Liane de Pougy

Liane de Pougy was literally a cocotte–and the most infamous in Paris. During France’s Belle Epoque, the highest echelon of courtesans were considered celebrities “as firmly established as the top stars of the theatre.” They were the talk of the town, their bon mots were repeated ad nauseum, and the press recorded their every movement, their gowns, their homes, their scandals, and their lovers–and the public lapped it up.

Born Anne Marie Chassaigne, Liane was, in the light of French romantic cynicism, the perfect courtesan, having been raised in a nunnery and escaping it through marriage to a naval officer (who impregnated her in spite of the impenetrable walls of the convent) at age sixteen. In her memoirs, Liane accused her husband of abuse, and she quickly acquired an aristocratic lover, whose prowess no doubt convinced her of her aptitude for amour. She was found in bed with her marquis, whereupon her husband shot at them both, and Liane quickly skipped off for Paris. After attracting the public’s attention while riding in her lover’s carriage to watch the Grand Prix, the Folies Bergère quickly hired her to headline a short skit which was long on showcasing her beauty and short on any talent she did not possess. Liane cemented her career when the Prince of Wales, who happened to be in Paris the night of her debut, accepted her bold request for him to see her onstage.

Tout Paris (the smartest set) and the public were wild about her, and with Emilienne d’Alencon and La Belle Otero, Liane was part of “Le Grande Trois,” though she was undoubtedly the premiere courtesan of France. She was sought after by the wealthiest and most aristocratic of men–and women, of which Natalie Clifford Barney was her most ardent and scandalous of suitors. After glimpsing Liane at the Folies Bergère, Barney presented herself to Liane in a page costume, announcing that she was a “page of love” sent by Sappho, and though Liane had primarily conducted affairs with men, Natalie’s insouciance charmed her, and their brief relationship was the inspiration for Liane’s 1901 tell-all roman à clef, Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll). The book became the talk of Paris and was reprinted at least 69 times in its first year. “Barney was soon well known as the model for one of the characters. By this time, however, the two had already broken up after quarreling repeatedly over Barney’s desire to ‘rescue’ de Pougy from her life as a courtesan.”

After this, Liane moved easily between the aristocratic lesbian clique in Paris and the high-living, frenetic whirl of Tout Paris, though her vicious feud with Caroline Otero took precedence in the press. Their most infamous encounter occurred at Maxim’s, where Otero contrived to outshine Liane and made a startling entrance wearing an extremely decollete evening gown and every jewel she owned on her body. Liane had been tipped off beforehand, and she entered Maxim’s in a plain white gown and a single diamond drop at her throat. But behind her was a maid bearing a large velvet cushion on which as piled a glittering mound of her entire jewel collection.

Liane found religion in her mid-thirties, and she entered a Dominican order in Lausanne, adopting the name Sister Mary Magdalene of the Penitence. This lasted a short while, however, and she shed her veil and habit for chinchilla and diamonds–though she professed to remain devout, having a copy of The Imitation of Christ by her bedside. In 1920, Liane retired from the life of a grand horizontale forever when she wed the Romanian Prince Ghika, whose parents cut him off without a penny when they heard he was to marry a courtesan. The pair nonetheless remained happy on a country estate, with only a brief hiccup in their union before reuniting to remain together until his death. In her widowhood, Liane rejoined the Dominican order and donned her old name, veil, and habit. She became involved in the Asylum of Saint Agnes, devoted to the care of children with birth defects. Late in life she published a couple of light tales (L’Insaisissable and La Mauvaise part-Myrrhille), and after her death in 1950, her memoirs, Mes cahiers bleus (My Blue Notebooks), were published.

