The life of Maria-Faustina Stefanini was ultimately one of unhappiness and loss. Her tragic end in a dark and lonely apartment belies her earlier years of passion and accomplishment, and her prodigious output of drawings in the last months of her life offers some insight into her suffering.

The second of six children, Stefanini was born in 1899 in Mulazzo, a village in northern Italy. In 1901, her father, Boniface, decided to emigrate to France to try to create a better life for his family. After a long journey that involved crossing the Alps on foot, he reached Thônes, a small village in the French Alps, where he opened a shop, Bazar Boniface, in which he sold everything from toys and jewellery to clothing and clocks. His business quickly prospered, and in time he opened five more shops in the area, providing a service to people in remote villages far from the city. Once he had established a home and assured a future for his wife and children, he returned to Italy to collect them.

As her father had never learnt to read or write or to work with figures, Stefanini would help him after school with his businesses, keeping the accounts, writing letters to suppliers, and so on. She and her four sisters soon became deeply involved in the running of the shops. With success came money and opportunity, and the sisters developed a taste for high society, travelling often to Paris to attend parties and other social functions.

Stefanini herself was very beautiful, and she was also emancipated – she was the first woman in Haute-Savoie to gain a driving license. Her strong and ambitious personality as well as her looks made her attractive to rich and powerful men.

In 1927, following a relationship with a diplomat, Stefanini gave birth secretly to a boy, Pierre, whom she left in the care of a religious organisation. Three years later, at the age of thirty-one, after a long love affair with Georges-Louis Andrieux, nephew of Louis Aragon and twelve years her junior, she had another child in secret, Mary-Anne, who was immediately handed over to a social welfare organisation.

Andrieux came from a very powerful and influential Parisian family. Unhappy about their son’s relationship with Stefanini, his parents had him deported to Morocco to prevent him from seeing her.

Mary-Anne was not to see her mother again until she was sixteen years old. For Pierre, the wait was even longer: he and Stefanini were eventually reunited when he was twenty-seven.

Stefanini continued to manage her father’s shops and to visit Paris, where she met the Marquis Davach de Thèze, whom she married, and who assumed legal responsibility for Mary-Anne. Stefanini remained fiercely independent, and when just a few months after their wedding she went away, leaving her new husband alone, he responded by having her arrested and imprisoned in Limoges on a charge of spying. Stefanini was eventually pronounced innocent. She was released from prison and resumed her married life with the Marquis, moving between his castles in different parts of France.

Despite her husband’s wealth, Stefanini had always had an income of her own from her father’s businesses. She had two apartments as well as property in southern France. However, in 1954, when her son, Pierre, made contact with her, her father lost respect for her and cut off her allowance. Eventually she was forced to sell most of her property in order to make ends meet.

In 1957, the Marquis died from throat cancer, but he left neither property nor money, having exhausted all his resources on extravagant living. Stefanini retired to her apartment in the town of Lamalou-les-Bains, where she entered into a lonely existence, refusing for much of the time to have any contact with her family. She gained a reputation as a medium and was able to use the information that came to her in dreams to help other people.

These dreams were often very disturbing, and, haunted by the images that entered her mind, Stefanini attempted to put her feelings down on paper. Highly superstitious, she believed that she was ‘born under a bad star’ and that she was the victim of her family and of society. The theme that haunted and obsessed her was that of her own physical decline and decrepitude. Although she took great care of herself and remained beautiful into old age, she declared that she was ‘in an advanced state of decomposition’.