Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A true story that never ceases to shock me is that of Blanche Monnier, who was locked up by her own mother, Louise Monnier, in the attic of their house in the French town of Poitiers for 25 years, with the windows barricaded so that neither light nor sound could penetrate. Blanche Monnier would probably have died there if an anonymous letter had not been received by the Attorney General in Paris on May 19, 1901, stating that an old maid named Blanche Monnier had been held captive by her family for 25 years, half starved and lying in her own filth. To this day, the author of the letter that ended Blanche Monnier’s suffering remains unknown. Because of the letter, at 2:30 p.m. on May 23, 1901, the chief commissioner of Poitiers visited Louise Monnier’s house at 21 Rue de la Visitiation. When the commissioner rang the doorbell, a maid opened the door and referred him to her brother Marcel, who lived in the house opposite, as Madame Monnier was indisposed. The inspector sought him out and confronted him with the letter. But Blanche Monnier’s older brother Marcel, a renowned lawyer, considered this to be slander. However, the inspector remained persistent, and eventually both went to their mother’s house, who was now present and extremely reluctant to allow the commissioner into the house. The house made an extremely well-kept impression. But when the inspector reached the third floor, a foul smell assailed his nostrils from afar. As he approached the attic room, it became increasingly unbearable. The inspector, who had been given the room keys by Madame Monnier, unlocked the locked door and opened it. At that moment, a beastly stench hit him, turning his stomach. But as he covered his nose with a handkerchief and entered the 18-square-meter room, he was horrified. The scene he found surpassed even the worst horror movie he had ever seen. Chained to a filthy straw mat lay a naked woman, emaciated to the point of being skeletal, her skin covered in a hard crust of her own feces and food scraps, swarming with maggots. This woman was indeed Blanche Monnier, who was in a pitiful state of health and had to live in a room littered with trash, with cockroaches running around on the rotten wooden floor. No daylight penetrated the window, which the inspector could only open with great difficulty because of the chain lock. Blanche Monnier, now 50 years old, held her hands over her face when the commissioner opened the window, as she had not seen sunlight for 25 years. Blanche Monnier, who weighed only 25 kilograms, was immediately taken to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Her mother, now 75 years old, and her brother Marcel were immediately arrested. Both claimed to have locked Blanche up for her own safety, as she had become crazy and violent. They had managed to completely isolate Blanche Monnier from the outside world for 25 years. To explain Blanche Monnier’s disappearance, a rumor was spread that Blanche had unexpectedly moved abroad. Later, the family reported Blanche’s unexpected death, but she was actually locked up in the attic, vegetating away. No one helped Blanche Monnier. This changed when the maid, who had worked for the respected aristocratic family for 40 years and changed the sheet that caught Blanche Monnier’s feces and urine every day at around 9:30 p.m., retired. This loyal maid, who simply looked the other way, even received a gold medal for loyal service from a Catholic association at the instigation of Marcel Monnier. After that, new maids arrived who were less discreet and reported on the hidden Blanche Monnier. But it was the letter that finally freed Blanche Monnier from her suffering. She was born on March 1, 1849, in Poitiers and was the child of the respected noble family Monnier de Marconnay. Blanche Monnier was an exceptionally beautiful woman who had many admirers and had fallen in love with the penniless lawyer Victor Cameil, who was older and also a Republican. Of course, her royalist parents did not tolerate her association with this man, who was not of her social standing. That is why Louise Monnier is said to have locked up her daughter. Blanche Monnier had written on the wall of her room: “Make beauty, not love or freedom, always loneliness. One must live and die in prison all one’s life.” Perhaps her mother simply could not bear her daughter’s above-average beauty. The fact is that no one helped Blanche Monnier, neither her older brother Marcel, who visited her despite the beastly stench and revelled in it, nor her now deceased father, nor the domestic staff. She had only survived by escaping into a fantasy world. In this world, her room was a beautiful place she called Hinter-Malampia. Blanche Monnier, who had been given no chance of survival when she was freed and to whom Chaplain de Mouton had administered the last rites when she was admitted to hospital, miraculously survived. Blanche Monnier actually regained her strength and particularly enjoyed the sight of the bouquet of flowers that was placed in her room every day and which she loved to smell. Her mother died of a heart attack on June 7, 1901, 15 days after her arrest. At her funeral, there were vicious insults against the cruel mother, for whom her older brother Marcel blamed everything. She was a tyrant against whom he could not rebel. After six days of trial and the questioning of 102 witnesses, he was sentenced in October 1901 to 15 months’ imprisonment for deprivation of liberty and torture. However, he appealed and was actually acquitted on November 20, 1901, because failure to provide assistance was only a criminal offense in France from 1941 onwards. Blanche Monnier suffered from severe mental and physical problems as a result of her 25 years of solitary confinement in her own mother’s house, which is why she was placed in a psychiatric clinic in Blois, where she died on October 13, 1913, at the age of 64. Only a few months later, her older brother Marcel also passed away. To this day, the fate of Blanche Monnier touches people all over the world, and as is so often the case, the following applies here too: “It is not the world that is cruel, but the people who live in it.”
