In 1902 a Paris court forced open the iron safe that had backed twenty years of bank loans. Creditors expected the Crawford millions in bearer bonds. They found old newspapers, a trouser button, and an Italian coin. This episode tells how Therese Humbert, born Therese Daurignac to a peasant family in 1856, built that illusion. She learned from a father who waved dubious parchments to claim noble blood, lied her way into marriage with Frederic Humbert, son of a future Minister of Justice, and kept her husband as a partner even after the lie came out.

In 1879 she began telling of an American millionaire, Robert Henry Crawford, whose life she saved on a train, and in 1881 announced he had left her everything. Two invented nephews with a rival will supplied the reason the safe could never be opened. She borrowed against it, entertained Marcel Proust and a future president, and sued her phantom rivals up to the highest court in France. The episode follows the collapse, the flight to Madrid, and the ordinary people left to pay.

• As a girl, Therese persuaded her friends to pool their jewelry and take turns wearing it to pass as wealthy.
• Two of her brothers appeared in court as the Crawford nephews, and each ruling made bankers more certain the fortune existed.
• After a bank official checked the registers and found no bonds in her name, she raised fresh cash from shopkeepers, farmers, and servants by selling life annuities.
• Henri Matisse’s in-laws were swept up because his mother-in-law was the Humberts’ housekeeper. Detectives raided his studio and his father-in-law went on hunger strike in custody.
• Arrested in Madrid in December 1902, Therese and Frederic got five years of hard labor. A 1930 article by her prosecutor placed her alive in Paris, not dead in Chicago in 1918.