by Blake Ellis
Luckily for us, she had held on to quite a few entertaining memories from her time working with Maria. There was the motorcyclist whom Maria cured on the spot with her “power of radiesthesia,” in which she would put her hand on a person’s body and emanate heat. “One day a young man walked in, his whole body shaking profusely because he had been in a motorcycle accident and couldn’t walk well,” Françoise recounted to us. “She spent a great deal of time with him, almost an hour. He walked out of there walking normally, no tremors.”
Then there was the story of a woman who was constantly in large amounts of debt, who would frequently call Maria’s office in search of winning lottery numbers. Maria eventually told Françoise to stop answering her calls, saying that people who wanted a magical, instant fix for their troubles were a waste of her time. Plus, she told Françoise that she had already warned the woman that she needed to be careful with her money and advised her to take out a low-interest loan from her husband’s company to pay off her debt. Then one December, the woman called again.
“She said, ‘You know, I am out of money, my husband already took out a loan, and Christmas is around the corner, we need to buy gifts for the kids and make a nice, special meal,” Françoise recalled. “I said, ‘Listen up, lady. On Christmas, when you’re poor, you eat potatoes.’ ”
“She hung up on me,” Françoise said, laughing. “I know, because I’ve spent Christmases eating potatoes, and that’s why I can say it.”
Often the calls were much more serious—such as, Françoise claimed, when Maria solved a murder by phone. “Madame Duval never answered the phone directly, since she had a lot of people calling for her, so I did the filtering, if you will,” Françoise started. “One day, I received a phone call that was different.”
When she answered the phone, a woman who had never consulted with Maria was on the other line. As was customary, Françoise didn’t let her speak to Maria. “But Maria was about six feet away from me, and said to me in an extraordinary fashion, ‘Give me the phone, let me talk to this person.’ ”
“But Maria, they’ve never consulted with you,” Françoise remembered telling her.
“That doesn’t matter,” Maria said adamantly.
So she transferred the call to Maria. According to Françoise, “I just heard Maria say ‘Tell me, what’s her name? What’s her birthday? When did she disappear? And where?’ ”
On the phone was the mother of a girl named Catherine, who had gone missing in Versailles. “And then, I’ll tell you, I remember like it was yesterday,” said Françoise. “[Maria] hung up the phone, looked at me, and said: ‘Françoise, this girl drowned. She was pushed into the water, and we will never see her again.’ ”
Françoise was devastated for the girl’s family and, at the same time, fascinated by Maria’s ability to connect with the unknown. “Oh, it was terrible! But just like that, she was so present in everything she said.” Maria asked her to call the inspector in charge of the investigation “right away,” but Françoise couldn’t get ahold of him, so they sent a fax.
“She dictated the fax to me,” Françoise recalled. “ ‘Mr. Inspector, . . . young Catherine’—I don’t remember her last name—‘disappeared around Disneyland, near Paris, where she worked. After she left work, no one saw her again, her mother told me. I can tell you what I saw. I saw that she was thrown into the water, I saw that she is dead, and I saw a man of color, in his thirties, very sporty, throw her into the water.’ ”
This level of detail certainly must have gotten the inspector’s attention, because Maria received a phone call not much later from the police. “I just heard Maria say, ‘No, sir, I knew nothing about this story, I swear!’ ” It turned out, Françoise said, that the police were investigating “a thirty-two-year-old man of color who was a triathlete. And he was the last person who had been seen with her; he was some sort of fling or boyfriend.”
Stories of adoring fans and miraculous discoveries reminded us of the claims in the letters and news articles we had seen. But still they seemed pretty fantastical to our skeptical ears. Françoise sure seemed to have bought into Maria’s powers and even claimed to have witnessed them firsthand. She was also a close friend. Perhaps she was simply trying to keep the lucrative myth of Maria Duval alive.
She even sent us a book that Maria had supposedly written. We had seen a number of listings for Maria Duval’s books everywhere from Amazon to eBay, with titles like The Seven Secrets of the Initiated, Words of Power, Secret Instructions, and How to Energize and Harmonize Your Aura. The one Françoise sent us was very simply titled How to Become Psychic, and it included a story relating exactly how Maria had become aware of her psychic gift. It all happened while her uncle, the same Italian priest mentioned in many of her letters, was on his deathbed.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon in the tiny northern Italian town of Ravenna, Maria wrote, when her uncle closed his eyes and a “supernatural peace” came over his face. His body was still except for his chest, which slowly rose and fell. Townspeople dressed in black came from all over, camping out in the streets and visiting him at his bedside, where they whispered prayers and kissed his forehead before tiptoeing away. “They came from the mountains as soon as they heard that the father, the saint, was suffering.”
When night fell, he awoke and asked for his teenage niece, Maria, who was fetched by one of the nuns. “I was at the office, having dinner,” she wrote. “The nun took me by the hand. I followed her to the stairs and I remember hearing my heartbeat in my chest, as we climbed each step. I was at the cusp of a crucial discovery, a revelation, and I felt it.”
