May 23, 1901 Poitiers, France
Bones jutted from her pale, shriveled flesh.
Her hair was a matted, unwashed mess.
Cockroaches crawled across her belly.
She either didn’t have the strength to shoo them away or didn’t even care.
It was hard for the rescuers to look at her.
What a tragic waste of a life.
No trace of her former beauty could be found in the skeletal woman lying in her own filth
in the tiny attic room she had been locked in for the last twenty-five years.
Blanche Monnier was born on the 1st of March, 1849 in Poitiers, a city in west-central France,
about 186 miles (300km) from Paris.
The Monnier family lived comfortably in a spacious old house in a wealthy part of town.
They were aristocratic and well-respected; Blanche’s father Charles-Emile Monnier was
the dean of a local arts college.
Her mother Louise was strict and ran the household with an iron fist, but was involved in social
projects.
She even received an award from the Committee of Good Works for her generous financial contributions
to the city.
Blanche’s older brother Marcel was clever and eventually studied law.
As far as it is known, Blanche received the typical upbringing for a girl of her class,
learning social graces and how to manage a household.
She grew into a lovely young woman.
She had big lustrous eyes and a soft cloud of curly brown hair.
Blanche’s grace, beauty, and pleasant disposition attracted many potential suitors for marriage.
Of course, Louise wanted her daughter to marry the right kind of man.
She was strict about her daughter’s social calendar.
However, in 1874 when Blanche was 22, she met the love of her life.
An older, penniless lawyer, someone wholly unsuitable in her mother’s eyes.
Once her father passed away, Louise began to exert even greater control over her daughter.
But Blanche continued to meet her sweetheart in secret.
Gossip filtered back to her mother and Madame Monnier forbade Blanche from seeing her lover
again.
But that didn’t stop Blanche from sneaking out.
There were many heated arguments between mother and daughter.
When Blanche threatened to elope, her mother took action.
Late one night, Blanche returned home from seeing her lover.
By the dim light of a single candle, she crept through the hall and tiptoed up the stairs,
trying not to wake anyone.
Little did she know, Madame Monnier and Marcel were laying in wait for her at the top of
the stairs.
As Blanche reached the second floor, arms shot out from the darkness, grabbing her.
She shrieked and dropped her candle.
Covering her mouth she couldn't scream and wake the servants up, Marcel and Madame Monnier
forced a struggling Blanche through the house until they reached a small unused attic room.
They opened the door, shoved Blanche into the pitch-black room, and quickly locked the
door behind her.
Through the door, Louise told her daughter that if she wanted to come out, she must promise
to break up with her sweetheart.
Blanche screamed and beat on the door, twisting the knob, but it didn’t budge.
Soon she grew tired of screaming.
Blanche began to feel her way around the room.
She stumbled over a straw mattress and realized that her mother must have put it there.
Clearly, Blanche’s imprisonment had been planned.
She could hardly believe it.
She lay down on the uncomfortable straw mattress.
Tomorrow she would get out and deal with her mother, for now, she would rest.
Blanche woke up hours later, her mouth dry and her stomach rumbling.
She was sure it was daytime, yet the room was still pitch black.
She felt her way over to the door, it was still locked.
Determined to get out, Blanche continued exploring the room for something that could help her
get free, but her mother had made sure nothing was left in the room that could help her escape.
There were only musty pieces of old furniture.
Worst yet, Blanche discovered why there was absolutely no light in the room.
The shutters had been nailed shut to the windows.
Heavy curtains hung over those shutters, stopping any light that dared to enter in between the
cracks.
Suddenly Blanche heard footsteps approach the door.
She quickly stumbled over to the door and began to pound on it, demanding to be let
out.
Louise ignored her daughter’s orders and shoved something under the door.
She reiterated that Blanche would be let out when she promised to give up her sweetheart.
Then Blanche heard her mother’s rapid footsteps as she walked away.
Blanche dropped to her knees and felt for whatever her mother had pushed under the door.
Her fingers touched cloth; a napkin.
Inside was bread.
Madame Monnier’s plan was to keep Blanche imprisoned in the attic room until she promised
to end her relationship.
She thought her daughter would quickly relent.
However, a furious Blanche vowed to never give in to her mother’s demands.
Madame Monnier and Marcel continued to go about their regular lives.
When asked about Blanche, they usually gave short and obscure answers.
According to some, they told vague stories about her going to school in England.
As time went on, the stories changed.
In England, Blanche met someone, got married, and moved to a remote area of Scotland.
They brushed off concerns that Blanche never wrote.
According to others, Louise and Marcel claimed that Blanche had simply disappeared in the
middle of the night.
They pretended to be sad about her vanishing but did little to look for her.
In the early days of Blanche’s captivity, she would scream until she was hoarse and
pound on the door until her hands were bruised and bloody.
The neighbors were told that Madame Monnier was caring for a member of her extended family
who was mentally ill.
Considering the power and reputation of the Monnier family no one cared to or thought
to question otherwise.
It had been weeks since her mother had locked her in this prison.
No matter how much Blanche begged, she wouldn’t let her out.
Not even to go to the bathroom.
Blanche felt disgusting.
She itched.
