What You’ll Uncover in Tom Sancton The Bettencourt Affair The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris
Tom Sancton – The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris
An NPR Finest E book of 2017
Heiress to the practically forty-billion-greenback L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest lady and the fourteenth wealthiest individual. However her gilded life took a darkish but fascinating flip in the previous decade. At ninety-4, she was embroiled in what has been referred to as the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled internet of hidden secrets and techniques, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured households, set in the most romantic metropolis—and involving the most glamorous trade—in the world.
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The Bettencourt Affair began as a household drama however shortly grew to become an enormous scandal, uncovering L’Oréal’s shadowy company historical past and buried World Warfare II secrets and techniques. From the Proper Financial institution mansions to the Left Financial institution artist havens; and from the Bettencourts’ servant quarters to the workplace of President Nicolas Sarkozy; all of Paris was shaken by the blockbuster case, the stunning reversals, and the shocking ultimate sufferer.
All of it started when Liliane met François-Marie Banier, an artist and photographer who was, in his youth, the toast of Paris and a protégé of Salvador Dalí. Over the subsequent twenty years, Banier was given a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in items, money, and insurance coverage insurance policies by Liliane. What, precisely, was their relationship? It wasn’t clear, least of all to Liliane’s daughter and solely little one, Françoise, who grew to become suspicious of Banier’s motives and filed a lawsuit in opposition to him. However Banier has a far totally different story to inform…
The Bettencourt Affair is a component courtroom drama; half upstairs-downstairs story; and half characterdriven story of a posh, fascinating household and the intruder who practically tore it aside.
Evaluation
“A Buffet for Scandal Aficionados…[Sancton] is an excellent straight-up reporter, and he has dug deeply into the many, many elements that complicate this story.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Occasions
“Juicy…the very picture of un grand scandale about the world’s richest woman.”—Vainness Truthful
“Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oréal heiress worth billions, became infatuated with a man 25 years her junior (a former Dalí protégé and an apparent social climber), giving him lavish gifts and even moving to adopt him. The story has all the trappings of a juicy affair, including graft and hidden Nazi sympathies.”
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Occasions E book Evaluation Paperback Row
Get instantly obtain Tom Sancton – The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris
“[A] riveting page-turner chronicling this sweeping Tolstoyan saga…In gripping but unsensational prose, [Sancton] brings the debacle alive in its many dimensions, recreating not merely the lurid courtroom drama, but capturing ‘the ineffable sadness at its heart.’”—NPR
“An intensely reported account of power, politics, persuasion and the dark family secrets of the ultra-wealthy.”—New York Day by day Information
“the book that has emerged from [Sancton’s] reporting on the case is surely the definitive account…riveting.”—Wall Road Journal
“Money, glamour, and scandal are often the key ingredients of a great story—especially when they’re true.”—Actual Easy
“A juicy chronicle of France’s richest scandal…A well-researched, crisply written, and entertaining story of family, greed, wealth, and the complex relations among them.”—Kirkus Opinions
“Although this tale seems destined for HBO or Hollywood, to bill this a mere ‘family drama’ belies the staggering depth with which Sancton portrays his subjects, whose motivations, desires, and downfalls are ‘so difficult to judge according to a moral code based on right and wrong, black and white, good and evil.’ A natural for book clubs, which will drain a French cellar’s worth of wine while appreciating Sancton’s meticulous research and discussing this unbelievable cast of characters.”—Booklist (starred evaluate)
“This true story of the elderly billionaire, the artist to whom she gave a fortune, and the family that claims it’s all been a big con, is proof that truth is stranger—or at least makes better poolside reading.”—City & Nation
“There is no comparable work on the Bettencourt scandal, only interviews and articles, making this highly recommended and pleasurable read a mix of luring tabloid fare and professionally researched courtroom and political drama.”—Library Journal (starred evaluate)
“The story of this convoluted war of wills (pun intended), told with skill by former Time Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton in The Bettencourt Affair, features a cast of characters pulled straight from a Tolstoy novel.”—BookPage
Get instantly obtain Tom Sancton – The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris
“A longtime reporter on a foreign desk, Tom Sancton knows Paris and has done his homework…The Bettencourt Affair is a devilishly engaging immersion into a world few of us can imagine.”—Shelf Consciousness
“This book has it all! Money, class, art, greed, intrigue, seduction, betrayal, and politics. It reads like a novel—a racy and intense thriller—but it’s all true. With amazing reporting and wonderful writing, Tom Sancton brings alive the drama of the richest woman in the world, the powerful minister she married, their intellectual daughter, and the audacious artist who may have siphoned off a fortune. Their battles shook France and will fascinate readers.”—Walter Isaacson, writer of Steve Jobs
“The Bettencourt Affair reveals the far-reaching tentacles of a sensational family squabble over the $40-billion L’Oréal fortune. The aging cosmetics heiress gave hundreds of millions of dollars to her protégé, who was then charged with criminal manipulation by the woman’s embittered daughter and convicted at a trial that also entangled French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a labor minister and others. It’s an eye-popping, page-turning read.”—John Berendt, writer of Midnight in the Backyard of Good and Evil and The Metropolis of Falling Angels
“A riveting, dishy account of one of France’s wealthiest families, whose Olympian grasp reaches scandalously deep into the French political world and the government itself. No one who reads this intimate tale of materialism and dangerous liaisons—peppered with political stars and so steeped in paranoia that even a butler makes surreptitious recordings to defend himself—will ever again associate the French upper classes with discretion and understatement.”—Anne-Marie O’Connor, writer of The Woman in Gold
About the Writer
Tom Sancton was a longtime Paris bureau chief for Time journal, the place he wrote greater than fifty cowl tales. He first broke the Bettencourt affair for a lot of American readers along with his function piece in Vainness Truthful in 2010. Sancton coauthored the New York Occasions (and worldwide) bestseller Loss of life of a Princess, a probing investigation of the murky circumstances behind Princess Diana’s loss of life. He has additionally written for Fortune, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, and different main magazines. A Rhodes scholar who studied at Harvard and Oxford, he’s at present a analysis professor at Tulane College in New Orleans, the place he spends a part of the 12 months. In 2014, the French authorities named Tom Sancton a Chevalier (knight) in the Order of Arts and Letters.
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