The story of 45-year-old Thierry Tilly, which came to a climax this weekend, is bizarre. To his confidantes, he was "a good family friend"; to the aristocratic French family De Vedrines he was a secret agent-turned-guru; to the French police he is a master criminal accused of "fraud, abuse of weakness, extortion, kidnapping and acts of torture and barbarism".
The extraordinary tale of Monsieur Tilly goes back ten years, to a time when his industrial cleaning company won a contract to work for a Parisian secretarial school run by Ghislaine Marchand, whose maiden name was De Vedrines, a family of aristocratic Protestants.
Tilly, who had a history of shady business dealings during the 1990s, allegedly targeted the De Vedrines on account of their wealth, worming his way not just into the life of Ghislaine but her two brothers as well - Philippe, an oil executive, and Charles-Henri, a successful gynaecologist.
Tilly told the De Vedrines he'd restore them to their place in French society
Tilly was a secret agent, so he said, with connections to the United States that went to the heart of the government. More importantly, Tilly reportedly talked the De Vedrines into believing that it was their family destiny to stand up for good against evil, as their ancestors had done during the reign of Louis XIV in resisting Catholic oppression.
Tilly had a name for this destiny, it was L'Equilibre du Monde (The Balance of the World) and he told the De Vedrines (pictured in a family photo above) that if they put their faith in him he would restore the family to their rightful place in French society.
Ghislaine and her brothers believed Tilly, and soon other members of the family fell under the spell, 11 in total, including Ghislaine's 88-year-old mother, and her two children, Francois, then 22, and her 24-year-old daughter, Guillemette, who had married four months earlier.
At first Ghislaine's husband, Jean, a financial journalist, assumed his educated wife and her sophisticated brothers would soon see Tilly for what he was: nothing more than a skilful con-man. But they didn't, and in September 2001 Tilly and 11 members of the De Vedrines moved into the family chateau at Monflanquin, in the Lot-et-Garonne region of France. When Jean tried to reason with his daughter, Guillemette, who had walked out on her husband, she called her father "evil".
For five years the De Vedrines locked themselves in the chateau, shunning the outside world, while allegedly handing over to Tilly most of the family fortune worth an estimated €4m. In 2006 they sold the chateau and moved to England, to Oxford, staying in a series of guest houses and honouring the rent on none.
With each passing year Jean Marchand grew ever more frantic, terrified he would never again see his family. Numerous protests to the French authorities were met with sympathetic shrugs of shoulders. What could they do? There was no evidence to show the De Vedrines were being held against their will, and perplexing as it was that the family fortune had been transferred to Tilly, it had all been done legally.
Meanwhile in Oxford the De Vedrines took on odd jobs to please Tilly. One worked as a cook, another in a sweet shop and Charles-Henri, the former gynaecologist, found a position in a garden centre.
The first crack in the edifice of intrigue appeared in March 2008 when Philippe de Vedrines and his wife Bridgette left Oxford and returned to live in Normandy. But if Jean Marchand thought he now had the breakthrough he needed to nail Tilly, he was to be bitterly disappointed. Philippe, the former oil executive, refused to press charges.
But a year later Jean Marchand's perseverance was rewarded when another of the group abandoned Tilly. This time it was Christine de Vedrines, the wife of Charles-Henri, the gynaecologist-turned-gardener, and what she told police led to an international arrest warrant being issued for Tilly.
Christine had been confined for long periods in a darkened room while being systemically beaten by Tilly until finally, unable to endure the suffering any longer, she had confided in her Oxford employer, a Frenchman as luck would have it, who persuaded Christine to flee Oxford.
But still Marchand's agony continued. Despite the French authorities issuing the international arrest warrant, their British counterparts refused to intervene on what is described as an undisclosed "technicality". It was only on October 21 that the French finally got their man when Tilly was arrested in Switzerland as he boarded a plane at Zurich.
As Tilly was taken to France to face trial, Jean Marchand flew to England to what he expected to be an emotional reunion. But the remaining seven members of the De Vedrines family refused to see him, leaving Marchand distraught. "You might think, or hope, that, with Tilly under arrest, the spell would be broken and they would return, painfully, to reality," the 62-year-old told reporters. "But no, it seems not. They are just as much under his spell as they were before... he had ruined an entire family."
In desperation Marchand put into plan what the French newspaper, Liberation, this weekend described as a "veritable commando operation". Marchand hired a criminologist, a psychiatrist and a lawyer and laid siege to the house of his wife and two children. After a month of painstaking dialogue, the seven have agreed in the last few days to return to France.
"I can't quite believe it," declared a euphoric Marchand, "I'm in a daze." The lawyer who helped expedite their release, Daniel Picotin, was more measured in his reaction. "They've finally come to earth," he said of the seven, "and it's been a heavy fall. They realise that they no longer have anything and some of them are wondering what will become of them."
Though the De Vedrines family might be unsure of what lies ahead, one thing is certain, the trial of Thierry Tilly, dubbed the "Mozart of Manipulation" by Paris Match, will be front page news in France, a country still bewildered as to how so many intelligent people were fooled by one man for so long.
It's a question Eric Marchand has been trying to answer for a decade. "I still cannot explain Tilly's hold on my family," he said. "It is a kind of mental kidnapping."
