Made Fools Instead Of Their Fortunes

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30979, 8 February 1966, Page 2

Made Fools Instead Of Their Fortunes

[By

SUSAN VAUGHAN]

Poor Helene Faverau—she had such visions of wealth and grandeur. But her only lasting claim to fame was to gain notoriety in the French newspapers and to make fools of 22,000 of her compatriots.

Her colourful but dishonest career came to an abrupt halt when a Paris Court found her guilty of obtaining 330,000 francs (£24,000) by false pretences. It all started in 1962 when Mrs Faverau, a schoolteacher, born 48 years ago near Cognac, in Western France, formed the “Syndicate of the Mallet Heirs” with herself as treasurer. A man called Jean-Pierre Mallet had, she claimed, emigrated to America in 1770, where he had acquired immense forests and gold mines worth about £2OO million. Mrs Faverau set herself up as Mallet’s heir “No. 1” under the pseudonym “Princess Youbi el Ayoubi” and announced that anyone named Mallet (or Malle, or even Malet) could share in their distant kinsman’s vast fortune. Another Fortune She was remarkably suecesful. Within a few months she had registered 22,000 members—among them many eminent politicians, lawyers and doctors—all eager for a share.

Surprisingly, no-ohe seems to have wondered why she went out of her way to reduce her own share in the fortune by discovering further claimants.

In fact, the “princess” was not interested in the inheritance—which did not, anyhow, exist. She had her eye on a fortune of another kind.

She charged every “relative” joining the syndicate a

10-franc membership fee, plus an extra five francs for “expenses.” Fifteen francs multiplied by 22,000 members boosted the bank balance of “Princess Youbi” by 330,000 francs. But when the members found they were getting no return for their 15-franc deposit, they began to ask questions. And before long, the police came calling. A Penny Each

It transpired that there was a gentleman called JeanPierre Mallet who lived in France at the end of the 18th century. But he never went to America, and ail he left in the world was a little under £loo—about Id for each “heir.” This was not the first time Mrs Faverau’s imagination

had promoted her to the ranks of royalty. Before she became a “princes” she “was married to the Emir of Chahidan, a little state in Iraq, lost behind the mountains of Turkestan.”

The truth is that she was once married; not to an emir but to a prince—a prince of con-men in the Paris underworld.

Before her marriage to the “emir,” Mrs Faverau’s dreams had a more down-to-earth flavour.

In 1951, she stood for a local election in Guadeloupe, where she made electoral speeches from the tops of coconut palms. But she did not win—her enemies persisted in cutting the palms—and her oratory—short.

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