by Blake Ellis
Those three hours of driving felt like days. Finally we pulled into Draguignan, a town neighboring Callas, where we had been able to find an affordable hotel at the last minute. There we met Julia, who we were so relieved had made it to France, and Jordan Malter, a producer from our video team who was there to document our search. Wearing the same clothes from the past thirty-six hours and looking especially shell-shocked after our harrowing drive, we greeted Julia in the hotel lobby to head to a much-needed dinner. Unlike us, she actually looked like she belonged in the South of France. Wearing a chic peacoat and black heels with her dark brown hair in a stylish bob, Julia looked ready for a night on the town. We just wanted a bottle of wine.
As we scarfed down some pizza at a nearby café, one of the only places open on a Sunday evening, we recounted our hellish journey to Julia and Jordan in painful detail. Rather than commiserate with us, they looked at each other in confusion, saying the drive they’d taken on the large French highway had been pretty simple. “Didn’t you guys go through any tolls?” Julia asked.
That’s when it hit us. As we had tried to figure out how to switch our French-speaking GPS to English, we’d selected the “no tolls” option, thinking French tollbooths would make an already foreign drive even more confusing.
Instead, we’d almost killed ourselves before we even got to Callas.
The Dusty Archives
THE NEXT MORNING we got up early, eager to leave our twin beds in our cold and sparsely furnished hotel room. We met Julia for a quick French breakfast of soft cheese, baguettes, and strong espresso as Julia told us that she had set up a meeting for us all the way back where we started the day before: Nice. The quick, easy trip on the French toll road made us especially embarrassed about the trek we had endured.
We were eager to try to confront Maria, but first wanted to gather as much information about her as we could. If she was once as popular as some of the reports claimed, the local newspaper should have proof. So we started our search in the dusty archives of Nice-Matin.
We were greeted by Alain, a tall and lanky man with thinning white hair. He was the paper’s archivist, whose job it was to store and maintain the newspaper’s decades of materials, including a digital archive in which he found several articles for us that mentioned Maria. He seemed thrilled that people actually needed his services and were interested in the dusty collection of documents he had spent so many years cultivating.
After struggling with his dated microfilm machine, he was finally able to pull up a newspaper article from 1992 that showed a picture of the psychic. “Maria Duval, voilà!” Alain exclaimed as he noticed her picture quickly scroll by on the screen. When it came into focus, we saw a much younger Maria standing next to what appeared to be a goose or a duck. After a quick skim of the article, Alain told us it said that Maria had returned to Callas from Paris that year because of her love of animals. “A witch, a gentle witch,” he translated from the headline.
As we looked over his shoulder, he told us how he remembered Maria as a local celebrity for many years and that he had heard her on local radio stations giving horoscopes. He said he believed she was indeed a real psychic, saying it as matter-of-factly as you would say someone was a doctor or lawyer. We fired off question after question. Alain was happy to help but seemed confused about why we were so skeptical of this woman.
He was also eager to show us the newspaper’s physical archives in a giant basement stuffed with bound books full of old newspapers. To get there, we packed ourselves into a metal freight elevator with flickering fluorescent lights and headed underground. After a short walk through a hallway that seemed to house forgotten furniture and other junk, we came upon a darkened room where we were immediately hit with the musty smell of old paper.
We had hoped that the newspaper’s digital database would have been able to point us to any old articles about the psychic that might have been down there. But the database didn’t go back far enough. We were stuck with trying to find them within a massive collection of hundreds of books, each of which contained hundreds of pages of newspaper. Luckily, we’d come with a few dates in mind, which helped us somewhat narrow our search. In our early reporting, we’d seen what appeared to be old newspaper clippings dug up by one of Maria’s defenders and posted online. We’d assumed at the time that they were fake. Now we hoped to confirm our suspicions by going directly to the source.
The first article we were convinced was photoshopped featured large type suggesting that Maria had found someone by helicopter in Saint-Tropez—an eerily similar story to the one from her website and YouTube videos uploaded by gd2use. We showed the faded old clipping to Alain, but it didn’t have a specific date to help guide his search, and he was unable to find it anywhere.
We looked for a different article, but the book that would have housed it was oddly missing from the shelf.
Moving on to the last one, Alain climbed up on his ladder and at one point looked like he was about to fall backward as he dragged the large, heavy book off the shelf. He proceeded to lay it down on the floor so we could all huddle around. “Where is it?” he said as we leafed through it until we got to the date we were looking for: September 25, 1977. Suddenly, in the bottom left-hand corner, we spotted a photo of a woman. Even though she had brown hair instead of her signature blond bob, it was definitely her. It was the exact same clipping that appeared online that we had thought was fake. Alain was as excited as we were, and he quickly gave us a rough translation of the small box of text beneath the photo.
“It says, somebody lost. And the family gave to this woman Maria Duval just a photo of the man who had been lost in the forest.”
“Just looking at the photo,” he said as he acted out the scene with his own palm in front of his wiry spectacles, “she was able to find this person. She is, how do you say in English when somebody has a sixth sense, somebody has a power?”