Paris under water

One hundred years ago, the “gayest city in the world” was drenched with water. The Seine river had risen many times before, but it had retreated before it could do any damage to the “City of Lights.” This changed, however, the morning of January 21st, 1910. The following is an eyewitness account of the flood, courtesy of Esther Singleton’s The World’s Greatest Events, v 9:

AT TEN minutes to eleven on the morning of Friday, January 21, 1910, almost the very hour at which on another January 21 Louis XVI. mounted the scaffold, the power station from which all the public clocks of Paris are worked by compressed air was flooded by the Seine; all the clocks stopped simultaneously with military exactitude, and with a start of surprise Parisians began to realize that the Seine in flood was not a harmless spectacle that could be watched with the cheerful calm of philosophic detachment, and that the river in revolt was an enemy to be feared even by the most civilized city in Europe. Crowds, it is true, had gathered on the embankments, admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea; they had watched cranes, great piles of stones, and the roofs of sheds emerge for a time from the flooded wharves and then vanish in the swirl of the rising water, while barges and pontoons, generally hidden from sight far below, rose gradually above the level of the streets, notably one great two-storied bathing barge, a vision of unsuspected hideousness, that threatened at any moment, triply moored as it was, to crash into the parapet.

But it was in the order of things that wharves should be flooded; it was sad that the little suburban towns by the river should be swamped, but these incidents could be regarded with altruistic sympathy. The stopping of clocks, however, and the irritating obsession of onze heures moins dix which confronted the Parisian from every street and cafe clock was something new and alarming; with its suggestion that time had stopped dead at the most ill-chosen of moments, this petty but perpetually repeated annoyance was the symbol of all the manifold inconveniences wrought by the flood, the failure of electric light, the disorganization of trams and ‘buses, the bursting of drains and the swamping of houses, and perhaps none of them was more demoralizing.

By the time that Paris woke up to the fact that it was war with water, the most evasive and insidious of enemies, the Seine had made the low-lying suburbs its own. From visits to out-lying districts I retain a vague impression of thick black slime, abject shivering misery and great lakes of yellow water, with here and there the upper story of a house rising like an island from the desolate waste.

From the Ile de la Grande Jatte, where the little restaurants were six feet deep in water, I watched a rescue party row back with difficulty across the river. They had saved a few pathetic sticks of furniture and a great mattress which, as its owner with exultation pointed out to the sympathetic crowd, was perfectly dry. A covered cart was in waiting, but the inside was already full and the mattress was hoisted on to the roof. Alas! for the vanity of human exultation! Hardly had it been tied in place when a storm of torrential rain swept down and drenched the mattress and its poor despairing owner as thoroughly as though they had fallen in the Seine. All the time the Seine was rising remorselessly, and those whose houses were threatened gathered along the banks in the rain, watching the river with the silence of utter dejection, though some of the braver spirits were building walls of masonry across their thresholds— walls over which a few hours later the river had risen.

At Bercy, within the fortifications, the quay was under water. The scene was indescribably desolate: a long row of cheerless houses three feet deep in water, as far as the eye could see; a double row of lighted gas-lamps burning pale and absurd in the gray daylight, because the flood had made it impossible to extinguish them; a punt conveying a workman to his flooded home, poled slowly along by two policemen and bumping monotonously against the poplars and sunken railings; two soldiers on a flimsy raft that the most destitute of mariners would have scorned, steering an erratic course, as one of them paddled desperately with a tin pan; and only one bright touch. From the sixth story of one of the beleaguered houses a scarlet duster shaken by same careful housewife waved defiance to the river.

Parisian life during the Flood

A day or two later the Seine was working havoc. havoc in the very heart of the city. On the left bank the defenses were weakened by the low level railway lines running from the great Orleans terminus of the Quai d’Orsay to the Austerlitz Station and from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Auteuil viaduct. The whole length of these lines was flooded twenty feet deep. The Seine actually flowed through the Orsay terminus as the water poured on to the line higher up the river and then fell back into the Seine through the ventilation shafts of the station, which looked for all the world like a swimming bath. Only the iron gallery, on a level with the entrance from the road, was left unsubmerged; the central depth had been converted into a huge tank of muddy water, while the sightseer looked vainly for the engines and carriages that lay drowned beneath. The unfinished works of the Metropolitan railway, running from north to south, had been converted into a subterranean river at right angles to the Seine two miles long, and were flooding squares and streets a mile away near the Saint Lazare Station.

