Because she’s worth it

The scandal over Liliane Bettencourt’s L’Oréal fortune is exposing the way French high society operates, says Patrick Marnham. And it is harming President Sarkozy in the polls

It all started as a banal family squabble over €17 billion. Liliane Bettencourt is heir to the L’Oréal family fortune and among the 20 wealthiest individuals in the world. She is 87 years old, a widow and rather deaf, and she lives alone with half a dozen servants in a mansion in Neuilly, the most expensive suburb in the Paris region. Last year her daughter, Françoise, discovered that her mother had given about €1 billion to a pushy society photographer who had also become a major beneficiary in Liliane’s will. So the daughter applied to have her mother made a ward of court. Now the affair has become a national political scandal, damaging the president of the republic and opening up the richest and most secretive level of French society like a slice of sponge cake.