The Humbert Affair

The case

On 9 May 1902, under a court order and before a crowd of reporters, officials forced open a strongbox in a mansion at 65 avenue de la Grande-Armée in Paris. For two decades its owner, Thérèse Humbert, had told bankers, lawyers and judges that it held the bonds and papers of a vast American inheritance, and on the strength of that box she had borrowed tens of millions of francs. Inside they found almost nothing. Accounts of the contents vary, from an old newspaper, a trouser button and a coin to a brick and a penny, but all agree on what was missing. The family who owned the safe had already left town.

Thérèse Daurignac was born in the mid-1850s into a peasant family at Aussonne, near Toulouse. Her father, a foundling who practised as a healer, liked to hint at a noble inheritance to come, and his daughter learned early how far a promise could be stretched. In 1878 she married Frédéric Humbert, son of Gustave Humbert, a distinguished jurist who became Minister of Justice in 1882. She is said to have won over her in-laws by claiming to be heir to a château in the Gers. That story fell apart; the marriage survived it.

The tale that made her fortune came next. Thérèse said that in 1879 she had helped an American millionaire, Robert Henry Crawford, through a heart attack on a train, and that on his death he had left her a large part of his estate. Two nephews, Henry and Robert Crawford, were said to dispute the will, and until the quarrel was settled the securities had to remain sealed in her safe. The genius of the scheme lay in the lawsuits. Thérèse hired eminent lawyers to fight the nephews through the courts, and each judgment, up to the Court of Cassation, became fresh proof that the Crawford millions existed. When the nephews had to appear in person, two of her brothers obliged.

Against this phantom collateral the Humberts borrowed heavily and lived grandly. They moved to Paris, bought the Château des Vives-Eaux near Melun, and kept a salon that drew politicians, magistrates and men of letters. Frédéric sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1885 to 1889. When creditors pressed, new loans paid off old ones. A life-annuity business the family set up, the Rente Viagère, brought in further deposits from small savers.

Doubts surfaced repeatedly. The newspaper Le Matin questioned the story as early as 1883 and returned to it later, and some lenders grew suspicious when they compared the size of the supposed inheritance with the sums already borrowed against it. Eventually a creditor obtained an order for the safe to be placed under seal and opened. Shortly before the appointed day, Thérèse, Frédéric and her brothers slipped away.

They were found in Madrid on 20 December 1902 and returned to Paris, where the crowds turned out to see them. The trial before the Seine Court of Assizes began on 8 August 1903, with Fernand Labori, who had defended Dreyfus, among Thérèse's counsel. She stayed defiant, and near the end told the jury that Crawford had really been a man named Regnier, a go-between in the 1870 war, a claim no one could test. On 22 August the jury convicted all four defendants. Thérèse and Frédéric received five years each; her brothers Romain and Émile Daurignac received three and two years. Many thought the sentences light for what Prime Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau had called the greatest swindle of the century.