There has likely never been a more extreme rags-to-riches story than Marie Angelique Leblanc’s
From stealing food and living in the forest to French courtier
In 1731, a wild woman in the Champagne region of France was seen stealing apples from a tree. She wore skins and rags, and carried a club. According to Julia V. Douthwaite’s book The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, when the villagers set their bulldog on the girl, she immediately killed it “with one blow before scaling the trees and swinging, branch to branch back into the woods.” A nobleman ordered that she be caught and when she was, she made animal cries, “to the terror and astonishment of everyone who heard her,” according to a source at the time. Otherwise, she couldn’t speak. Guesses about her age ranged anywhere from 10 to 18.
It was impossible to imagine, but in the coming decades, this very same person would become a woman of influence in the Parisian courts, hold audiences with royalty, and attract admirers the world over.
In 1755, the biographer Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet chronicled the wild woman’s story, apparently with the help of Leblanc herself, in An Account of a Savage Girl. She wrote that when Leblanc was seven or eight years old, she was painted black and sold as a slave somewhere near Wisconsin and put on a boat headed for France. (Contemporary scholars usually identify Leblanc as Sioux). But along the way, the boat was shipwrecked, and Leblanc and another girl washed up on shore in France. The girls became completely wild, wearing only rags and skins and sleeping in the tops of trees. When they were hungry, they dug roots out of the ground with their hands. They killed whatever game they could find, squirrels or foxes, ate the animals raw and drank their blood. They learned to make bird calls. Slowly the wilderness seemed to change them. Her time in the wild changed her body. Leblanc’s thumbs were noticeably broader. She became almost entirely impervious to the cold. Leblanc left the girl and struck out on her own after they fought over a possession.
Shortly after her capture, she was baptized and brought to a hospital, and from there she seemed to fall apart. All of her teeth fell out. Leblanc struggled to eat cooked foods offered to her in the hospital, preferring instead rabbit blood and raw frogs. Previously, she had climbed and run in the wild; now in this “humanized” environment, she hardly moved.
Eventually, once she regained her health — unlike many other feral children who had “missed the window” for learning language — Leblanc became fluent in French. She was an object of curiosity. People all over the world came to see her. She received visits and letters from royalty. A duke provided her with a generous allowance, which enabled her to move to Paris where she briefly became a nun. When he died in 1752, she left the convent in search of cheaper lodging, but remained well connected among the social elite, even having an hour-long audience with the Queen Marie, wife of Louis XV of France.
To members of the French court, Leblanc was not just a curiosity, but an important opportunity to express and confirm their views on race. Her reform was a statement about the supremacy of the Western Christian way of life. Douthwaite notes her name, Leblanc, meaning white, suggested that it was not just her time in the wild that the French hoped to scrub her of, but also her heritage. After she was captured, she was seen by a doctor who bled her and wanted to “put French blood in her veins.” Reports from the time were quick to declare that she was not French, but likely from a French colony, as though a “true” Frenchwoman would never be “reduced” to such behaviors.
The reform of feral children was an idea of particularly zealous appeal in colonizing countries. Such children were taken in by missionaries or soldiers, the most fervent proselytizers of Western civilization. Non Europeans were already seen as animals, but the feral child was a representative of a “savage” race removed entirely from the “humanizing” effects of Western civilization. They required additional elbow grease. In Leblanc’s case, this was taken quite literally. The people who found her seemed to want to scrub the wildness out of her. As Douthwaite wrote, “After several washings, her skin became white.”
And Leblanc was doubly offensive. She was not just a subversion of what humans were supposed to be, but also what women were supposed to be. As Douthwaite explained, European women’s bodies in the 18th century were highly regulated: “Silence, immobility, physical constraint, and social surveillance formed the guiding principles in female pedagogy.” The “civilized” woman’s body was not her own. It’s easy to imagine how unnerving the sight of a powerful woman beating a dog to death was to the French men who captured her.
As Douthwaite notes, while feral boys of this era, such as Victor of Aveyron and John of Liege, were subjected to rigorous intellectual exercises, most of Leblanc’s reentry to society was premised on bodily restraint in convents or hospitals, despite the fact that she appeared to be incredibly intelligent.
When Homassel-Hecquet saw Leblanc in 1765, she found her “retaining nothing of the savage.” She had successfully made the transition from a screeching wild girl to a woman of influence in the Parisian court. She died in 1775, a wealthy woman, mostly preferring to wear silk and velvet, though still maintaining “a certain wildness in her look.”
