Great story in Atlas Obscura today and a nice break from the usual middling and unimaginative lawyer fraud we have to report on this site, at least there’s an element of imagination here!
ALL IT TOOK TO UNCOVER the fraud was a lick. Charles Hooreman stood in front of a chair for sale at the exclusive Parisian gallery Didier Aaron in 2012. It had allegedly been the property of Princess Louise Élizabeth, daughter of King Louis XV, but Hooreman was immediately suspicious. He noticed telltale signs of familiar handiwork; his practiced eye could spot many of the techniques used by popular furniture restorers working in Paris at the time, and he knew that one of them used melted licorice to make new wood look older. So he bent down for a lick. “I could taste the fraud,” he later told Vanity Fair.
The man behind the gallery’s furniture collection was one Bill G.B. Pallot—regarded as one of the world’s leading experts of antique French furniture. With his long hair and brightly colored three-piece suits, he cut a distinctive figure in French media and society. His bonafides were unimpeachable: He’d made a career dealing ornate chairs, benches, and other furnishings to galleries, museums, royal families—even the Palace of Versailles. He’d written the book on the subject—The Art of the Chair in Eighteenth-Century France—and taught it at the art history department at the Sorbonne. He was often hired by prestigious companies such as Christie’s auction house to teach or represent the field. And then Hooreman, a former student no less, called him a conman. Four years later, he was arrested.
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