The life of Thérèse Humbert is yet another tale of a rags-to-riches tale fraudster, this time in 19th century Paris.
When Thérèse Daurignac was born into a peasant family in Languedoc, France, in 1856, nobody could have imagined her future life would make her the subject of a 1983 TV movie. The little Thérèse was clearly a natural at the confidence trickster game, and even as a child would convince friends to lend her their jewellery in order to convince others that she was wealthy.
Beginnings
In an unlikely-looking match, the ambitious Thérèse wooed and married her first cousin, Frédéric Humbert, son of the French politician Gustave Humbert, spinning him tales of a castle she was due to inherit from her deceased mother's lover. Frédéric could not have believed the tale for long, but he soon became his new wife's accomplice, and together, they apparently used the non-existent castle as collateral for a loans from banks to fund a comfortable lifestyle -- presumably banks were more trusting of prominent members of society in 19th century France, and didn't require niceties like deeds.
They soon moved on to Thérèse's most audacious scam, honed from years of spinning variants of the old "I have an inheritance" tale, which was centered on a safe kept in the Humberts' Parisian home on the fashionable Avenue de la Grande Armée.
Saviour
Thérèse recounted the tale that, in 1879, she saved the life of a gentleman on a train. Upon hearing groans from the next compartment, she gained access by climbing out of the window, and discovered said gentleman collapsed on the floor of his compartment, apparently in the throes of a heart attack. After assisting him with her smelling salts (a popular remedy for heart attacks back then, it seems), she discovered, to her surprise, that she had helped save the life of none other than Robert Henry Crawford, an American millionaire. Crawford was, she related, suitably grateful and promised that one day he'd reward her.
That day came in 1881 when she received a letter informing her that Crawford had died, and had made Thérèse the beneficiary of his will. Crawford's instructions, so the tale went, were that Thérèse and her husband were to take care of the Crawford family fortune, in the aforementioned safe, which should remain sealed until Thérèse's younger sister Marie was old enough to marry one of Crawford's nephews.
Social Whirl
The inheritance hidden away in the locked safe was Thérèse's ticket to even more borrowing, including the cash to pay for the Humberts' grand home. The Humberts lived a life of social whirl in the years to come, with Thérèse's salon becoming a talk of the town, as they continued to borrow money from various sources, ostensibly to fund various investments in government bonds, using the Crawford millions as collateral.
There were, of course, suspicions aired, and the newspaper Le Matin published a skeptical article in 1883. But by this time Frédéric's father Gustave had risen to become France's minister of justice, and he backed up their story.
There was even, apparently, a court case in which the Crawford nephews (impersonated, as it later transpired, by two of Thérèse's brothers, speaking French in an apparently bad American accent) sued for the return of the contents of the safe. But with the justice minister behind them, the court ruled in favour of the Humberts.
Justice
It all had to end, of course, and it came when some of the Humbers' creditors did their sums and realized that the total of the Thérèse and Frédéric's debts exceeded the claimed value of the Crawford inheritence. In 1901, the creditors sued, and the court ordered that the safe be opened to check its contents. The Humberts had already fled the country when the safe was cracked and found to be empty. (Some accounts suggest it contained a brick and a half penny, but that seems even less believable than the Humbert tale itself).
The fugitives were soon captured, and after a very public trial in which all of the defrauded high-and-mighty were named, Thérèse and Frédéric were sentenced to five years hard labour. After that, history is silent about the couple.
How much of this tale has been embroidered over the years, it is quite impossible to tell, and tales of the wealthy lending vast sums based on little more than promises of hidden riches seem hard to accept. But as we saw last week, today's gullible are really no different.
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