The Psychic No One Sees
MARIA WAS EVEN a mystery in the tiny town of Callas, where narrow cobblestone streets and country roads curved among vineyards and medieval buildings.
When we showed up in the center of Callas to look for any clues about Maria’s real life, we were some of the only people around. Even in the summer months, the quaint town is far less of a tourist destination than the nearby port cities like Nice and Marseilles. In January, it was deserted. We parked next to the historic stone fountain and decided to pop our heads into any stores that were open.
Sitting at her desk in the small one-room tourism office on the way into town, a younger woman immediately recognized Maria’s name. She described her as a well-known resident of Callas who wasn’t in town much. She recalled having seen her at some local music festivals. And according to this woman, we were the first people she knew of who had come looking for Maria.
At a small, dimly lit restaurant that appeared to be one of the nicest in town, the middle-aged husband-and-wife owners weren’t exactly excited to talk to us. Eventually we convinced the man to answer a few questions as his wife glowered at us disapprovingly. “Personally, I don’t know her. Physically, I’ve never seen her,” the man told us. “She’s lived here a while. But she’s discreet.”
Then there was the young clerk working the register at the tiny grocery store where we purchased a fresh baguette and a huge chunk of delicious French cheese for only a few euros. The worker, wearing glasses and a black puffy coat with a large hood, didn’t even recognize the name. He said he had lived in the town his whole life and had worked in the store for a decade, but he had never heard of Maria.
We took our bread and cheese next door to a bar and tobacco shop, where a man wearing a tight black turtleneck served us tiny glasses of red wine in between ringing up packs of cigarettes and gum. As we devoured our food at an outside table, we were joined by a ruddy-faced, balding local man we’d met earlier by the fountain, who seemed very amused by us, as well as a little drunk, and who claimed to have the day off from work. He introduced himself as François.
He and Julia began speaking French to each other, while we tried to be involved in the conversation as much as we could, smiling and nodding along, picking up words here and there like voyante and “Duval” from within the conversation.
Soon François was joined by his friend Agostino, a round Italian man with gray hair and big black eyebrows. We showed them both a picture of Maria. Immediately they recognized her. “She’s well known,” François said. “But us, in a village like Callas, we’re very down-to-earth. It’s the winery, the olive trees, and that’s it. We don’t give a damn about psychics. She’s more for the people abroad than here.”
François said he had seen her around town a couple of times. It was Agostino, though, who had the most personal connection to her. He said he was one of the landscapers who had built her pool. “She’s not an unpleasant person, but she’s very . . . how can I say? She thinks of herself as very important, when she’s not,” he explained.
Just down the street, “Dame Jeanne,” the owner of the town’s only wine shop, was thrilled when we approached with a video camera. A tall, theatrical woman with short reddish-brown hair whose head almost reached the stone ceiling above her, she chatted with us in French from inside a dark and musty cave filled with bottles of French wine, gourmet spices, and other knickknacks. She knew who Maria was right away.
“She lives in the outskirts and I don’t think she even buys her bread here,” she told us.
“What do people say about her?” we asked.
“They don’t.”
“No?”
“No, honestly, no. You can ask any other shop owners here, no one knows her.”
“Do you believe she’s a psychic?”
“Me, I believe what I see. Maybe, but maybe it’s also a good business model, huh? But me, I’m a very grounded person, so I have trouble [believing that]. I’ve never consulted with her.”
“Do you know anyone who has consulted with her?”
“No.”
“I think she is better known abroad than here,” she added. “We don’t go see psychics.”
This seemed odd, considering what Maria’s friend Françoise Barre, the former mayor, had claimed: that Maria’s services were praised so highly.
Dame Jeanne seemed increasingly intrigued by our questions, asking whether we had met Maria. When we told her we had not, she explained that the only time she had ever seen her was at a pharmacy in a different town. “She’s very proud,” Dame Jeanne told us. “She had sent lists and lists of things she wanted from the pharmacist, Jean-Pierre, via fax, and by the time he got the fax, she was there, waiting in her Mercedes for her medication.”
But in the seventeen years Dame Jeanne had owned her wine cave, she claimed to have never seen Maria in her store or anywhere else in Callas.
“She is the psychic that no one ever sees.”
The House
WALLED IN BY giant slabs of impenetrable white concrete and a tall metal gate that towered above us, Maria Duval’s house was clearly the home of someone who didn’t want to be found.
Finding the place was an hours-long adventure in itself. We had two addresses for Maria, one from the nice woman who worked for the city of Callas and another from the public trademark applications. Our GPS didn’t recognize either of them. So we typed in the two addresses over and over, attempting to find any version that the machine would recognize, and drove wherever it took us.
We started with the one from the town employee, which took us to the side of a cliff. At the end of a steep driveway was a sprawling estate. We knocked on the door but no one answered, and then we heard voices—but we couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Worried that whoever was there might think we were trespassing, Julia called out “Allo!” “Allo?” in as friendly a voice as she could. Soon we saw two women walking toward us from the bottom of a tree-lined hill, and we squinted to see if either of them was elderly with blond hair. They were friendly enough, considering we were strangers standing on their property, but neither of them was Maria, nor could they tell us where to find her.
