Her parents sent her to a boarding school in Belgium near the country’s border with West Germany. On a trip home, she met a young Belgian soldier named Roger Lemaire, who, like her father, was stationed in West Germany. She married him when she was 18.
The couple had two children, Gilles and Virginie, but divorced when Myriam was in her mid-20s. A second marriage, to Christian de Moffarts, a conference planner, also ended in divorce. In the late 1980s, she began baking pastries in the kitchen of her home and delivering them to restaurants.
Nevertheless, she still found time and energy to try to help those less fortunate than her. She began visiting Nepal after a friend told her that it was an affordable and practical place for charitable endeavors. Her fledgling efforts to help children with poor or absent parents culminated, after she met Mr. Ullens, in her establishment of an orphanage outside Kathmandu, the nation’s capital. Nearby, the baron and baroness also built the Ullens School, which offers an international baccalaureate curriculum.
Her other projects included the Mimi Foundation, which created support systems for cancer patients in French and Belgian hospitals; Club des Combins, an organization that provides insurance to the mountain guides of Verbier, an alpine Swiss resort; and Maison Ullens, a clothing line that aims at “the perfect travel wardrobe,” according to its website, with stores in Paris, New York and Aspen, Colo.
The European press described the Ullenses as friendly with European aristocrats like Prince Charles and Belgium’s king and queen. Their travel between Switzerland, China, France, Belgium and the Maldives led Mr. Ullens to tell The Wall Street Journal in 2013, “Our main ‘houses’ are a plane and a boat.” He complained about the lack of wall space for hanging their art in their Swiss chalet.
The Ullenses’ munificence and glamour are now being scrutinized and gossiped about in the Belgian news media. Nicolas Ullens was already a figure of some notoriety as a former Belgian intelligence officer who in recent years had made dramatic accusations of government corruption. Following Mimi’s killing, Nicolas’s sister, Brigitte Ullens, has publicly defended his character and accused their stepmother of financial selfishness and of dividing the family.
