THÉRÈSE D’AURIGNAC WAS HAVING A LOT OF TROUBLE getting used to being a servant girl.
People ordered you around like you were dirt. They worked you like an ox. They treated you like a slave. Men made unfeeling and indecent passes at you.
Thérèse’s family had always been poor—in fact, her father had been no more than a peasant in her home village of Bauzelles, France—but at home she’d always been treated like the intelligent, resourceful girl she was.
That had all changed two years ago on January 5, 1874, when her father, René D’Aurignac, had died, leaving the family penniless. This had forced the whole family—Thérèse, her sister, her two brothers, and even her mother—to become servants to rich families in the nearby city of Toulouse. If you had no money in 19th-century France, going into service was usually your only option. It paid almost nothing, but at least you were fed and given a place to sleep.
Still, this wasn’t supposed to have happened. Her father had always promised his family that on the day of his death, they would inherit a large estate.
Thérèse still felt stupid for having believed it—but when you’re told the same thing day after day for 16 years, it’s hard not to believe it a little bit. Her father’s story was that he had actually been born into a very rich family—an aristocratic family—but his rebellious behavior as a young man had gotten him kicked out and disinherited. However, his parents had promised that if he married and made good, his children would be welcomed back into the D’Aurignac family after his death—with fully restored inheritance rights. All the documents proving his story and his family’s promise were locked in an old oak chest in his bedroom.
After René D’Aurignac’s funeral, the family had gathered in his bedroom to watch Thérèse’s brothers Emile and Romain open the chest. Thérèse was pretty sure that nobody else in her family had really believed her father’s story either, but now, huddled together and desperate, they all shared the irrational hope that, by some miracle, it might be true anyway.
The lock on the chest was badly rusted. Romain went outside and came back with an axe and a hammer to smash it off.
Inside, they found nothing more than an ordinary brick.
Since then, Thérèse had felt totally cornered. There didn’t seem to be any hope. She wasn’t a ravishing beauty, so chances of marrying her way out of her situation were just about zero. She was very strong-willed, refusing to be pushed around, so chances of promotion in her work weren’t great—in fact, she’d already been fired from almost as many jobs as her father!
The problem, as far as Thérèse could see, was France’s class system. It seemed to be completely based on money. If you had money, all doors were open to you. It didn’t matter if you were a fool or even a criminal. If you were broke, on the other hand, it didn’t matter if you were a champion or a genius—the doors remained closed.
That’s all Thérèse could see when she imagined her future—a long row of firmly shut doors.
And then, on March 2, 1881, an unbelievable thing happened.
Thérèse was in a third-class rail car on a train to Paris to visit an aunt, when she saw an elderly American tourist in the first-class car fall out of his seat in exactly the way she remembered her Uncle Jean-Pierre falling off his kitchen chair when he’d had a “fit” several years ago.
Ignoring the rule about third-class passengers not being allowed into first-class cars, she rushed through the glass doors and lifted him up, turning him over onto his side and keeping his tongue from blocking his throat exactly as she’d seen the doctor do to her uncle. “This man needs to get to a hospital right away!” she told the porter who came running to help. “Can you get him a carriage when the train stops at the Gare du Nord?”
She kept massaging the man’s neck and shielding him from the sun until the carriage arrived at the nearby Hôpital Lariboisière, where she helped two orderlies put him on a stretcher. But as the orderlies lifted the stretcher to carry him away, the man raised an arm to stop them.
“Who are you, mademoiselle?” he asked in awkward French.
“My name is Thérèse D’Aurignac,” she replied.
“Mademoiselle D’Aurignac, will you wait for me until I come out again?”
She said she would do so.
She waited for him in the hospital lobby for almost six hours.
Thérèse spent the next three days caring for this man in his luxurious rooms at the Hôtel Grande Métropolitain. She prepared his medicines, fed him soups from the hotel restaurant, and bathed his head and chest with cool water. When he slept she watched his breathing carefully for any sign of further trouble. He was extremely grateful and thanked her often in a heartfelt and genuine way that was a welcome relief after the way her employers treated her.
He told her his name was Robert Crawford. He was an industrialist from Chicago, on business in Paris—business he had fortunately completed several days ago. He’d been doing a little sightseeing to fill the remaining days before his departure for New York, and still hoped to keep to that schedule. Would Made-moiselle D’Aurignac be willing to help him recuperate until his departure?
He was so charming, considerate and appreciative that she agreed.
Two days later at Le Havre, Thérèse helped him up the gangplank to his steamer—he was still a little shaky—and then bade him goodbye. He kissed her gallantly on both cheeks, pressed her hands with great affection, and then insisted on pushing an envelope into them. He shook his head firmly when she protested.
