Today, society is shocked by the revelation of Bernard L. Madoff’s “Ponzi Scheme,” and many sources compare his fraud to that of Richard Whitney. However, Madoff is closer in relation to the infamous Le Grande Therese, than the sad case of Whitney. In 1902, a political and financial scandal rocked the French nation when it was discovered that Madame Thérèse Humbert (nee Aurignac), daughter-in-law of the deceased Minister of Justice, had swindled nearly 100 million francs from the French government and its citizens over twenty years. How did this woman, who was not particularly beautiful, educated or well born, manage to defraud scores of people, ranging from the brightest and sophisticated of French society to the simplest?

Let us return to Therese’s childhood.

The seeds of charm and deception were sown in the person of her father, an impoverished nobody who liked to tell the tale of his secretly noble background: his name was not Aurignac, but d’Aurignac, and his home was not the small cottage in which he lived, but a mighty chateau in the Auvergne. Unfortunately, he had quarreled with his parents who cast him out, but after his death, his children would inherit the castle, title and fortune of d’Aurignac. As proof to any unbelievers, he would allow them a peek at a brass-studded chest in which he stated lay all the documents necessary for his children to claim their fortune. Thérèse, based on the wild imaginings of her father, grew up thinking she was of noble blood, and spun her dreams and hopes on that future inheritance. It was a cruel and bitter blow to her pride when after the death of her father, the chest proved to contain nothing more than a brick.

Humiliated, and even more so when she was forced to find work to support her three younger siblings, Emile, Romain and Marie, Thérèse could only bide her time while she plotted to restore herself to the “rightful” place she felt she deserved. Good fortune came in the form of a position as washerwoman in the household of a half-aunt, who was married to Gustave Humbert, the Mayor of Toulouse. There she met Humbert’s son, the weak-willed Frederic. Thérèse stroked his ego, encouraging the sensitive young man to pursue his dreams, for she said a kind old lady, Madame de Mariotte had bequeathed her a chateau, a large estate and riches beyond imagination. When she turned 21, she could inherit and give it all to her dearest Frederic. He swallowed her sympathy and lies, and immediately proposed. When his father objected, the couple eloped and moved to Paris.

In Paris, the couple lived well beyond their means, dining in the best restaurants, taking the best seats in the theatre, and buying expensive properties. If it wasn’t for Frederic’s father, now the Minister of Justice–he could not afford the scandal–who stepped in and paid their debts, the Humberts would have been arrested by their creditors. After their bills were paid, Therese noticed something: simply seeing money calmed her creditors and with the prospect of cash available to pay bills, they seemed more inclined to lend to the young couple. It was a situation ripe for exploitation.

A few months later, Thérèse received a windfall: she had been left millions by a rich American named Crawford whom she’d met in 1879. According to Thérèse, on a train ride, she heard groans from the next compartment. She entered into it by climbing along the outside of the train. There she found a man who was having a heart attack. When she had revived him with her smelling salts, the man told he was an American millionaire named Robert Henry Crawford. He was eternally grateful and promised to reward her some day. Two years later in 1881, she received a letter that stated that Crawford had died and made her beneficiary of his will.

However, there were conditioned on the inheritance: her sister Marie was to receive a third of the state, as were two cousins of Mr. Crawford; no part of the legacy was to be touched until Marie’s 21st birthday; lastly, the will would not be valid unless one of the nephews married Marie. In a blaze of publicity, Thérèse installed a fireproof safe in the bedroom of her new home in the Avenue de la Grande Armee, hired a provincial magistrate to act as notary and placed the documents and securities in the safe. The magistrate testified the procedure was sound and legal, and then Thérèse sealed the safe with hot wax. It would not be opened until her sister’s 21st birthday. The brilliance of this move was immediate: all doubt vanished about the claim and Thérèse was able to borrow as much as she liked on the strength of it. She and Frederic went on a spending spree, buying three country mansions, a steam yacht, countless hats and clothes, and thousands of other things. In total, they borrowed 50 million francs on the strength of an empty safe.

Thérèse furthered her deception by borrowing almost twice as much on the initial 50 million francs. Any doubts that could possibly arise about the legacy were allayed by the various legal technicalities which arose: the Crawford cousins could not decided who would marry Marie, Marie might declare she didn’t want to marry either one of them.

