued into the summer, resulting in several drafts of a proposed agreement. “With this odious suit, you are slowly killing me,” Liliane wrote to her daughter in June 2008. “This protocol will give you an honorable way out.”
According to one version dated April 2008, Françoise agreed to withdraw her suit on the following conditions: Liliane promised to grant Banier no more liberalities; Banier renounced any future adoption project; Liliane pledged not to give Banier a role at L’Oréal, the family holding company Thétys, or the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation; Liliane promised not to reduce the functions or status of Jean-Pierre Meyers and foreswore any future revocation of the L’Oréal shares gifted to her daughter and grandsons.
This version seemed to offer something for everyone. Banier could have kept everything he had gained up to that point and avoided a trial. Françoise would have succeeded in shutting off the spigot and preserving the family fortune. And Liliane could have continued her cozy relationship with Banier as a friend, but not as the object of her largesse. Most important, at least to Liliane and Françoise, the affair would be quietly settled before the press got wind of it and turned it into an embarrassing media frenzy. “I don’t even dare imagine the risk of a leak, which grows larger each day,” Liliane wrote to her daughter.
By the end of the summer, though, what had seemed like a promising reconciliation deal broke down. According to Maurice Lévy, there was a clause that called for putting Liliane under guardianship in the event her health declined. What shocked Madame Bettencourt, he says, “was the fact that the choice of guardian would be made by her daughter.”
Another of the mediators, Xavier Fontanet, pointed to a different source of the breakdown: There was a clause guaranteeing that Madame Bettencourt could see her two grandsons, but “she only wanted to see Jean-Victor [the elder]. I don’t know the reason why she did not want to see Nicolas.” Liliane considered this “nonnegotiable.” She called her younger grandson on his cell phone and told him, “Listen, I don’t want to see you anymore, because every time I see you, you remind me of your mother.”
Banier says he refused to sign his part of the agreement because Françoise’s lawyers wanted him to acknowledge that “Madame Bettencourt had psychological problems and memory lapses,” something that he never admitted. “I found that monstrous.”
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On July 1, 2008, in an apparent effort to convince Françoise to drop her suit, Banier wrote to her directly. “We crossed paths some fifteen years ago at Arcouest. But we don’t really know each other, and furthermore I think that you haven’t wished that.” Seeking to explain his relationship with Liliane—and perhaps to launch a veiled threat—he wrote that “the hundreds, thousands of letters exchanged [between me] and Liliane will attest to the literary dialogue that we carried on. Your mother has told me to publish them.” His relationship with André, he said, was “different, certainly with less complicity, but nonetheless very deep. Even though I sometimes wondered if he might have suffered from my proximity with Liliane, he assured me that our relationship had enlightened him.” In conclusion, he wrote: “Your mother has too much personality for anyone at all to be able to influence her. . . . You are mistaken about her and about me.”
On July 16, Françoise wrote a terse and unequivocal reply: “Monsieur, do not expect me to believe what you have written me. None of that is either true or sincere. As for me, I have confidence in the justice system that is now at work.”
The time for reconciliation was over.