Mallet's Millions

Many Americans suspect that they are descended from European royalty and often hire genealogists to prove it. By the same token, many Europeans are convinced that they have a relative who emigrated to America and became a millionaire. A few are right. The rest provide employment for lawyers, archivists and private detectives--especially in France, where the search for several legacies has gone on for generations. None of them is more fabulous than that of Jean-Pierre Mallet, who, so the story goes, died childless in 1818 in Winooski, Vt., leaving behind properties that stretched from the shores of Lake Champlain all the way to Chicago.

To be sure, no Vermont probate court records any evidence of Mallet's millions--or indeed of his ever having lived in Vermont.* The U.S. Treasury also claims that it knows nothing of this vast estate, now worth $512 million, which it is supposed to be holding in trust for the rightful heirs. Such professions of ignorance do not deceive Princess Helene Favraud Ayoubi, 45, widow of a self-styled Iraqi emir and president of the World Union of Mallet Heirs, which is dedicated to recovering the legacy. Nor was she overly fazed last week when the French government indicted her for swindling 22,000 members of the Mallet union out of $66,000 in dues through "chimerical promises of eventual gain."

In her eyes, it is all part of a gigantic Franco-American plot. As the blonde, plump princess has been telling her 22,000 relatives ever since she set up the union in 1957, their common ancestor was one of 13 children of a poor Limousin farmer who fought with the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution and was rewarded by a grateful Continental Congress with a huge farm in Vermont. He multiplied his fortune by 1) discovering oil in Vermont, 2) marrying a Creole beauty whose Louisiana father left them his gold mines, and 3) buying Chicago slaughterhouses. After his death, his property was expropriated by President Andrew Jackson as compensation for Napoleon's blockade of the U.S. during the War of 1812, and ever since both the U.S. and French governments have connived to hush the whole thing up.

Wild as the story may seem, it has survived the earnest attempts of a century of debunking historians, for the Princess Ayoubi is hardly the first to tell it. It has been told and retold in Limousin, where Mallet is as common a surname as is Johnson in Minnesota, since the middle of the 19th century. U.S. Consul Walter Griffin did in fact try to locate the inheritance, called it quits in 1894--and for his pains earned the disapproval of the French National Assembly, which demanded a more thorough investigation. Government opinion, however, seems to have quietly come round to Griffin's conclusions, for a Mallet union founded in Rochefort in 1926 was disbanded shortly afterward--on police orders.

In Paris last week, while a dozen ill-dressed followers waited anxiously in the hall outside his chamber, Judge Andre Laly tried to conduct a pretrial interrogation of the princess. What documents did she have to prove the existence of the inheritance? "I don't have any official documents," she explained. "That's why I founded the union--to find the documents." The weary judge concluded that the next step in the case would be a psychiatric examination. But this was not likely to discourage all the other Mallets. One scholar has concluded that the real Jean-Pierre Mallet was a French farmer who died not far from his birthplace in 1815, leaving an estate of $290--but Princess Ayoubi's reaction was probably typical. "Eh bien," she shrugged, "if it wasn't that Jean-Pierre Mallet who went to America, it was obviously another."

*There is a Mallett's Bay on northern Lake Champlain, only five miles from Winooski, as well as a Mallett's Creek and Mallett's Head, but they all appear to have been named for one Captain Stephen Mallet, a French recluse who died alone and penniless in the area in the 1790s.

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