“You’ve been absolutely wonderful,” he said. “An angel of mercy and generosity. I will never be able to thank you enough.”
She didn’t open the envelope until she was back on the train to Toulouse.
It contained an amazing 250,000 francs—more money than she had earned in the past two years of domestic service.
In fact, it was enough money to enable Thérèse to free her mother from her servant’s job and set her up in her own linen shop.
But this miracle wasn’t over. Two years later Thérèse announced that she had received a letter from Sauvignon and Hébert, a legal firm in Paris, informing her that she’d been named in the will of the recently deceased Chicago industrialist Robert Henry Crawford. The will bequeathed to her the astonishing sum of 100 million francs’ worth of investments—on two rather unusual conditions:
1) that the inheritance be held in trust at the offices of Sauvignon and Hébert for Thérèse D’Aurignac until she had reached the age of 30;
2) that the inheritance be given to Thérèse D’Aurignac, with accrued interest, on her 30th birthday—but only if or when Thérèse D’Aurignac was married.
It didn’t take very long for news of this extraordinary inheritance and its conditions to spread throughout Toulouse.
The most immediate result was that, within days, Thérèse was the most popular girl in town.
Suddenly the young men of Toulouse didn’t seem to care that Thérèse was plain-looking, or that her father had been a peasant, or that she was only a domestic servant. Suddenly they all seemed to think that she was beautiful, smart, funny, and ever so charming! It wasn’t long before she was receiving lots of marriage proposals.
Doors were beginning to open.
A lot of young women might have let this go to their heads, but not Thérèse. She wasn’t fooled. She knew that many of these young men were just interested in her newfound riches. At the same time, she certainly wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. She took her time, refused to be rushed, and about a year later chose Frederic Humbert, a lawyer and the son of Toulouse’s influential mayor, Gustave Humbert.
It turned out to be a smart choice, because Frederic wasn’t at all like Thérèse. She was strong-willed, aggressive, organized, and ambitious. Frederic was quiet, flexible, thoughtful, and a bit scatterbrained. He’d only become a lawyer to please his father. Whenever he could, he withdrew into his studio to paint.
In 1870s France, this was the opposite of the norm. The husband was expected to be the ruler of the family. The wife was expected to be seen but not heard.
But Frederic was perfectly happy to let Thérèse take over the driver’s seat. He liked having a strong and decisive wife.
As soon as they were married, the young Humberts moved to Paris. In those days, anybody who was somebody lived in Paris. Paris was at the height of its glory—the capital not only of France, but effectively the whole of continental Europe. Emperor Napoleon III had just spent almost 20 years cleaning and modernizing the city, and it gleamed with new or rebuilt palaces, bridges, monuments, and grand boulevards. It was where the most famous financiers, architects, doctors, and artists of Europe gathered. A fifth of France’s entire population lived in Paris.
At first the Humberts moved into a modest townhouse, but that was just temporary. Thérèse had big plans, and it wasn’t long before she was putting them into action.
Word of her amazing inheritance had, of course, reached Paris as well—energetically helped along by Thérèse’s father-in-law, Gustave. Gustave Humbert had taken a liking to Thérèse as soon as he realized that she was the “son” he’d always wanted! If Frederic had been a disappointment to him, the ambitious and strong-minded Thérèse was a good replacement. The two quickly teamed up on all kinds of projects.
It wasn’t long before one Paris banker after another rang Thérèse’s doorbell to offer his “services.” “Services” was banker talk for “loans.” Anyone expecting an inheritance of 100 million francs was a pretty good credit risk from a banker’s point of view. The financial community of Paris was telling Thérèse Humbert that she could borrow all the money she wanted.
More open doors.
So that’s what Thérèse did. She borrowed money. Tons of money. The first thing she did with it was rescue the rest of her family from their drudge-jobs. Then she bought a huge mansion on the fashionable Avenue de la Grand Armée and had it totally renovated—installing expensive silks, hardwoods, a huge glass solarium with a pool, and a three-story glass rotunda out front. She increased the size of the stables and added a bowling green. She made it the sort of place that politicians and financiers and socialites would be impressed by. (Frederic, on the other hand, just had the carpenters add a modest painter’s studio to the rear of the mansion, where he spent most of his time contentedly practicing his watercolor techniques.)
When the mansion was ready, Thérèse turned her attention to country estates. Everyone who was someone in Paris had a country estate. She bought two—one in Provence, another in Avignon—and a classy yacht that she moored in Le Havre. Meanwhile she filled her closets with clothes and jewelry.