Because of her father-in-law, the Humberts had political connections and assets to launch themselves into the upper echelons of French society. Sophisticated Parisians were just as taken in by Therese as Toulousians had been and more importantly, they were equally prepared to advance her credit. The Humberts bought a newspaper, which their loyal friend Armand Paraye ran as a radical muckraker, and used it as a vehicle to support the progressive cause of her father-in-law, and even campaigned to have Frederic elected as Republican deputy to the French parliament. Before long, Thérèse had become on the of the most esteemed hostesses in the nation with presidents, ministers and plutocratic financiers all paying court to her in her opulent Paris home.

But Thérèse grew greedy. She established an insurance company, the Rent Viagere, in 1893, was backed by little more than a fancy prospectus with unauthorized pictures of the President of South Africa and the Pope. This scheme drew in many more, often smaller investors and was aimed at peasants, small businessmen and others unable to save large amounts of money for their final days. It succeeded not only because it offered large returns from small investments, but because it was seen to honor its settlements quickly and without fuss. Unfortunately, the insurance company was a sham; its deposits and payments received were left unsecured, and any settlement which had to be paid was taken directly from these incoming payments. More than 40 million francs were raked in, most of which went into Thérèse’s private bank account, which Thérèse and Frederic used to slowly pay off their loans with income the insurance firm produced.

Thérèse utilized the Crawford cousins to allay any fears about the legitimacy of the inheritance. To keep creditors from calling in their debts, every time one threatened or at least looked to threaten, a Crawford suddenly called, wanting to buy the debts in order to own all of the Humberts’ chits in order to ruin the family. The creditors would instantly refuse, thinking that a debt that valuable would be better off in their hands, and this would appease them.

But the chips were about the fall. Suspicion was aroused when Girard’s bank in Elbeuf, which had made substantial loans to Thérèse in the 1880s and 1890s, began to experience losses and Girard called on Thérèse for payment on the loans made to her, pleading he would go bankrupt otherwise. Therese cared little for his bankruptcy, and when he shot himself in despair, a case was opened into the Humbert affairs. Rene Waldeck-Rousseau, one of the most distinguished members of Paris bar and a republican politician, conducted the effort to collect the largest of the outstanding debts and came to know the Humberts this way. As his inquiries spread about the Crawfords, the Humberts and the Girard loans, he began to feel doubts.

However much she’d shored up any doubts with investors and her creditors, Thérèse’s story had many holes in them, not the least the fact that no one had ever seen truly the Crawfords, nor could anyone provide an address for them. Way back in 1883, Le Matin published a skeptical article, but Humbert’s powerful father-in-law backed up her story. Humbert claimed that the Crawfords had sued him so that she would have to place her part of the inheritance in the Crédit Lyonnais bank. After a lengthy litigation, during which the two Crawford nephews, Henry and Robert, appeared in court, it was ruled that the locked safe should remain in Thérèse Humbert’s possession. When Jules Bizat, official for the French bank, asked Humbert how she had invested her money, she claimed that it was in government bonds. Bizat checked and found that it was not the case.

By the late 1890s, Thérèse’s creditors noticed that the supposed amount of the inheritance would never be able to cover all the loans and legal costs. Le Matin began a campaign of exposure and the court proceedings moved without delay. Humbert’s creditors sued her in 1901, and the next year the Parisian court gave an order that the fabled safe would be opened to prove the existence of the money. The safe was found nearly empty, containing only a brick and an English halfpenny. The scandal rocked the French financial world, and thousands of smaller creditors and investors were ruined, included the in-laws of the painter Henri Matisse. But Therese and her family had already fled the country for Madrid. Panic erupted, and while the police of every capital in the world were looking for them, the Humberts viewed the coronation ceremonies for King Alfonso. Late in December of that year, they were arrested in Madrid and brought back to Paris for trial.

The trial, immediately named L’Affaire Humbert, was just as absorbing and scandalous as that of the Dreyfus Affair which exposed the Anti-Semitism and treason raging in the French Army. It was revealed that the Bank of France loaned a sum never disclosed, as it was able to stand the strain of failure, that Cattani, a banker, poured the trifling sum of 220,000 dollars into the Humbert coffins, that the Credit Industriel of Paris, handed out 120,000 dollars, and that victims included Empress Eugenie and the son of the president of the French Republic–to say nothing of the scores of aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and working-class French citizens wiped out, or nearly so, by the swindle.