She was ashamed of the way she smelled.
She had never gone this long without washing her hair.
Blanche wasn’t sure how long she’d been imprisoned, but she had been using a fingernail
to scratch marks in the wall when she received food.
That was the only way she could tell time was passing.
She couldn’t keep time by when she slept, because she hardly slept.
There were mice and insects in the room.
Sometimes she could hear them scrabbling around.
When she lay down bugs crawled on her.
The rare times Blanche finally managed to drift off to sleep, her dreams were horrible;
nightmarish, she’d jolt awake, but being awake was just as much of a nightmare as being
asleep.
Blanche’s sweetheart died in 1885, some 8 years after she disappeared; he never found
out what became of her.
Even after Blanche’s lover’s death, Madame Monnier continued to imprison her daughter.
She never let her out.
No one ever came in, not even to clean.
Blanche had no contact with the outside world and was isolated in her attic prison from
everyone and everything.
Her mother continued to feed her by sliding food under the edge of the door.
No one outside of the house knew about Madame Monnier’s twisted punishment.
Time passed.
Many forgot that a beautiful young woman named Blanche Monnier had ever existed.
But someone knew the Monnier family’s horrific secret.
On May 23, 1901, the Attorney General of Paris received an anonymous letter that revealed
Blanche’s horrible incarceration--25 years after Blanche had initially been forced into
the attic room.
In part, the letter said “Monsieur Attorney General: 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.”
The authorities went to the Monnier home to check things out.
Most of the house was fine, but in the hallway leading to the attic, the police could smell
a rotten stench coming from a padlocked room.
They smashed the padlock, broke the door down, and barged in.
The room was pitch black inside.
The smell was incredibly strong.
On the police superintendent’s order to open the windows, one of the policemen ripped
down the dusty, heavy curtains blocking the shutters.
As he yanked the barred shutters off their hinges, light flooded the room for the first
time in 25 years.
That’s when they saw Blanche.
In the corner, lying on a rotted straw mattress was a naked, severely malnourished woman.
Surrounding her was a crust of filth composed of excrement and bits of decayed vegetables,
rotting meat, and oyster shells.
Bugs were crawling over everything--including Blanche.
The air was so putrid that every minute or so the police had to run out of the room into
the hallway to get a breath of fresh air.
The police quickly wrapped Blanche in a blanket.
She was 51 years old now and quite fragile from her captivity; she weighed just 55 pounds
(24.9 kg).
She could neither stand nor walk on her own.
She cowered when they took her outside into the sunlight; she had not seen the sun in
decades.
She was transported to a local hospital.
In the miserable little attic room, investigators found words Blanche had scratched into the
wall related to her freedom.
At the hospital, Blanche was elated to have a bath and finally be clean.
She politely thanked the doctors and nurses helping her.
Madame Monnier and Marcel were arrested.
By now Louise was in her mid 70’s and suffering from unspecified heart problems.
The police had to keep her in the medical unit of the prison.
The press had a field day with the horrific discovery.
‘Beautiful girl punished for staying true to her sweetheart’ ‘Monstrous mother’s
cruel Punishment.’
The salacious headlines were endless.
Lurid pictures and sketches of Blanche being rescued were published in the newspapers.
Songs were composed about the Monniers.
Public perception was horrified, there was fascinated pity towards Blanche and anger
towards her terrible mother and brother.
Louise died 15 days after her arrest from heart complications.
She was well aware that her personal reputation and the name of the family was forever tarnished.
Allegedly she altered her will at the last and bequeathed the family’s wealth towards
the care of her daughter.
Marcel Monnier was left to face the courts by himself.
He had moved out of the family home several years before, building a successful law practice,
marrying, and having a daughter.
However Marcel and his young family lived nearby and he spent much time with his mother
at the family home.
From the beginning, he had been well aware of and helped with Blanche’s captivity.
Marcel’s defense was that he had tried to help his sister and make her life as comfortable
as possible, but his mother was in charge of the family, not him and she couldn’t
be reasoned with.
Horrific details came out during the trial.
Not only was Blanche held captive in a dark room with the shutters on the lone window
nailed shut, for most of the time she was chained to the bed.
She was not allowed to leave the room for any reason including going to the bathroom.
Marcel Monnier was initially convicted and sentenced to 15 months in prison for his role
in Blanche's imprisonment and mistreatment.
However, he was released on appeal.
He argued that he was never violent towards his sister.
There was no law in the French penal code that it was a crime to not free someone whom
you did not imprison yourself.
The courts were forced to drop all charges.
The public was enraged over the injustice of the case.
Marcel and his family ended up going into hiding to escape an angry mob determined to
mete out the punishment that was denied by the court system.
The years of captivity took their toll on Blanche, even after she was released she suffered
from several mental health problems.
She was diagnosed with various disorders, including anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia,
exhibitionism, and scatophilia.
Blanche was committed to the Dessaignes psychiatric hospital in Blois, France, and lived there
quietly until her death at age 64 in 1913.
The author of the anonymous letter to the Attorney General was never found, some thought
it was Marcel finally coming clean, but many historians think it was one of the Monnier
servants taking pity upon poor Blanche.
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