Blanche Monnier: A Fate Worthy of a Horror Story
Young woman locked in a tiny room for 25 years by her own mother
Life for Blanche Monnier started rather normally. In fact, one could say she was lucky, as she was born into the haute bourgeoisie of 19th century Poitiers, France.
What it meant for Blanche was that she wouldn’t need to worry about money or trouble herself with work like her less fortunate peers pertaining to lower classes. All she had to do is attend social events, look pretty and find a worthy husband.
Yes, life was indeed good when you belonged to an affluent, revered family of old noble origins.
Mademoiselle Monnier was probably not much different than any other girl her age. One could imagine her dreaming of love, marriage, family, having a home of her own. We know she enjoyed playing the piano and was quite good at it. All in all, there was nothing particularly exceptional about Mlle Monnier’s young life.
Had it remained so, history would have forgotten about her, as it had forgotten about many other idealistic young girls, full of hope and secret wishes of happiness. And it would have been better for Blanche had she been given the chance to live out her small, ordinary, utterly unremarkable life — sometimes happy, sometimes less than so.
The turnabout
Blanche, however, made a misstep on the road to generic marital bliss which proved fatal. Instead of choosing among one of the many respectable suitors that flocked around her — as she was a renowned beauty, and well off, too –she fell in love with a lawyer who was not considered her social equal, as he was poor.
That did not concern Blanche in the least, but her mother had a distinctly different idea of her ideal son-in-law. And it was most definitely not ‘a penniless lawyer’.
It seems that Blanche was more than reluctant on giving up the thought of marrying the man she loved. In fact, she just wouldn’t desist. She upfront confronted her mother and refused to abandon her hope of marriage for love rather than status.
Madame Monnier on the other hand was not one to take obstinacy and rebellion lightly. She took it not only as a personal offense but a potential smear on her family’s honor. And she couldn’t allow that for the world.
Imprisonment
Enraged at the point of madness by her daughter’s defiance, Madame Monnier did not shy away from taking drastic measures. The goal, after all, justifies the means, does it not?
She decided that the best solution was to lock her daughter in a tiny room in the attic, chaining her to the bed, presumably with the help of her son, Marcel. It’s less than likely that a middle-aged woman could overpower a healthy 25-year-old by herself, so there’s little room for doubt that Blanche’s brother helped with the execution of the heinous deed.
Even if Marcel didn’t help with the initial act of imprisonment itself, he did help keeping it a secret for the next 26 years. You’ve read that right. 26 long years of Blanche’s life have passed in the confines of a crammed, stuffy, filthy, tiny room.
How did they manage to keep that gruesome secret hidden for so long, without raising suspicion, without anyone asking questions about Blanche’s whereabouts? She couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air without a soul noticing, or at least wondering what had happened to the beautiful Poitiers socialite.
But people often choose not to see the obvious and not to ask questions if the answers might appall them.
Blanche’s mother and brother seemingly grieved at her disappearance at first, giving their best to hold up the pretense of a doting family worried sick about the wellbeing of their daughter and sister. After a while, ‘with a heavy heart’ no doubt, they carried off with their lives as if nothing had happened.
It seemed that everyone had forgotten about Blanche, especially after the lawyer she had loved died 10 years into her disappearance. With his passing, there was not a soul left to miss her.
The years dragged on. No one wondered anymore, no one cared. It was as if Blanche Monnier had never existed.
The discovery
But exist she did, for 26 bitter years stuck in her miniature prison. One could not say she lived, for it was not life that Blanche had spent up in that soiled attic, shackled to the bed. To call that state life would be a gross offense to the very meaning of the word, and to Blanche herself.
Seconds trickled to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days, which seeped into weeks, months, years.
And then, one day in 1901 the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous letter, whose sender remained unknown to this day. The author of the letter was quite concise yet left no room for misinterpretation:
I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half-starved and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years — in a word, in her own filth.
As the accusations were so appalling, police forces barged into the Monnier home immediately after having received the tip. And there they were met with a sight that would remain ingrained in their minds for the rest of their days.
On a bed filthy beyond wildest imagination, lay Blanche Monnier, now 51, completely naked, enshrouded in long, dirty hair that hadn’t been cut or washed for 2 and a half decades.
She was confined to the bed, covered in food remains, bugs, and her own excrement — as she was not allowed to use the toilet — emaciated due to a diet of meager scraps, weighing a mere 25 kg, and completely insane.
The policemen who found her couldn’t stand to be in the room for long, as the air was stale and filled with the odor of putrid food and human waste.
The aftermath
Blanche’s mother died 15 days later, not surviving long enough to be charged with her unspeakable crime. She did live to see an angry mob gather in front of her house, as the people of Poitiers were nothing short of outraged when all the horrid details of Blanche’s imprisonment came out.
Her brother, Marcel, was convicted at first but was acquitted on appeal, with the reasoning that he was not legally obliged to rescue his sister from the danger of death or injury, according to the French penal code. In addition, he was considered mentally incompetent, as the judges probably had issues coming to terms with the idea that a man deemed sane and ‘normal’ could have simply allowed his mother to do what she did for 26 years without moving a muscle to stop her.
And as for Blanche? She never recovered. The trauma she underwent was just too serious to overcome.
She was broken beyond repair, and it’s no wonder — staying sane in the conditions she was forced to live under would have been not only near impossible but a fate too terrible to fathom.
Imagine a perfectly normal young woman of sound mind and full of life crammed in a small room and kept chained to a bed, forced to sit in her own filth, never seeing the light of day, never seeing another human being except for her darling mother who’d pop in to throw her leftovers barely enough to keep her body going. It was more than enough to drive anyone mad.
After all, the only way out she had left was precisely that — going out of her mind, as there was no other escape from her rancid prison. Her sanity slowly and inevitably abandoned her after years of indescribable suffering, leaving behind but a shell of a woman she once was.
As a result of her severe emotional trauma, she suffered from several mental disorders, including anorexia, schizophrenia, exhibitionism, and coprophilia, to the very end of her life.
What did her final years look like? Did she manage to find at least some peace for her tortured soul? Did she find kindness in people who took care of her? We’ll never know for sure.
Death found her in a psychiatric hospital to which she was committed after having been released from her hellish confinement. She was 64.
There was no possibility for a happy ending for Blanche. No fantastic turn of events to her favor. No magic cure for her pain. She was robbed of everything: her life, her youth, her love, and ultimately, her very mind.
Blanche was not to have a simple, ordinary life that would quietly disappear in the somber halls of time. Her life was to leave a distinct mark in history after all — a history of cruelty, abomination, and the abysmal depths the human mind can sink to. She would become known as La Séquestrée de Poitiers (The Abductee of Poitiers).
Lamentably, her case was not to be an oddity, a product of an exceptionally twisted mind that’s nothing short of an aberration, an exclusive occurrence that was never to happen again. Every now and then we’re shaken to our core over and time again by horror stories of child abuse, of pain and suffering inflicted by those who are supposed to be nearest and dearest.
And one cannot help but wonder how many more pages of history such as this shall be written in the tears and blood of the innocent.
