MARIA’S LETTERS ALWAYS made a huge deal about her supposed ability to find missing people. In France we were stunned when the archivist from the local newspaper pulled out the decades-old article claiming she’d found an elderly man using only a photo that his family provided.
We were dubious about the claim, though the clipping at least showed that she really did make headlines as someone who could locate the missing. We still hadn’t seen any evidence of the one story that kept popping up: the unbelievable rescue of the missing person in the ritzy resort town of Saint-Tropez. Her website had detailed the story, as told by a so-called skeptic, who had also been mesmerized by her catlike eyes. This person had described Maria and this discovery in great detail, but we were never able to track down his or her identity. In a YouTube video Maria told a similar story, which Antoine had seemed to mention again in the Toulon café. But there was one big discrepancy between their versions and the one from her website. Maria and Antoine talked about her finding a man, while the website recounted the rescue of a missing dentist’s wife.
We had shown the friendly archivist at Nice-Matin a newspaper headline that a fan had posted online. When he couldn’t find the paper that should’ve shown the headline, we became convinced the story was a myth, as we’d initially assumed. If it were a photoshopped image used to lure in more victims, that would explain why the subject of the alleged rescue had morphed depending on who was telling the story.
Once we were back in the States, the friendly archivist told us he’d found another article. It wasn’t the one we’d been looking for in the archives. This one, from 1978, was all about Maria’s various rescues over the years, glorifying her as “the nicest of the witches.”
Local police and firefighters don’t hesitate to give Maria Duval a call after their regular efforts fail. She is always available and her pendulum is almost always right.
It was clear that whoever wrote the article thought highly of Maria, saying that she greeted the author from a street by her garden, which was soaked in sunlight and filled with zodiac signs.
It could be that one day we will witness the birth of the Witch Liberation Movement, and if they choose a flag-bearer, it will certainly be the nicest and most lovely of them all, Maria Duval of Draguignan—next to her, the old-timey images of witches with brooms, crooked fingers and noses are ridiculous.
Then we noticed a mention of Saint-Tropez.
Two years ago in Saint-Tropez, the wife of a doctor went missing, and all the search parties had been fruitless. The population, the vacationers, were in upheaval when a young woman came to the police.
The woman was Maria, who according to the article asked for a photo of the woman and a map of the country, which authorities set up on a table in front of her.
They all saw, at the end of a few minutes, the pendulum, until then moving, coming to a stop and stabilizing over a precise point.
“She’s here,” said the young lady.
Just in case, a helicopter [was sent] to the place indicated, not far from Gassin. The woman was there, hurt and unable to move.
There it was, practically word for word, the same story we’d kept hearing—but again, with one key difference. This article mentioned a doctor’s wife instead of a dentist’s wife, like the story from Maria’s website. We had always assumed that the tale on her website was written by some creative copywriter. But perhaps it was actually a sloppy translation of one of these newspaper articles. The difference in the two stories really did all come down to one French word. This still didn’t explain, though, why Maria and Antoine had told the exact same story about a missing man rather than a woman. We still had a lot of questions and had a hard time believing that Maria could have found anyone with simply a pendulum.
The article also included a number of other personal details about the psychic that we had seen in her letters but had ruled out as fiction. It talked about her ability to find missing animals, reminding us of how her letters claimed she had found Brigitte Bardot’s dog and of a trademark we once found for what appeared to be a business producing horoscopes for dogs. It said she had spent her childhood in Italy, raised by a family who had their own psychic powers. This included her uncle, a priest in a small village near Milan “who told her once, before she could understand it, that the golden strands inside her brown eyes gave her the power of communication.” It also said she had been examined by authorities who determined she truly was a psychic. Again, this all matched the letters, while the story of her uncle also mirrored what Maria had supposedly written in the book that Françoise sent us (though in the book her eyes had been described as green). The numerous small details in the article also matched much of what Antoine had told us, such as the fact that Maria had worked in art galleries and that she’d gone through several divorces.
This article had a familiar byline. It was the name of a man who had written other positive articles about Maria. His writing seemed suspiciously similar to that of the self-proclaimed skeptic on her website. But as we searched online and enlisted the newspaper’s help to try to locate him, we couldn’t find any evidence of his current existence or a way to contact him. The people mentioned in his various articles were also nowhere to be found in our online searches. Without talking to this writer, it was impossible for us to verify that anything he had written was actually true, as the supposed rescues had happened decades ago. But his articles, published in a widely read reputable newspaper, seemed to have helped make Maria famous. They had convinced people for years that she was the real deal, everyone from locals in town to the newspaper archivist to the millions of victims who read these stories over and over again.
Early in our journey, we had been convinced that Maria Duval was nothing more than a stock image. Once we determined she existed, we believed the letters were pure fabrications and we still doubted her powers. Real or not, however, the myth of Maria Duval was rooted in more than a copywriter’s wild imagination.