Adele Spitzeder (1832-1895) was born in Berlin to two singers but within months, her father, a celebrated bass-buffo, died. A patient failure as an actress, she borrowed a hundred gulden in 1869 and promised ten per cent a month. Within three years the so-called Dachauer Bank had made her the wealthiest woman in Bavaria and taken the savings of some thirty thousand servants, farmhands and village priests. It collapsed in November 1872. She served three years, wrote her memoir, resumed lending, was imprisoned again in 1880, and died in Munich.