The trial lasted six weeks, and at its end, Thérèse was sentenced to prison for 5 years for both Thérèse and Fredric, and 3 years for Romain and 2 for Emile, both of whom impersonated the fictional Crawford brothers in court. When Thérèse Humbert was released from prison, she emigrated to the United States where she died in Chicago in obscurity in 1918. The persons whom she had defrauded remained mostly silent to avoid further embarrassment, and the L’Affaire Humbert became a footnote in history.

Further Reading:

History’s Greatest Scandals by Ed Wright
The World’s Greatest True Crime by Colin Wilson
The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque by Benjamin F. Martin
La Grande Therese: The Greatest Scandal of the Century by Hilary Spurling

From the late 1890s through the 1910s, there emerged a spectacular, dazzling nightlife along Broadway. At that time, Broadway was a two mile stretch of din and dazzle between Madison and Longacre Square (renamed Times Square in 1904). One might rub shoulders with sparkling showgirls and squalid prostitutes, cops and confidence artists, panhandlers and the wealthiest men of Wall Street. Nicknamed the “Gay White Way” because of the never-ceasing splendor of lights from street lamps to marquee boards, the classic way to spend a night on Broadway began with cocktails, then to a show, then to one of the gaudy, extravagant “lobster palaces.”

These “lobster palaces,” defined as “one of the elegant, expensive new restaurants that emerged in New York City, which specialized in lobsters and attracted the rich and famous,” catered to the theatrical crowds that nightly surged out of limousines, taxis and theatres in search of dinner or an after-theatre supper. And “lobster palace society,” comprised of playboys, professional beauties, stars such as Lillian Russell, chorus girls, kept women, sportsmen, newspaper men, celebrities of the Bohemia of the arts, and businessmen from the hinterlands. Beginning with the opening of Café Martin in 1899, the lobster palace, and its accompanying society both challenged and changed the components of New York society and its nightlife, proving a worthy ancestor of the “café society” of the 1920s and 1930s.

The first official lobster palace was Café Martin, which was opened in 1899 by Louis Martin, who had successfully operated a small hotel on Ninth St that was a favorite of French visitors. When he learned that Delmonico’s was vacating its site on Twenty-Sixth street to move uptown, he leased the building and created an intimate restaurant that introduced side-by-side eating known as a banquette. This cozy atmosphere was very attractive to men who wished to entertain young women who were not their wives and not surprisingly, Café Martin became the rendezvous of the smart set for luncheons and dinners. Another beguiling feature was his dining terrace, which was placed just above the street and covered with a brightly striped awning. Seated behind shrubs, flowering plants, and palms, guests could admire the splendid view of Madison Square without being seen. Martin hired an orchestra for his cafe and allowed women to dine there if escorted, and even served drinks to them (cafes normally operated as masculine preserves).

Café Martin was quickly followed by the Café des Beaux Arts, founded by a former employee of Martin, Jacques Bustanoby, and his two brothers. Located a Forty-Second and Sixth, Bustanoby’s restaurant was immediately popular with theatergoers and the headliners of the shows. The attraction for the theatre stars were the soirees artistique, which Jacques cajoled them into performing. Lillian Russell, for example, would enter the restaurant to applause and in the company of Jesse Lewishon, Diamond Jim Brady and his wife Edna, and producer Florenz Ziegfeld and his wife, Anna Held, and it was in this restaurant that Lillian and Diamond Jim, both famous for their girths and appetites, wagered that if she could match him course for course, he would give her a huge diamond ring the following day. According to Bustanoby, Lillian slipped into the ladies’ room and came out with a heavy bundle under her arm, wrapped in a tablecloth. She told the proprietor to keep it for the next day and then returned to the table and ate plate-for-plate, beating Jim fair and square.

The bundle she handed to Bustanoby was her corset.

