Madame Therouz

Madame Therouz was an Orlesian noblewoman who settled in Ostwick following the Orlesian Invasion of Ferelden. She is famed for her redevelopment of large swathes of Ostwick City, and the construction of the city's current Alienage.

Personal Life
Therese Therouz' parents were both youngest children of Orlesian nobles with little inheritance expected, but when she was five years old her mother inherited a large amount of Ostwick City from her cousin Berhart. They paid little heed to the properties, simply collecting rents and ignoring all petitions for repairs from their tenants, until the Orlesian victory in Ferelden opened up Ostwick as a potentially valuable trading partner. At this point they discovered that most of their land consisted of slum tenements too far from the coast and too close to the walls to be valuable, which included the city's alienage.

Madame Therouz was nevertheless sent to the city, against her wishes, and proceeded to spend large amounts of her mother's inheritance on construction projects. The first to be completed was the village of Sante sur Mer, to the north west of Ostwick City, which was a near perfect reconstruction of the Ghislain village where she grew up. It was left abandoned as she turned her attention to the city centre, where she cleared the alienage overnight and began construction of an opera house and botanic gardens on the site. The city's elves, having been displaced, moved to Sante sur Mer and petitioned Madame Therouz to accept their tenancy. She ignored these petitions too, for so long that the City Council granted them the right of residence.

Despite her passion for spending money, Madame Therouz never quite bankrupted herself. Her development projects increased the value of the neighbouring properties considerably and before she ran out of money she appointed her companion, an elf forty years her junior named Kennit, as manager of her estate. He was a far more conscientious landlord, who arranged for repairs and redevelopment of the remaining properties that turned them into a profitable portfolio. On her death in 9:05 Dragon, she left him her entire estate. It was challenged in court by several of her Orlesian cousins on the grounds that an elf could not own property, but the City Council decreed that the will was legal and reasonable and, in doing so, held that elves could indeed own property in Ostwick.