When Maria showed up in his room, he asked her to come closer and sit on his bed. “It’s you who holds the ‘power’ for the generation after mine,” her uncle told her, according to the book. “Look closely into my eyes, they are just like yours, green and speckled with yellow dots. It’s ‘the sign’ and it’s this sign that you will recognize, on your own time, in our family, the one who will take over from you when the moment comes.”
He told Maria that nuns would claim he performed miracles and was a saint, but that he saw himself as merely a priest and “sorcerer,” and he told Maria that she was a sorcerer as well.
“Don’t be afraid. A sorcerer is not necessarily an evil being. They only become that if they want to, if they want to channel all their might towards evil. . . . And precisely because these powers, which I have, which you have, come from God, we must use them for good, to help others, to comfort those who have nothing.” He warned her that this wouldn’t be easy, and that she would have to make “heartbreaking” choices along the way, and that she may be even be forced to risk her own life.
After that, he began to wheeze, closing his eyes but continuing to speak. He said he could tell that Maria was scared of her own powers and the visions that took hold of her. The two of them continued to talk throughout the night, pausing only when interrupted by the occasional visit from a nurse. When the end was near, Maria opened the window so that her uncle could see his final sunrise. After he took his last breath, she ran out of the room and burst into tears.
This fantastical story echoed the one Maria had told in her letters, in which she said that her powers had been passed down to her by her uncle, who had been a beloved priest in a small Italian village. We didn’t know what to think, but Françoise was clearly convinced by these stories.
She also told us a little about what it was like to work for the renowned psychic. “She was very demanding, very demanding,” the former mayor said. “For example, if the phone rang, I shouldn’t wait for it to ring again. Two rings was the maximum. She was so perceptive, she needed everything to be exact. She never forgot anything, she was extremely organized.”
She said she didn’t see Maria very often anymore, that her health was deteriorating and that she no longer gave psychic consultations. She did, however, confirm that Maria still lived in Callas and that she was a local celebrity, but she stressed t
hat Maria was very private. Interestingly, she also confirmed that much of the detailed information in Maria’s Wikipedia entry, which we’d originally dismissed, was actually correct, including the fact that she had a son named Antoine Palfroy.
There was one key piece of information that Wikipedia had wrong.
• • •
In our conversations with Françoise, she would make one small clarification that led us to a massive discovery: Maria’s real name was Maria Carolina, but her last name was “Gamba,” not “Gambia,” which we’d seen on Wikipedia and in other online postings.
This was huge. We had struggled for months to find any truly personal details about this woman. Searching the new spelling online brought us to a whole new trove of information—and most important, business filings with Maria’s real name all over them.
These new documents were all written in French. We struggled to make sense of all the legalese but were at least able to learn that Maria really had been born in Milan, and that she’d become a French citizen. The documents also gave us her birthdate, July 15, 1937, meaning she was nearing her eightieth birthday.
These documents contained more than basic biographical details, though. Astroforce, the main company that had sent out the Maria Duval letters for many years, appeared on them over and over again. A French attorney helped interpret the filings and told us that the documents seemed to have been filed by a corporation named L’Estagnol, the same name we’d seen in the address for Maria listed on trademark filings. The value of her home was also listed, showing that it was appraised for around €762,000. We didn’t know how old the appraisal was, but this suggested the home could be worth at least $1 million in US dollars today. So how did she get all this money? The filings provided a clue.
To our amazement, the French attorney told us that the documents showed that Maria had been the sole shareholder of the Swiss version of Astroforce. This is essentially what we’d seen on Wikipedia all those months ago, when we didn’t even believe she was a real person. We knew that Astroforce had once been behind the letters, and the French filings also revealed that Maria had received nearly 207,000 Swiss francs (or around $200,000 in 2008 dollars) from the liquidation of the company in 2008—the same month of the French article heralding her return to Callas.
Finally, here it was, the proof we were looking for. Just as we had suspected, the same woman whose face was on all those letters had clearly profited from them. The only question was how much. If she had received similar payments in other years, then she could have easily made millions from this worldwide scam.
Armed with this new information, we were more ready than ever to try to confront Maria. We were also becoming increasingly nervous about whether we would be able to find her or get any answers to our questions. In preparation for our trip, we tried to get in touch with what appeared to be her only son, Antoine. We even sent messages to his wife and children. We were careful not to give away our upcoming travels, in case Antoine or Maria disappeared before we arrived. After all this, we couldn’t come home empty handed.
As the days went on, Maria Duval became practically all we could think about. She haunted our thoughts and our dreams. Were we crazy to be flying all the way to France in search of an elderly psychic?
The Trip
TEXT MESSAGE:
Saturday, Jan. 23, 11:45 a.m.
Melanie: Holy crap check your email
Antoine emailed me
Antoine’s email, which we quickly translated into English, landed in our inbox just hours before we set off on our trip.
Hello,
I am the son of Mrs. Maria Duval. You tried to contact me several times. My mother does not want to get in touch with you unless it’s through her lawyer.
