She Was the Richest Heiress in France. Her Mother's Boyfriend Took €1 Billion Before Anyone Noticed.
Her family's fortune survived two world wars. It almost didn't survive one photographer with a key to the Neuilly house.
On any given afternoon in the salon at Neuilly-sur-Seine through the late 1990s, the richest woman in France had two calendars.
One was the official one her secretary kept, dotted with L’Oréal board notes and visits from her grandsons. The other was an unofficial one, kept by a Parisian photographer named François-Marie Banier, who decided which entries on the first calendar were going to be honored and which were going to quietly fall off.
The second calendar would eventually cost Liliane Bettencourt roughly €1 billion in cash, paintings, life insurance policies, and one private island in the Seychelles.
It cost the household its butler, too. Pascal Bonnefoy spent the better part of 2009 and 2010 hiding a dictaphone behind the armchair in her study, recording the conversations the family hadn’t been allowed to hear.
What the tapes contained turned out to be larger than anyone in the house expected. Eight people would eventually be convicted of abus de faiblesse, abuse of weakness, the French statute the courts use when the signature is valid but the signer no longer is.
And one sitting president of France would be pulled into the wreckage before it was over, by the same set of tapes that broke open the family.
But to understand how a woman worth tens of billions ends up signing away a fortune to the man who came to photograph her, you have to start with what she was handed, and what she was never taught to guard.
