THE HUMBERT CASE. T HERE is one solid reason, and but
one, for the acute interest which foreigners have taken in the Humbert case. The story of itself—the story of a legacy intercepted only by legal difficulties, upon the strength of which the legatee promises heavy bonuses to any one who will lend him or her money—is one of the commonest in the annals of swindling, and the scale of the legacy was settled by the nationality of the pseudo-testator. All over the Continent "an American fortune" means a fortune of millions, and suspicion would have been excited had the romancer con- fined herself to thousands. The trial-differed in no respect from ordinary French trials, the Judge having obviously made up his mind from the beginning, and the jury trust- ing the summaries by the prosecuting and defending counsel much more than the long-drawn evidence. The heroine of the story, "la grande T1u5ri.se," as the Parisians called her, displayed, so far as we see, no special or unusual intellectual power. There was, no doubt, a touch of genius in devising the collusive suits for the millions, because everybody naturally thought that a suit for a non-existent property was improbable, and indeed, among sensible men, absurd ; but every one attributes this part of the scheme to some one more far- sighted than Madame Humbert, possibly her husband, whom the jury declared to be her accomplice, and who was familiar with legal forms. The device of the empty safe said to be full of bonds was a very shallow and risky one, for besides tempting every burglar in Paris, any creditor who accused Madame Humbert of obtaining money by false pretences could have demanded an order of the Court for the examination of the safe, when, as actually happened, the fraud would at once have been exposed. It is true that lies, luck, and the laxity of the Courts all protected the adventuress ; but she had no right to reckon on the last two, and it may be greatly doubted whether the first-named were quite so "magnificently adroit" as it is the fashion of the moment to assert. She must have expected a day of detection, she had years in which to prepare her final romance, and no one who reads it will disagree with the audience who heard it that it is laughably foolish. Her portentous "secret," the revela- tion of which was to deliver her at once, turned out to be an assertion that Crawford, the supposed testator, was a spy named Regnier, who acted as go-between for Bismarck and Bazaine, who did not die till three years after the inheritance was said to have fallen in, and who never possessed, or could have possessed, any large amount of money. Bazaine had no fund of the kind to draw on, and Bismarck, who had, was not accustomed to reward subordinate agents in that Imperial way. Any novel- writer in Paris would have invented for her a better romance than that, which revealed a distinct poverty of intellectual resource, as did her incessant reiteration of the promise that she would lay the millions on the table. As they had never existed, this reiteration amounted to courting defeat. She should have called herself heiress and trustee of Bazaine, talked of "the plunder of Mexico," and explained that her co-heirs, who styled themselves Crawfords, sent now and then for the millions to make sure that they were safe. She remains, therefore, an ordinary, very audacious, and most obstinate adventuress, who was enabled by French credulity to borrow very large sums. What she did with the money is still not explained ; but it is admitted that she spent £16,000 a year in luxury, pur- chasing everything that took her fancy, paying £300 for a dress, £36 for a hat, and surrounding herself with pictures, bric-a-brac, and fine hangings. "I want my carriage," she told the jury, "and my bed." That, how- ever, in no way differentiates her from the type to which she belonged, the women who in their thirst for physical comfort plunge into lying apparently without a fear that the day of exposure must arrive. .
The real interest of the case, as it appears to us, consists in the revelation it affords of certain social conditions. The worship of money has sunk deep into the very nature of a certain class of Frenchmen, so deep that a great fortune seems to them to be of itself an ad- mirable thing, and its possession a gift like genius, or beauty, or valour. Much has always been pardoned to the poet, or the beauty, or the daring soldier, and now much is pardoned to the rich. The great men of Paris hung about Madame Humbert; the artists were at her feet; even suspicious men of business like bankers, money- lenders, and solicitors yielded to the charm of her wealth. Even after M. Waldeck-Rousseau had publicly announced his opinion that her story was entirely a fraud, and that the millions had no existence, Madame Humbert still found lenders willing to advance great sums of money upon the faith of her promises. The man who at last crushed her, M. Cattaui, had lost through her more than £100,000. No doubt she offered heavy interest, that is, in fact, bribes, which made dividends pleasant for bank shareholders, and heavily paid influential go-betweens ; but there was a disinclination to investigate" her statements, a readiness in accepting her stories, which showed a positive willingness to believe, an inability to think that any one so admirable as an inheritor of millions could be an ordinary cheat. The effect of this feeling is to make of money the great distinction, the one object of effort, and therefore induce all classes to remove as far as possible all obstacles to its attainment. The" ungovernable impatience
to be rich," as Macaulay called it, dissolves all scruples, and society finds itself held together only by the necessity or the hope of making profits, which means very rapid putrescence. Society has not reached that stage in France, but it is advancing towards it, and. therefore towards that fierce reaction, that hatred of money as the moving power, which in France tends to produce revolution.
There is another dangerous symptom, too, revealed by this trial, and that is the widening area of popular suspicion. Throughout the history of the case one cause of the deep interest felt locally in its progress has been the belief that it would prove "another Panama affair." There is no evidence whatever that Madame Humbert ever succeeded in bribing anybody except her creditors ; but it is certain that she said she had, and that her threats of making a grand exposure of important personages if she were arrested met with nearly universal credence. Ministers of State, Judges, Police Magistrates, every one who had ever visited at her house, or had any connection with her trials, were all supposed by the "man in the street" to be open to bribery, and many of them to have been bribed. There was a list, it was said, of the "corruptibles," and it was to be produced. in open Court, with Madame Humbert herself to give the details and furnish the proof. She was to bring the social edifice crashing down upon the heads of those whom it shelters, and to march to prison over the ruin of the greatest reputations of France. She made no accu- sations—probably had none of any moment to make— though up to the last moment a dossier, or bundle of papers supposed to be full of dangerous secrets, lay upon a table in the Court ; but of all Madame Humbert's false- hoods, her threats of ruining politicians and Judges were those which found the multitude most credulous. That is a very bad symptom. It may mean that the thirst for wealth has invaded the official class, and that the bureaucracy, invested with great power and wretchedly paid, is beginning, as in Russia and Turkey, to turn its preroga- tives into money, thus destroying its moral influence as well as its efficiency. Or it may be that the suspicion born of hatred and envy with which, the aristocracy and the plutocracy have long been regarded by the multitude in France has extended itself to the bureaucracy, who from the fall of the Legitimist Monarchy till now have been re- garded as the protectors of the people. In either case, the social fabric is growing weaker, and will have to be recemented before France regains possession of her full energies, whether for external action or internal reform. In a strictly centralised Republic it is necessary that every agent of the State should be not only incorruptible, but beyond a suspicion of the possibility that he may be corrupt, or the plans and reforms of the central power will be baffled at every turn. What is the value of legal decisions if the Judges are corrupt, or if, as would seem to be the case in Paris, the people think that whenever the cause is heavy, money or the interference of Ministers will influence the Court's decrees?
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