By 1885, at the age of 27, Thérèse Humbert was well on her way to becoming an important person in Paris. Her salon was one of the most interesting meeting places in the city, attracting all kinds of fascinating people—painters, politicians, writers, lawyers, and businessmen.
This was all the more surprising since Thérèse herself had not had a rich girl’s education. She had never learned how to be elegant and witty. She was plain-spoken, and hard-headed in her opinions. She had a scratchy voice and a bit of a lisp. But people liked the way she didn’t try to put on airs. They liked her sense of humor and her genuine curiosity. She learned quickly, and had an instinctual sense for how to dress, how to mingle, and how to put people at ease. She soon acquired a reputation for being lively and thought-provoking—and for treating her servants decently.
Once Thérèse had assembled all the basic requirements for a life of influence in Paris, she began tackling the world of business. She’d always wanted to be a businesswoman, and with her wealth this was now a realistic possibility. She teamed up with her two brothers, Emile and Romain, and began by investing in real estate. She bought houses, estates, office buildings, and warehouses. Then she consulted Frederic about art and bought paintings: El Grecos, Velazquezes, Daumiers, and Toulouse-Lautrecs. She also invested in a number of art galleries (whose owners, if they knew what was good for them, quickly developed an enthusiasm for Frederic’s watercolors).
She drove hard bargains and kept a sharp eye on expenses. Her investments made money. She used some of it to pay down her debt, but she also gave generously to charities and cultural projects recommended by her father-in-law. That raised her profile among Paris’ politicians and social leaders. Gustave Humbert was teaching her well.
Fewer and fewer of that long row of doors remained closed.
Then, in 1886, there was a shocking development. A front-page story in the French newspaper Le Matin announced that a challenge had been filed in U.S. Supreme Court against the last will and testament of Robert Henry Crawford.
The challengers were said to be two nephews of Thérèse’s benefactor—named Robert and Henry Crawford. The nephews claimed to have found another will—undated—which listed three beneficiaries of their uncle’s estate: Thérèse D’Aurignac, Robert Crawford, and Henry Crawford.
They were thus challenging the right of Thérèse Humbert to receive the entire Crawford estate when she turned 30—the inheritance that had convinced the bankers of Paris to lend Thérèse every penny she’d used to buy her properties and businesses!
For a few days, the bankers were quite alarmed. But then word got around that Gustave Humbert—who had recently been named France’s Minister of Justice—had examined the documents and had decided that Thérèse had a very strong case. Everybody calmed down again.
Thérèse’s own reaction, of course, was typical Thérèse. She was furious. There was no way she was going to let herself get pushed around by these upstart Crawford nephews. She marched down to the offices of Sauvignon and Hébert and demanded to be given those inheritance documents. When Monsieur Sauvignon objected that according to the will, she wasn’t supposed to be given the documents until she was 30, she said she only wanted to store them in a place where she’d know for certain those Crawford nephews couldn’t get their fingers on them—a safe in her own bedroom! She said she was prepared to sign a guarantee that the safe would not be opened, and the documents would not be touched by anyone, until the courts determined the rightful owner. Somehow, she managed to talk Monsieur Sauvignon into agreeing to this arrangement.
That safe in Thérèse’s bedroom became famous throughout the French financial community—especially among the bankers of Paris. It contained the inheritance against which they had loaned her, by now, over 70 million francs. They were as anxious to keep those documents out of the hands of the Crawford nephews as she was.
To make sure this remained so, Thérèse announced that she had hired a small army of American lawyers to challenge the nephews’ claim. The nephews, apparently, did the same to challenge hers.
The case began to grind its way slowly through the American courts.
While all this was going on, Thérèse kept expanding her business empire. One of her biggest projects during this time was the founding of an insurance company with her brothers Emile and Romain. Known as the Rente Viagère, this company sold life insurance, and like Thérèse’s other companies, it received very positive newspaper coverage. (Being the daughter-in-law of the country’s Justice Minister always helped to attract positive newspaper coverage.) Within a fairly short time it too was reported to be making a tidy profit.
No matter what sort of business she undertook, “La Grande Thérèse,” as she came to be called, couldn’t seem to fail.
She was doing well on the social and political front too. Her circle of influential friends was growing steadily. She’d managed to talk Frederic into running for Parliament, and he’d won a seat. There was talk of her father-in-law becoming Leader of the Senate. The President of France himself had come to the Humbert mansion for dinner on several occasions.