“Diamond Jim’s” given name was James Buchanan Brady, and though a successful financier, he was most known for his love of the items which gave him his name, and his astounding appetite. It was not unusual for Brady to eat enough food for ten people at a sitting. A typical Brady breakfast would be: eggs, pancakes, pork chops, cornbread, fried potatoes, hominy, muffins, and a beefsteak. For refreshment, a gallon of orange juice—or “golden nectar”, as he called his favorite drink. Lunch might be two lobsters, deviled crabs, clams, oysters and beef, with a few pies for dessert. The usual evening meal began with an appetizer of two or three dozen oysters, six crabs, and a few servings of green turtle soup, followed by a main course of two whole ducks, six or seven lobsters, a sirloin steak, two servings of terrapin and a host of vegetables. For dessert, the gourmand enjoyed pastries and a two pound box of candy.

Lillian Russell, his longtime amour–though the actual details of their relationship (romantic or platonic?) are murky–”airy, fairy, Lillian, the American Beauty”–after whom America’s favorite rose was named–whose hourglass (while corseted) figure with its ample hips and very full bosom weighed 200 pounds; she was the Belle Epoque ideal. She was known equally for her legendary beauty, her voice and stage presence, and her appetite, as it was said she ate more than Diamond Jim! Whatever the case was, restaurateurs and maitre d’hotels sighed in ecstasy alike when the two descended upon a lobster palace after a performance, with Rector’s being the ideal place.

Rector’s, though making its debut in New York City after the restaurants of Bustanoby and Martin, was the premiere lobster palace. Though sharing fame with such entities as Shanley’s and Murray’s Roman Gardens, etc in terms of opulence and grandeur, something about Rector’s placed it ahead of the crowd. It didn’t help either that everybody went to Rector’s.

Lobster palace society indulged itself in a healthy exhibitionism which led to its most characteristic ceremony, the “entrance.” At no other place could one make an entrance as at Rector’s. A sturdy, imposing building of Greco-Roman design, the interior was breathtaking, Charles Rector lavishing $200,000 to transform the interiors into a mirrored paradise of green and gold, providing linen especially woven in Dublin, hand-stenciled silver covered a hundred tables on the ground floor and seventy-five on the second. Four private dining rooms completed the interiors. In a neat coup before opening, Rector wooed saucier Charles Parrandin, the maitre d’hotel Paul Perret and the business manager Andrew Mehler from Delmonico’s. His staff of 165 were impeccable, most having graduated from professional schools in Switzerland and though the hours were grueling (10 am to 3 am with three hours off in the afternoon) and the salary meager ($25 dollars weekly), Rector’s was the place to be for both patrons and employees alike.

On to the “entrance”:

The time is somewhere between eleven thirty and midnight. The orchestra is playing, when it is suddenly called to a halt. The leader has caught sight of a star just about to enter (if she is not a star recognizable on sight, he has probably been tipped off in advance as to her identity). There is a pause of silence during which all conversation ceases. Then the orchestra strikes up the song currently associated with the star who, blushing faintly, glides swanlike to her table, skin dazzling, diamonds winking, profile at the proper tilt. Her escort, probably hidden behind the blanket of violets, her evening’s tribute, knows his name will go down in history.

By the 1910s, competition for patronage became fierce, particularly after the ragtime dance craze swept across both sides of the Atlantic. As restaurateurs and patrons sought new diversions, into America came the cabaret. Initially existing on the fringes of New York society, and mainly known through Parsian caf-concs of the 1890s, the cabaret first reached beyond the vice districts to the attention of respectable New Yorkers in the spring of 1911 when Henry B. Harris and Jesse Lasky, two vaudeville entrepreneurs, opened the Folies Bergère Theater on Forty-Ninth in the heart of the theatre district. Two shows a night were offered: first, an elaborate revue from 8 pm to 11 pm, and an after-theater cabaret performance from 11:15 pm to 1 am. The two promoters introduced a champagne bar, a balcony promenade, and the first American midnight performance. Soon after its opened though, the Folies suffered a financial decline. Offering only 700 seats, the theatre could not sustain its huge redecoration costs and entertainment investment. Designed as a theatre-restaurant, the Folies’ two elements didn’t work well together. The restaurant only comprised 41% of the floor plan.