On the right bank the river was threatened to overflow the embankments, and the problem of defense became a difficult one; for the damage done by the inundation of the Saint Germain quarter by the water from the Orsay Station, and of many streets in the central districts by percolation, would have been nothing to the havoc that would have been wrought by the direct sweep of the Seine over the embankments on the right bank. One of the difficulties of the situation was the Pont de I’Alma, which, with its low arches, was almost submerged, and held back in the center of Paris great masses of water that threatened to sweep over the quays.

Up the Seine on the right bank men were working for dear life by the light of naphtha flares to raise the earthworks along the parapet of the embankment. The Quai de la Conference and the fashionable avenue of Cours la Reine were deep in water, but a thin line of sandbags backed here and there by wooden screens still kept back the surface flood. As the river rose, and it rose eventually over five The seine feet above the level of the embankment, the military engineers raised the height of the barrier, which was half a mile long. That night the water was steadily creeping higher and higher, while a civil engineer, mud-bespattered, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his button-hole, was standing on the corner of the sandbag bastion by the Pont de la Concorde and measuring its advance. He turned to a stranger beside him and said: “The river is still rising as fast as ever. If the barrier goes, five feet of water will sweep across the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevards—over everywhere,” he added with an expressive gesture, “until it meets the flood that the Metropolitan is pouring out round the Saint Lazare Station.” Then abruptly he turned to a non-commissioned officer awaiting orders behind him: “Give me another tier of sandbags.” Orders were hoarsely shouted, and a crowd of little black figures, each shouldering a sandbag, swarmed like ants along the narrow earthwork, on the one side a few inches above the river, on the other a foot or so above the flood that lay deep on the embankment and on the avenue of Cours la Reine.

Weary as they were, after three days’ unceasing toil, each man swung his sandbag into its place with a will and burst into a soldiers’ chorus that sounded strangely merry amid the desolation around. That night the Quai du Louvre was barred off by the police, and a silent crowd gathered at the barrier, though nothing could be seen, anxious for the safety of the collections that are the pride of France. In the mist the Seine seemed as broad as the Rhine at Cologne, and the eye of fancy could descry Notre Dame between two raging floods, splendid and fearless in the majesty of its builders’ faith. At this point the river flows beneath the Pont des Arts, and as its water poured through the iron supports of the bridge it made the little rippling noise of a hundred small cascades, a sound like malicious laughter even more terrible than its silence.

The roadway along the southern facade of the Louvre was all uneven with the pressure of the overflowing drains beneath it, as though an earthquake had passed, and it sagged down suddenly just beneath the balcony of the splendid Jean-Goujon door. Here out of sight of the anxious crowd there was a scene of feverish activity. Men were tearing up cobbles from the road and building a rough wall across a gap in the parapet, where a flight of steps goes down to the river. There was need of haste; for the water that looked black and stagnant in the glare of the naphtha flares was creeping up apace and licking the lowest tier of cobbles. Others were recklessly digging great holes in the footpath between the poplars, and ramming the earth into bags, or nailing together great pieces of driftwood, fished from the river, to form a screen behind the sandbags on the parapet and hold them against the pressure of the current, while carts kept rumbling in and unloading piles of stone and rubble against the wall and screen. I glanced over the screen that reached my chin, expecting to see the river five feet or so below me, and drew back with a start of alarm when I saw the gleam of water above the stone parapet and realized that it was only held back by the flimsy barrier. A few hours later and the river would have won; all the basements of the Louvre would have been flooded, and the water would have carried ruin across the Rue de Rivoli and Palais Royal.

It was no wonder that a sense of impending disaster hung over Paris; yet there was much in the situation that was simply comic. The special envoys of the King of the Belgians, invited to a lunch at the Foreign Office, were carried there in a large, flat-bottomed boat poled by a couple of watermen. Naval boats of the collapsible Berthon pattern were to be seen on wagons in the Avenue de l’Opera, while bare-footed sailors splashed contentedly in the lake opposite the Saint Lazare Station. At times the incongruity of these things was scarcely realized.