Then, in 1888, Thérèse Humbert turned 30—the age at which her inheritance from Robert Henry Crawford should have been handed over to her. But the court case in the United States was still dragging on, showing no signs of being settled. So everyone shrugged and just kept waiting. After all, Thérèse was paying the interest on her loans without fail, and making French bankers a lot of money. There was no point in trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
Which wasn’t to say that there weren’t any complainers at all. Monsieur Jules Bizat, for instance. This short, dumpy little man worked as an investigator for the Bank of France, so being suspicious was part of his job. One day, while talking to a banker named Monsieur Delatte, the two men discovered they’d both been wondering about some of Thérèse Humbert’s stories. Hadn’t anyone found it strange that her court case with the Crawford nephews had been going on for over two years now, with no resolution in sight?
“Well, you’re going to New York in a few weeks, aren’t you?” Bizat said. “Why don’t you look those Crawfords up and get their side of the story?”
Delatte agreed. The next time he ran into Thérèse Humbert, he asked her casually where these remarkably quarrelsome Crawford nephews lived.
Thérèse said they lived in a suburb of Boston.
During his trip to America, Delatte made a side trip to Boston. He searched the city’s property records and even its voting records for a Robert or Henry Crawford. No luck. He then tried Chicago, the hometown of Robert Henry Crawford. No luck there, either.
Delatte telegraphed this information back to Bizat.
Bizat made an appointment at Thérèse’s office and confronted her with Delatte’s information. Thérèse just laughed.
“I didn’t mean Boston, Massachusetts,” she said. “I meant Boston, Georgia. The Crawfords have lived in Georgia for over a hundred years.”
Bizat felt like a fool.
But when he tried to contact Delatte back in New York to ask him to check out Thérèse’s explanation, he was informed that Delatte had been mugged several days earlier and had died in a New York hospital. It was pure coincidence, and had nothing to do with his investigations into Thérèse Humbert’s court case, but the result was that Bizat’s own investigations fizzled.
Thérèse Humbert’s position in Paris society remained secure.
It wasn’t until early 1901 that a muckraking journalist, Emile Zola—who was also a famous novelist—began writing accusing articles in Le Matin about Thérèse Humbert and her companies. He questioned why nobody seemed curious about the Crawford nephews’ court case that had been dragging on, by this time, for over 15 years. He also wondered why no one had ever checked Madame Humbert’s famous bedroom safe to verify that it indeed contained an inheritance worth 100 million francs.
Most people reading Le Matin just grinned at Emile Zola’s jabs. Zola was famous for making wild and unproven accusations. Even Thérèse Humbert just shrugged and ignored him.
But her chief attorney, Maître du Bruit, took Zola’s comments personally.
Without consulting Thérèse, he wrote a furious letter to Le Matin, accusing Zola of slander. He said that Zola had done irreparable damage to his honor. He threatened mayhem and prosecution. If Zola was suggesting there was something suspicious about the Crawford will, well, he could prove otherwise. Madame Humbert had nothing to hide. Indeed, he was prepared to open Madame Humbert’s safe and to let Le Matin or anyone else examine the documents in question if they thought it was so important. That would settle the issue!
When Thérèse was informed of du Bruit’s letter, she was appalled.
She asked du Bruit what on earth he was doing. She reminded him that she’d signed an assurance with Sauvignon and Hebert that no one would open that safe or handle its documents until the courts had ruled on the rightful owner.
Du Bruit hadn’t forgotten that. But it wasn’t a problem, he assured Thérèse. There was an article in French inheritance law that allowed for the opening of officially sealed documents if it was in the public interest. He was quite sure he could invoke that law in this particular case. After all, not just his honor had been challenged by Zola, but hers, too.
Thérèse snapped that she didn’t give a fig about her honor! What she was afraid of was that opening the safe would jeopardize the Crawford court case in the United States—just when it seemed to be coming to a conclusion!
At this, du Bruit became huffy. He said he had seen no evidence that the Crawford case was coming to a conclusion. If it was, he certainly hadn’t been informed about it.
Thérèse Humbert threw up her hands and charged out of the room.
But when she turned to her various legal and political friends for help to block du Bruit from opening her safe, Thérèse found herself running into unexpected resistance. Zola’s articles had been more effective than she’d expected. The prime minister himself, it was whispered, had now “taken an interest” in her case. He was said to be of the opinion that the only sensible way to resolve this issue was to open the safe.
A prime minister’s “opinion” in France in the early 1900s had a lot of clout.
Two days later, a mysterious fire broke out in the Humbert mansion. It burned down a large part of the building’s west wing, which was the wing that included Thérèse’s bedroom. The bedroom was completely destroyed, but according to the firemen, the safe was a fireproof model. They felt there was a good chance that its contents hadn’t been damaged. The only way to make sure of that, however, would be to open the safe and find out.
