Rare color patterns of tulips drove that price even higher, so much so that people started mortgaging their homes and estates to get bulbs that they hope to then resell at a profit.
A legal interpretation issued in 2003 says that if a divorce is disputed, property bought for one partner by a spouse's parents before marriage can revert to the partner alone.
The insult had occurred on a day when Pitty wished to draw five hundred dollars from her estate, of which he was trustee, to invest in a non-existent gold mine.
The practice has been highly lucrative for the French state, which raked in upwards of 771 million pounds ($840 million) in 2022 from bank accounts, real estate, and personal property.
One way to do this is to divert money into niche research centres, for example in renewable energy or real estate, thus attracting students keen to forge a career in those areas.
Under normal circumstances, the French nonprofit Judicial Control and Investigation Service (SCJE) would have had to spend months to find such a real estate gem.