In the early hours of Thursday morning, Liliane Bettencourt, 94, passed away peacefully at her home in Paris.

Bettencourt was the only child of Louise Madelaine Berthe and Eugene Schueller, who founded L’Oreal, and last year was ranked as the richest woman in the world with a fortune of $39,5 billion (R522 billion).

In her final years, Bettencourt suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and vegetated in an armchair in her Art Deco mansion near Paris, surrounded by her servants, dogs, and caregivers.

But while Bettencourt had lead a relatively conventional life, albeit dripping with privilege, one day it all changed when she found fancy in a younger man – flamboyant writer and photographer, Francois-Marie Banier, explains WWD:

Bettencourt wanted to help Banier build his photographic career; her first act of fiscal generosity was to pay for a catalogue of a photo show for him at the Centre Pompidou in 1991.

She saw to it that he had lucrative photo contracts with L’Oréal, and she also bought property and paintings in his name.

Although he was openly gay, she appeared to be in love with him. An Adonis when young, he was still a nice-looking man, and they shared restaurant meals and traveled together. They also kept up a voluminous correspondence.

At one point, she had put his name on insurance contracts worth up to $1 billion on her death and tried to give a private island she owned to him.

However, there was one person with whom the over-the-top generosity didn’t sit well – her only child, Françoise Meyers, details TIME:

But it was not just the money. As Françoise tells it, Banier so dominated Liliane’s time that she found it increasingly difficult even to see her mother — though she lives across the street from the Bettencourt mansion in the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly. It seemed, she said, as if Liliane had been “pulled into a sect” by a “guru who cut me off from my family.” Françoise looked on Banier as a sort of sibling rival, who attempted to insert himself into the family as a surrogate son and drive a wedge into the already troubled relationship between mother and daughter.

Things came to a head for Françoise shortly after André’s death in November 2007, when one of the Bettencourt employees gave her some stunning news: She claimed to have overheard a conversation in which Banier insisted that Liliane legally adopt him as her son. “That was too much,” Françoise recalled. “This man had denigrated my father, manipulated my mother, and shattered our family.”

On December 19, 2007 she filed a criminal complaint against Banier for acts of abus de faiblesse – or “exploiting the weakness of her aged mother” – a felony in France:

It all added up to a scandal that riveted France for a decade. It ended in 2015 with Banier initially being sentenced to three years in prison by a court in Bordeaux and required to repay Bettencourt 158 million euros and a 350,000 euro fine.

A year later an appeals court reversed the verdict, giving Banier a four-year suspended sentence and ordering him to pay a 375,000 euro fine.

Unfolding over a long period, between 1999 to 2011, it became known as L’affaire Bettencourt.

But Bettencourt wasn’t the first one with whom Banier found a close friendship with:

He was taken up in his 20s by artist Salvador Dalí, who was fascinated by him. The pianist Vladimir Horowitz was another pal. Diane Von Furstenberg is also a longtime friend, as is actress Vanessa Paradis. The late French President François Mitterrand was a friend, too, and Banier became a fixture at the Élysée Palace during Mitterrand’s tenure there.

And Banier wasn’t the only one to take advantage of Bettencourt’s fortune:

The so-called Bettencourt Affair electrified France for a decade and seriously damaged the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.

Patrice de Maistre, who managed Bettencourt’s vast fortune, was accused of getting her to hand over envelopes of cash to members of Mr Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party during his 2007 presidential campaign.

The charges against Mr Sarkozy, who denied all wrongdoing, were subsequently dropped in October 2013 due to lack of evidence.

Secret tape recordings made by the Bettencourt butler revealed conversations about donations in the tens of thousands and requests from her entourage for financial gifts.

In May 2015, a French court found eight people guilty of taking advantage of her dementia.

Filled with dark chapters, the Bettencourt fortune has had a long and storied history:

[It funded] pro-Fascist movements, the enormous profits made under Nazi occupation, a tide of secret political contributions, illegal Swiss bank accounts, and tax-evasion schemes.

On the positive side, the family firm is one of France’s most dazzling industrial success stories, and the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation stands today as one of the country’s leading philanthropies, pouring hundreds of millions into medical research, the arts, education and housing.

Envious? I didn’t think so.

[source:wwd&independent&time&telegraph]