This is the extraordinary story of the painter Séraphine Louis (1864-1942), who considered herself peerless, and who was known as Séraphine de Senlis. Yet by all rights, her life should have been spelled out in advance: she was destined to be a simple housemaid, like the heroine of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. Born into poverty in Arsy-sur-Oise, at a very young age, Séraphine had already been placed with several wealthy families in the area. When she was 18, she went to work in a convent, where she stayed for 20 years. At the age of 42, in compliance with the voice of the Virgin Mary, this solitary, self-taught woman began to paint, finding inspiration in the local flora, the church’s stained-glass windows and her own dreams and visions. Her paintings, her motley, colorful wardrobe, and her delusive tendencies (at times she believed herself engaged to a handsome Spanish officer, at others, the victim of wicked priests) gave her a reputation as a character in the town of Senlis. As fate should have it, she went to work for Wilhelm Uhde, a Parisian art collector who had come to Senlis for its quietness. Uhde, who was among the first to collect Picasso, Braque and Douanier Rousseau, was fascinated by Séraphine’s paintings, and decided to bring them to public attention. He became her patron, and in 1928, organized a major show in Paris of naïve painters (Séraphine Louis, Rousseau, Vivin, Bombois et al.) Reveling in dreams of glory, sucked into a mysticism as destructive as it was creative, Séraphine became more and more deluded. When Uhde withdrew his financial support after suffering a reversal of fortune during a recession, Séraphine totally lost her grip on reality. She was committed in 1931, and from then on, her fate resembles Camille Claudel’s: deprived of freedom, peace and quiet, and art; neglected by the asylum staff, and starved by the Occupation, she died, having fallen into oblivion.