Nonetheless, people latched onto the idea of supper, dancing and a show, and by late 1911 and early 1912, a number of lobster palaces picked up the cabaret idea and began experimenting with the presentation of entertainment along with the sale of food and drink. Jacques Bustanoby opened the Domino Room at Columbus Circle and introduced midnight ’til dawn dancing. Reisenweber’s, which could claim to have introduced cabaret to America, had four rooms and a ballroom. At various times, it had its large restaurant divided into the 400 Room–where the Dixieland Jazz Band were introduced –, the Sophie Tucker Room and the Doraldina Hawaiian Room–was the first in New York to echo with the pitter-pat of turkey-trotting feet–, all offering patrons a choice of environments. Later cabaret/lobster palaces were The Midnight Frolic and the Century Roof (Cocoanut Grove), who charged relatively expensive covers of $1-2 for a couple without drinks! Once inside, drinks cost 25 cents for cocktails and highballs, $2.50 for a pint of champagne, five dollars for a quart. Sans Souci, founded by Vernon and Irene Castle, was the first cabaret not associated with a preexisting lobster palace. Designed after Parisian models, the club opened Dec 1913 in a basement on 42nd Street. Other places followed suit, opening special cabaret establishments. Finally, theatres converted their roof gardens to cabarets and ballrooms.

Dancing girls were the sole attraction of this first show, and within two weeks every lobster palace with a dance floor had a chorus line. At first, the development of the floor was almost accidental, as restaurants merely followed Lasky and Harris’s policy of presenting a few entertainers as incidental diversions. restaurant managers would hire a few special intimate acts, such as singers and dancers, from rathskellers or the lower rungs of vaudeville and have them circle among the tables as incidental attractions to the dining and drinking. Rather than putting up stages, the restaurants cleared a space in the dining room or installed small platforms. It was only after 1915, after the ragtime dance craze had made the cabarets profitable that owners were convinced of their earning potential and began to implement more elaborate stages.

The seating of patrons at tables was the other distinctive feature of the cabaret, one that encouraged greater intimacy between audience and performers and among the audience itself. Guests watched the entertainment from dining chairs at tables. As the years went by, the size of meals declined as guests spent their time watching the acts or dancing, but the restaurant setting and the table continued as an important locus for patrons’ dining, drinking and personal interactions.

Lobster palaces died with the closing of the Great War, and despite efforts to revive the old restaurants of both lobster palace society and the Four Hundred, society had changed too much. Most notably was the sudden popularity of Harlem in the 1920s, and finally, Prohibition, which put many legitimate restaurants out of business who were unable to sustain profitability without the sale of liquor.

Further Reading:
On the Town in New York by Michael Batterberry & Ariane Batterberry
Diamond Jim Brady by Harry Paul Jeffers
Empire City by Kenneth T. Jackson, David S. Dunbar
Steppin’ Out by Lewis A. Erenberg
Welcome to our city by Julian Street
Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of Last Hundred Years‎ by Lloyd R. Morris

The aristocracy of Britain is a mystifying body of people; titles, orders of precedence, and strawberry leaves notwithstanding, there has been a misconception of the actual numbers of which British (which means English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh) nobility comprises. The most common misnomer and mistake is to label the British aristocracy as the “Upper Ten Thousand” prior to 1852–and if indeed at all!

This mistake is most prevalent in Regencies, which is a given, considering that many Regency authors tip their hats to Georgette Heyer. Ironically, while many do acknowledge Heyer’s deliberate inclusion of historical inaccuracies, and a smaller few have admitted what we know as “Regency” is closer to the Victorian/Edwardian era atmosphere in which Heyer was raised, it appears most Heyerisms have been accepted as fact. The trouble with naming the ton, or the aristocracy, as the “Upper Ten Thousand,” is that the phrase is of American origin.

Coined by American poet N.P. Willis to describe fashionable New York of the 1840s and 1850s, in 1852, Charles Astor Bristed penned The upper ten thousand; sketches of American society. By a New Yorker. The phrase could have been passably familiar to 1860s Britain, when the eponymous hero of Thackeray’s novel, The Adventures of Phillip (1861-62), contributed weekly to a fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten Thousand”, but it didn’t appear to come into relative use regarding the aristocracy of Britain until the 1870s–when the nobility truly swelled to include titled families of all four countries (many people were granted peerages from countries not of their birth, as seen the case of George Curzon, who was given the Irish Barony Curzon of Kedleston to allow him to continue to sit in the House of Commons after he finished his reign as Viceroy of India), the landed gentry, the army and navy, and the growing numbers of men ennobled for being wealthy, talented or influential.