Thérèse Humbert borrowed for 20 years against an inheritance from an American millionaire who never existed, and the safe held almost nothing

The Crawford inheritance was a hoax. Thérèse Humbert, born Thérèse Daurignac in 1856, said that in 1879 she had helped an American millionaire, Robert Henry Crawford, through a heart attack on a train. In 1881 she said he had left her his fortune in his will and that his nephews were contesting it. She said the will and the bearer bonds sat in a locked safe in her house until the courts decided. She married into the family of Gustave Humbert, a minister of justice, and borrowed against the inheritance for about twenty years. One account puts the first loans at 50 million francs. Her brothers played the Crawford nephews in court, keeping the case alive. In 1902 a court ordered the safe opened. Accounts differ on what was inside, but there were no bonds. The Humberts fled and were arrested in Madrid in December 1902. Thérèse and her husband Frédéric each got five years; her brothers got three and two. A banker who had lent to her shot himself, and thousands of small creditors lost their money. A 1903 song, Le coffre-fort aux faux Crawford, mocked the empty safe. Her later life is uncertain; one account says she died in Chicago in 1918.