Bridge after bridge was closed to the public as great masses of driftwood that could not be dislodged formed against them, until at one moment traffic was forbidden over all the nine bridges that lie between the Pont Neuf and the Pont de Crenelle. Cabs, carts, and every kind of vehicle concentrated in the unflooded streets, were blocked into a solid mass that surpassed the wildest nightmares of congested traffic. Part of the Place de l’Opera began to collapse, and a cab might take two hours to get from the Opera to the Madeleine, five minutes’ walk. An unreasoning panic seized the cabmen and chauffeurs; they were possessed with the fixed idea that no bridge across the Seine was safe, and no bribe would persuade them to cross the river; while they refused to take fares for even the shortest distance. Men left their homes dry-shod in the morning, and returning from business had to wade up to their knees through unlighted streets or creep perilously along a narrow plank gangway, only to find that it stopped short just where the water was deepest.

One evening I was walking down a street which a few hours before had been thick with traffic. A single cart passed down beside me, and at once, without the slightest warning, the road began to undulate; and the next minute I was in water up to the knees, and one wheel of the cart had sunk through the wood pavement up to the axle. Once wet I plodded on through the water and in the darkness blundered against a plank which formed part of a trestle bridge some five feet from the ground; then climbing up, found myself at a perilous elevation on two exceedingly narrow planks. After cautiously venturing forward some little way, a woman’s shriek sounded so close to me that I almost lost my balance. Then in the obscurity a long row of black figures was discernible all on the bridge and coming in the opposite direction to myself. I succeeded in helping the young woman who had shrieked to pass me; then an elderly business man slipped between the two planks at my feet, and was hauled up with difficulty; then finally there was a crack, a plank broke and some unfortunate person fell flat on his face in two feet of filthy water. At last, somehow or other, I reached higher ground, and found a pathetic group of men and women, lighted by a policeman’s lantern, waiting to take their turn on the remains of the gangway. They were returning to their homes in the street which had been flooded since they went out.

On Saturday, January 29, Paris awoke to a bright sunny morning and the end of its nightmare. Early in the morning crowds gathered along the embankment, no longer murmuring in melancholy chorus, “Qa monte, qa monte” ; but laughing and chattering as they watched with uproarious satisfaction the broadening of the thin dark line which showed that the Seine was no longer rising or stationary, but slowly falling.

Sunshine restored, even in the flooded quarters, the true Parisian gaiety that had for a time been overclouded with a terrible sense of powerlessness and insecurity. The flooded streets were bright and gay in the sunlight, as boats plied to and fro carrying men and women to their work. Every one was good-humored, and even a portly business man swarming down a rope from a first-story window into a police boat, while his wife and children watched his gymnastic prowess with undisguised horror, was laughing heartily, and fully conscious of the humor of the situation. Throughout the day crowds flocked to all the quarters that the river had attacked. To make the scene more gay, soldiers were everywhere, standing on guard at dangerous points or gathered round fires of wood paving blocks and drinking coffee and hot wine. Every one had an air of triumph; for the Seine had at last confessed itself defeated, and it only remained for Paris to show once again its superiority to disaster. In almost every street between Montmartre and the river pumps were hard at work: encouragement came from the news that the Seine was failing to resume what had been before the hopeless task of emptying cellars and basements; there were pumps of every kind, large and small, hand-pumps, smart electric pumps, steam pumps, and monstrous indescribable pieces of machinery that took up half the roadway, obscured the sunshine with clouds of filthy smoke and looked as if they had been rescued from the scrap-heap. Half Paris was in the streets gaping at the excavations, where the water had entangled planks and masonry, s«j>«o< pipes and cables in inextricable confusion and examining the barricades with eager interest while their elders compared them with the barricades of the Commune.

Further Reading:
Flooding in Paris in 1910 – The Guardian
Photos of Paris Flood
Postcard collection of the Paris flood
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 by Jeffrey H. Jackson
The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith (fiction) ****!

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