We returned to our car and typed in the second address, “L’Estagnol, Les 4 chemins,” the same address listed on many of Maria’s public trademark documents. It was located miles away from the estate, and to get there we’d have to travel through more winding mountain roads. When we drove up to a four-way stop, our GPS announced that we had arrived at our destination. We pulled over to the side of the road, but we couldn’t find any houses. We looked at Google Maps on our phones, which showed that the intersection had a name, Les quatre chemins, which roughly translates to “the four paths.”
The hours passed and soon it would be dark. We still had no idea where Maria Duval lived. Confronting her had been the whole goal of our trip. Dejected, we decided to go back to the hotel to strategize. Driving away, something caught our eye: a faded yellow sign with “L’Estagnol!” written on it in cursive. It sat outside a run-down stucco home with white shutters and a red tiled roof. This was when we realized that the trademark address had taken us to the right place, but we didn’t have a house number. We looked back at the number of the other address, thinking that it might correspond to the address for her house. It didn’t match the house in front of us but suggested it was just down the road. We must have driven right past it.
We flipped a U-turn and parked on a little dirt path next to a large horse stable and riding area, convinced her house must be within walking distance.
Almost directly across the street, we saw the number we had been looking for on what appeared to be a laminated piece of paper, nailed into the trunk of a large tree. Next to the tree was a metal gate chained shut with a silver padlock, connected to a beat-up chain-link fence that spanned the entire front of the property. We couldn’t see a house, only an overgrown dirt road surrounded by trees, fallen leaves, and brush. On the gate, an old red sign warned that this was private property. Nearby was another sign that contained an image of the head of a dog, which warned that visitors entered at their own peril. Above the gate there was a yellow sign stating that the property was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. When we looked up, a security camera was pointed right at us. If there was some sort of house down this road and Maria Duval were there, we were convinced that we were not going to get to her.
We continued to walk along the side of the street, crunching piles of dead leaves with our boots and passing speeding cars as we followed the chain-link fence and walked past more of the same yellow surveillance signs. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere until the occasional car came rushing by on the main road, reminding us we weren’t alone.
A few hundred feet down the side of the road a house appeared.
It was clearly two stories tall and white, but a large white wall and a looming metal gate—with two concrete eagles perched atop each side—kept us from seeing anything more. We were able to get a glimpse of the roof from the road; the house wasn’t far behind the gate, but the thick greenery planted all around it kept the property hidden from anyone passing by. There was a sign that said “Beware of Dog” in French, on which someone had used a marker to change the word “Dog” to “Dogs.”
And there was a buzzer.
Uneasy, we pushed the white button.
Silence.
We waited a minute and buzzed again.
And again.
Slowly, the gate began to creep open.
It felt as if everything was moving in slow motion. Gradually, the solid white metal panels began to part, revealing glimmers of a woman standing only feet away.
After all this time and speculation, were we finally going to meet the woman herself?
Then, just as abruptly as it had opened, the gate stopped moving, leaving only a narrow opening between the two thick panels.
Julia quickly tried to get the attention of whoever was back there. “Allo?” “Bonjour?”
Then she locked eyes with a blond woman and the gate began to reverse course—closing with
a clang amid the sound of angry, barking dogs. Worried that we’d lost our chance, Julia quickly began speaking to whoever this was—as the two of us stood by panicked and helpless.
JULIA: I’m looking for Madame Maria Duval.
THE WOMAN: No. She’s not here at the moment. What do you want?
JULIA: We’re journalists and we have questions for her.
THE WOMAN: Madame Duval is in Rome at the moment.
Out of the conversation between Julia and the woman, we were able to make out that this was indeed the home of Maria Duval. The woman, who claimed she worked for Maria, told us to leave a note for the psychic in the mailbox next to us. As the conversation continued, we noticed a large, brown snout that appeared to belong to a Rottweiler emerge from under the spikes of a side gate. The dog looked straight at us with big, dark eyes that made it clear we weren’t welcome.
The woman proceeded to tell us that she couldn’t open the gate because of the dogs, and that she needed to go.
JULIA: OK, what’s your name, madame?
(Silence.)
JULIA: Just to know who I spoke to?
(Silence.)
JULIA: Hello? Madame? Madame?
She was gone, her black shoes silently disappearing from under the gate.
All that was left was the growling dog.
As soon as we were absolutely sure she had left, we turned to Julia, the only one who’d gotten a good look at the woman. “Was it Maria?” we whispered into the cold winter air.
Unfortunately, Julia was convinced that the woman couldn’t possibly have been Maria. While the woman behind the gate did indeed have blond hair, Julia told us that the person she’d seen was much too young to be the elderly psychic from the letters.
Maybe the real Maria was hiding inside. It seemed far too convenient that she’d taken a quick vacation to Rome the very same week we’d flown all the way to France to try to meet her. Either way, we followed the woman’s instructions and scribbled a letter to Maria on a page ripped from one of our notebooks. With the sun setting against a darkening sky, we walked back across the street, our feet again crunching the dead leaves beneath them, and placed the note in Maria’s small white mailbox.