The fire had given Thérèse such a case of jangled nerves that she packed her bags and told her staff she was leaving for one of her country estates. She told du Bruit that she was dead set against him opening the safe, and if he wanted to go against her express wishes and defy her express orders, she wanted nothing more to do with the matter.
The following week, on May 9, 1901, du Bruit, armed with a court order and surrounded by a crowd of bankers, reporters, and lawyers, instructed several workmen to open the scorched and peeling safe. Since Thérèse had forgotten to leave behind her keys, the workmen had to attack it with hammers and crowbars.
The safe was so massive and indestructible, it took several hours of pounding and smashing before the workmen were able to force open the door.
Inside, they found very little. Not a brick, exactly, but not much more than that. The sealed packets of investments looked impressive, but when they were opened, they were found to be worth less than 5,000 francs in total. Besides these almost worthless documents they found an empty jewelry case, a copper coin, and a brass button.
Then it was discovered that Thérèse, her husband, and her two brothers had all disappeared. Within an hour, a warrant had been issued for their arrest.
All four were found four months later in a boarding house in Madrid, Spain.
When news of the arrests spread across France, Thérèse Humbert promptly became a folk hero.
She had accomplished what most of France’s citizens had fantasized doing at one time or another: sticking it to the banks.
Banks were not popular in 19th-century France. They were seen as heartless, tight-fisted, and greedy. Almost everyone had a story to tell about a confrontation with a bank that had ended in financial grief. The idea that a simple, uneducated servant girl had fooled dozens of them into lending her hundreds of millions of francs, and then had risen to become a leader of Parisian high society for no fewer than 20 years—well, it was just too delicious for words.
But even more, they admired Thérèse’s pluck. They admired the way she had confronted her poverty and her lack of a decent job. They approved of the way she had rescued her mother, brothers, and sister. And they loved the way she had overcome her lack of beauty and her unpopularity.
The trial that followed, on August 8, 1903, mostly confirmed what everyone already suspected. Although there must have been a real Robert Henry Crawford, or someone like him (where else would Thérèse have gotten those initial 250,000 francs?), everything after that had been pure invention—cooked up with the help of Emile and Romain. The idea of Crawford’s will had been their ingenious way of getting Thérèse married and accepted into Parisian high society. The unusual conditions of the will had enabled her to borrow from France’s banks without ever having to produce her inheritance.
The provision about the handover at age 30 had been trickier, because that was a solution that had come with a built-in problem. While it had bought Thérèse five years to secure her social and financial position, it meant that at age 30 the game was up—her scam would be revealed. Her initial hope had probably been to become so financially successful during those years that she wouldn’t have needed the backing of the imaginary will.
But that part hadn’t worked out. Her investments had been profitable, but not nearly enough to pay back 240 million francs. She’d needed more time, so she invented an imaginary set of Crawford nephews to challenge her imaginary Crawford will. This, in effect, had extended the age 30 deadline almost indefinitely, and given her a second chance to make enough money to rid herself of her debts.
Unfortunately, that hadn’t worked either—and the main reason was the huge cost of maintaining her high position in Paris society. Buying and maintaining her estates, her yacht, and her lavish parties had made it impossible for Thérèse to make much real financial headway in the end. There was also some suggestion that she’d been forced to make blackmail payments to a number of lawyers who’d discovered her scam years earlier—perhaps including du Bruit.
It took the jury less than 24 hours to find all the defendants guilty as charged. Their sentences, however, were surprisingly lenient. Emile received only two years in prison, Romain three, and Thérèse and Frederic five. Even at that, the crowd outside the courthouse became very angry when the sentences were announced. They’d been shouting that La Grande Thérèse should be set free, with no prison sentence at all. As the four accused were whisked out of the courthouse by a back door with their coats thrown over their heads, they could still hear the crowd shouting and booing and throwing cobblestones out front.
Some analysts suggested that the judge handed down light sentences to avoid an appeal—an appeal that might well have caused a very explosive scandal. They felt that Thérèse Humbert couldn’t possibly have pulled off so complex a scam without a lot of inside help—from crooked politicians, crooked lawyers, and quite probably a crooked father-in-law. No one else, however, was ever charged in “L’Affaire Humbert.”
The bankers did lose a lot of money—some as much as 45 million francs. Several banks went broke, and a banker from Lyons even committed suicide.
But one banker from Paris, who had lost almost 4 million francs, became a national hero when he was quoted as saying, good-humoredly: “Oh, I’ll get paid back somehow, one of these days. And if I don’t, well, at least I’ve had the privilege of serving a truly gifted woman.”