In Paris, the advertisement promised both fortune and discretion. A young widow, a provincial heiress, occasionally a foreign lady of means seeking marriage: one had merely to write to the offices of the Baroness de Mortier, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, to be received by an honorable family. The suitors presented themselves armed with their savings, their ambitions, and the conviction that a dowry awaited them. In March 1887, the correctional court heard several of these men relate how that singular promise had led them from the initial letter to the Opéra, and from the Opéra to ruinous expenditure.
Madame Demortier, originally from Rochette according to the chronicle, had assumed the grand style of the Baroness de Mortier de la Rochette. Living apart from her husband, she entered into partnership with Lecourtois, an intermediary already well versed in the trade of matrimonial agencies. According to the trial record, their enterprise had initially arranged introductions and concluded marriages without provoking complaint. Soon, however, ordinary brokerage fees could no longer sustain their manner of living. From 1885 onward, the character of their advertisements shifted: the office began to dangle dowries of several hundred thousand, and at times upwards of a million francs.
The prospectus depicted the agency as an almost domestic, familial institution. A circular promised that well-connected representatives would conduct the overtures shielded from public view. The applicant completed a questionnaire regarding his birth, education, profession, religion, political opinions, and preferred matrimonial regime. He paid an initial, modest commission calculated upon the advertised fortune; the promotional prospectus stipulated that the prospective husband would subsequently remit two percent of the dowry following the nuptials and its receipt. The court would learn that this initial sum, seemingly so trifling, led not to an authentic heiress, but onto a meticulously staged scene.
The roles were cast with care. An older woman might enact the mother or aunt of the betrothed; Lecourtois presented himself as a father, guardian, or uncle. The young woman reputed to possess such wealth appeared under diverse names and varied histories. The chronicle identifies the principal performer among them as Mlle Leal, arrived from England, though acknowledging that her background remained obscure. It dwelt with pointed emphasis upon her physical appearance, as though the court were to pass judgment upon a woman’s person as much as upon the operations of the agency. This portraiture belonged entirely to the chronicler; the facts material to the prosecution lay in the advertisements, the ledgers of payment, and the orchestrated interviews.
The notices varied the portrait of the intended bride to ensnare the appropriate suitor: a wealthy widow, a divorcee, a maiden with some slight lapse of conduct which her vast fortune was meant to efface. The figures shifted according to the client. On one occasion, it was a Spanish lady dowered with three hundred thousand francs; on another, an English heiress possessed of four times that sum. The promise was always endowed with just enough imperfection to seem plausible: fragile health, an ancient misstep, a family demanding utmost privacy. The bureau was selling not merely an introduction, but a ready-made justification for the eventual absence of the fortune.
Lefèvre, a clerk from Limoges, read an advertisement concerning a young woman reportedly endowed by her family with one million two hundred thousand francs. The baroness replied that she could arrive at no determination until she had inspected him in person. In Paris, she presented him first to an elderly lady, the purported mother of the English heiress, and subsequently to Mlle Leal. The baroness advised the suitor to present his betrothed with a gift. Lefèvre initially purchased a piece of jewelry worth three hundred francs; he was gently made to understand that such an offering was far too modest for a lady of such wealth. He thereupon acquired another, valued at approximately four thousand francs. The wedding was announced for January 1886. Thereafter, the purported mother and daughter departed for London; Lefèvre accompanied them, bearing the charges for railway tickets, flowers, gloves, and entertainments. He remained persuaded that he was about to meet his bride’s family. In Paris, his mother and aunt discovered that the heiress and her fortune had no existence whatever outside the realm of invention.
Other men recounted briefer variations of the selfsame journey. Francis Boisseau, a clerk from Lyon, had disbursed a commission and engaged a box at the Opéra where he was to meet an affluent Spanish lady. Chapot, a Parisian rentier, paid four hundred francs to be presented to an only daughter supposed to own two apartment buildings; he instituted inquiries, discerned the fraud, yet never recovered his money. The proprietor Tizerand expended sixteen hundred francs for an interview at the hippodrome with a veiled woman who, according to his deposition, dismissed him with open mockery of his attire. The promise of marriage remained ever distant; the disbursements, by contrast, were invariably prompt and in coin.
The jeweler Labsolu described several successive attempts. At first, he remitted a commission and engaged a theatre box, without finding favor in the eyes of the young lady presented to him. The baroness then arranged another meeting in Granville, receiving four hundred francs to defray the travel. Following his return, Labsolu believed he recognized at the Opéra a young woman who was introduced as having arrived from that very town. He broke off the negotiation. A third proposal, this time concerning a family from Marseille, was accompanied by a fresh demand for eight hundred francs for traveling and brokerage expenses. In the end, he ceased paying altogether. His testimony does not permit the verification of every identity advertised; rather, through his receipts and disbursements, it demonstrates how the agency redoubled its overtures toward a client the moment an initial promise began to falter.
One episode laid bare the almost mechanical repetition of the same cast of characters. The witness Dauchot stated that he had journeyed to London with Mlle Leal to marry her, discovering only after the ceremony that no dowry whatever would be remitted to him. During the proceedings, he wavered as to the exact hour of the ceremony, while Leal disputed his account of their legal status. The public prosecutor observed that another suitor, Lefèvre, had been dispatched to London in the character of a fiancé at that very same time. The chronicler seized upon this coincidence to paint a farcical scene; for the court, it illustrated above all how the selfsame woman and the selfsame promise could be made to serve several operations concurrently.
The dealings of the agency did not rest exclusively in the hands of the baroness. The record indicates that Mlle Leal severed her connection with the establishment to trade on her own account alongside Madame Lepron, operating from lodgings in the Rue Washington. Certain depositions bore upon these subsequent ventures and upon men who, for their part, sought a mistress rather than a wife. The accounts were conflicting, and the court was obliged to isolate the facts imputed to each party. Madame Lepron, apprehended alongside Leal, had attempted suicide in prison according to the chronicle; she was nonetheless acquitted at the conclusion of the trial. In the eyes of the judgment, the agency and its associates did not constitute a single entity to which every deception could be indiscriminately ascribed.
When the police directed their attention to the notices, the Baroness de Mortier and Lecourtois fled Paris. Both were tried in absentia after failing to appear at the hearing of March 24, 1887. Leal and Lepron stood in the dock. The witnesses represented merely the visible fraction of the injury: the chronicler estimated that numerous other victims remained silent, restrained by shame or the dread of ridicule. Letters seized at Demortier’s premises corroborated the oral depositions. The prosecution discerned therein a systematic fraud; the defense maintained that the suitors had merely pursued their own material interests, and that fraudulent intent remained unproven.
The court settled the measure of guilt. Madame Demortier was sentenced in absentia to three years’ imprisonment for swindling; Lecourtois received one year; Mlle Leal, four months. Madame Lepron was acquitted. These penalties could neither restore the vanished funds nor realize the imagined unions, and the chronicle provides no particulars concerning restitution. It leaves the reader instead before the machinery exposed by the trial: an elegant letterhead, a phantom dowry, an encounter in a theatre box, followed by fresh expenditures designed to bring the nuptials seemingly nearer. The suitors had arrived in search of a wife, and departed bearing only receipts for tickets, jewels, and commissions paid. The court, for its part, was obliged to separate mere sentimental disappointment from proven deceit, condemning only those whose criminal participation had been established.