While writing her biography of Matisse, which won the Whitbread Biography and Book of the Year 2005, Hilary Spurling came across the scandal that nearly destroyed the French Third Republic. Reading like a novella, its plot is a confidence trick of dazzling proportions. Therese...
Therese Humbert's salon captivated fin-de-siecle Paris. Her dazzling wealth, as the illegitimate daughter of an American billionaire, was fabled. But it was all a hoax. La Grande Therese looks at her life and times.