NEW YORK, NY.- Myriam Ullens, a pastry chef who married a billionaire Belgian aristocrat and turned his fortune into a globe-spanning source of philanthropy, died of gunshot wounds on March 29 in Ohain, a village in the Walloon Brabant province of central Belgium. She was 70.

Her stepson Nicolas Ullens presented himself to police and said he had killed Ullens, the Walloon Brabant prosecutor’s office said. Authorities seized a handgun from him and proceeded to the home of Myriam Ullens and her husband, Guy Ullens, where they found her dead in a Volkswagen and Guy Ullens beside her, in a state of shock, with a wounded leg.

According to the prosecutor’s statement, Nicolas Ullens attributed his actions to a family fight over money and said that moments before he shot his stepmother, he had been arguing with her and his father at their home and had been asked to leave. He was being held in jail and has been charged with premeditated murder and violating weapons laws, the prosecutor’s office said.

Myriam Ullens’ death was a sordid end to a life that had seemed like a fairy tale, or at least a fairy tale in the age of global capitalism.

In the early 1990s, Ullens (pronounced YU-lens) was raising two children on her own and seeking investors to so she could expand her small pastry business, which had shops in Brussels and Waterloo, Belgium. She arranged a meeting with Guy Ullens, a titled baron and married father of four who had recently sold his family’s beet sugar refinery for $1 billion.

When the door opened and he appeared, Myriam Ullens experienced a “coup de foudre” — a French expression that equates love at first sight with a thunderbolt, she told the French magazine Madame Figaro in 2014. “He is my Pygmalion, the man whom I love and who made me break out of my shell,” she said.

Guy Ullens fondly described her as the “queen of pastry” with a passion for charity in a 2014 interview with The Kathmandu Post.

In 1999, after Guy Ullens divorced his wife, he married Myriam. The same year, his family firm, Artal, bought Weight Watchers for $735 million in what Forbes called in 2018 “one of the best private equity deals ever.”

“Guy asked me to quit my company,” Myriam Ullens told Global Citizen magazine in 2015. “I accepted but told him I was going to get involved in philanthropy instead.”

In 2000, Guy Ullens — whose full surname, which he often abbreviated, is Ullens de Schooten Whettnal — retired from business, missing out on billions in potential future earnings, according to Forbes. With his new wife, he put his fortune in service of a charitable spending spree.

The Ullenses’ most remarkable project was the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which opened in 2007 in Beijing.

It “was the first international-standard museum in China dedicated to contemporary art,” Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said in an interview. “It had capacity in scale that no other museum in China had at the time of its opening, and that very few have even reached since then.”

The museum’s first exhibition, “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” helped establish a new canon in art history. At the same time, the museum also brought the work of foreign artists like Robert Rauschenberg into China.

The idea for the museum arose from Guy Ullens’ years of travel to China as a businessman, and from the passion for China he shared with his wife.

“When we started going there in the early 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was not as fashionable,” she told Global Citizen.

“Artists hid themselves in the aftermath of 1989,” she added, referring to the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. “We would visit them in very hidden places, looking at the paintings with a torch in a staircase or a parking lot.”

In 2017, the Ullenses sold the museum to Chinese investors in a deal put together by Lunar, a Shanghai private equity firm. Since then, its internationalist spirit has persisted. From this past October to January, it presented “Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York,” an exhibition that included more than a dozen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

The institution has also grown; it now includes three buildings throughout China that draw more than 1 million visitors a year. Its success has inspired several of the museum’s Chinese benefactors to open art institutions of their own, Philip Tinari, the UCCA’s director, said in an interview.

Myriam Lechien, who was also known as Mimi, was born on Sept. 23, 1952, in Cologne, in what was then West Germany, where her father, Paul, a colonel in the Belgian army, was stationed. Her mother, Monique (de Drijver) Lechien, was a homemaker.

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 was, like her father, 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 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 Guy 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, Colorado.

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 Guy 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 Myriam Ullens’ killing, Nicolas’ sister, Brigitte Ullens, has publicly defended his character and accused their stepmother of financial selfishness and of dividing the family.

In addition to Nicolas and Brigitte Ullens, Myriam Ullens is survived by her husband; a brother, Philippe; a sister, Geneviève Lechien; her children from her first marriage; two more stepsons; five grandchildren; and many step-grandchildren and step-great-grandchildren.

One factor inspiring the Ullenses to build so many institutions was the pleasure they took in starting something new together, Laurent Degryse, the husband of Myriam Ullens’ daughter, Virginie, said in a phone interview.

“They would wake up in the middle of the night, prepare jasmine tea and start a whole conversation,” he said. “At the end of the night, the project would have taken another turn.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.