I would ask you in the future to stop contacting my wife or children. Contact me but do not involve my family anymore.
I’d appreciate if you told me what you want from me.
Cordially,
Antoine PALFROY
The timing couldn’t have been worse, as we were planning to knock on her door as soon as we arrived in Callas. We were thrilled to have made contact with him—Maria’s very own son—but we worried that we had gotten off on the wrong foot by bothering his wife and adult children, who we thought might lead us to him or his mother. Antoine’s stern warning to leave Maria alone surely gave us second thoughts.
This was just the beginning of the day’s drama. As we wrestled with Antoine’s email, we grew increasingly concerned that we were going to arrive in France unable to speak with anyone around us—not to mention with Maria. Julia Jones, the French-speaking colleague who’d made the last round of phone calls for us, was scheduled to meet us in Callas. Much to our dismay, she lost her green card the day before our scheduled departure. We worried that she wouldn’t be able to leave the United States without it. At the same time, a massive winter storm was brewing across the East Coast, which threatened to throw a wrench into her travel plans even if she was allowed to get past airport security. Without Julia, our expensive trek to France could all be in vain.
Then we began to worry about the two of us being able to make it there, especially since we were both coming from different cities. If we’d been able to watch the day unfold on a movie screen, the dramatic narration may have gone something like this.
Of the two intrepid female reporters, Blake had always been the free spirit. So while type A Melanie sat at her gate hours in advance, Blake wasn’t quite as prepared. Thanks to unusually long security lines stretching around the Denver airport, as travelers from across the country were being rerouted because of the storm, she began her journey by missing her flight to Chicago, where she had been set to rendezvous with Melanie before the long red-eye flight to London. Melanie was already in the air as Blake pleaded with the gate agents to let her on her plane, which was still sitting on the runway. When Melanie landed and turned her phone on, she received a rapid-fire series of frantic text messages and emails from Blake alerting her that she’d missed her flight and would be flying straight to London. Melanie’s stomach sank. She was already becoming increasingly nervous about the whole adventure, and she had been looking forward to seeing Blake, to hopefully put her own nerves at ease. Now, as she ate her cold airport falafel before boarding the dreaded plane, she wished she could just turn around and head back to sunny Los Angeles.
About eight hours later, Melanie landed in London, with just a few hours remaining before the short flight to Nice. Still there was no word from Blake. Worried that Blake had been waylaid yet again and not wanting to enter international security and risk leaving for Nice without her, Melanie paced back and forth in front of the winding lines, much to the chagrin of the airport employees, who kept telling her she was going to miss her flight. Finally, mere minutes before Melanie was about to give up and head to the gate alone, a panicked Blake came running full speed around the corner—attracting the attention of most people in the busy Heathrow terminal.
The two journalists barely had time to say hello to each other before the employees ushered them into the line. They were almost through the security checkpoint when Blake was pulled because she’d forgotten to remove her toiletries from her luggage. Instead of requiring her to remove them and try again, the security worker seemed to take pride in going as slowly as possible, looking carefully through every single one of Blake’s items—as Melanie looked on in sheer terror.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Blake was cleared and the two of them sprinted to the gate, boarding the flight to Nice just in time. They settled into their uncomfortable airplane seats and breathed a sigh of relief. The worst was over.
• • •
A few short hours later, we landed in the beautiful city of Nice, ready for our hour-long drive to the hotel.
We could see the bright blue ocean as our plane landed, and after navigating through all the French signs in the airport, we made it to the rental car desk. Luckily the agent spoke English and told us he h
ad one of the best vehicles for us. At our designated spot in the garage was a giant black Peugeot SUV. Our rental cars on past reporting trips had typically been cramped sedans, so we were impressed that we’d managed to score this vehicle with our modest budget for the trip.
As soon as we got on the road, we figured out why.
As tiny cars whizzed past us, our own vehicle was barely able to fit in the lanes of the main street leaving the airport. And as the roads got narrower on the way out of the city, we began to worry that we would hit cars trying to pass us or sideswipe parked vehicles and the large concrete walls bordering the right side of the road.
The drive started out easy enough despite the size of our car, all the signs in French, the endless roundabouts, and a dashboard that showed us our speed only in kilometers. But then our GPS began navigating us through winding mountain roads. At first we were in awe of the beautiful views around us. Soon, though, the sky got darker and darker and the hills got steeper and steeper, making the drive increasingly treacherous.
In retrospect, we can’t help but laugh about what this must have looked like. Two American women driving alongside French cliffs at a snail’s pace in a gigantic SUV that took up almost the entire narrow road. But at the time, it was terrifying. It was pitch-black outside, and every time we took a corner, we were afraid we would hit another car straight on.
We had no idea how fast we were going. It felt like we were flying until we noticed a line of cars piling up behind us. (We would later convert our speed of 60 kilometers an hour and realize we were moving along at less than 40 miles per hour.) On multiple occasions we tried to look for a place to pull over to let the other cars pass, if for nothing else but to get their bright lights out of our rearview mirror. With nowhere large enough to fit our car, though, we just kept going.