Raised by wolves

Feral children have fascinated and frightened people for centuries, raising questions about what it means to be human. Richard Sugg shares the stories of some of these wild children - and explains why their return to society was not always a happy one

- Richard Sugg

One of the pack

Mowgli is surrounded by wolves in a 1937 illustration from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. In the past, feral children have been found living with animals such as wolves and bears

Join me for a moment at a royal hunt in France, in 1737. Far ahead of the main pack of riders and dogs, one figure hurtles with incredible speed after fleeing hares and rabbits, bringing back prey to the main party before they can catch up. But look closer: the creature racing on all fours across the grass is not a dog but a girl of perhaps 15.

Her name was Memmie le Blanc, known as "the wild girl of Songi" after the village Songy, in north-eastern France, where she was captured in 1731. At that time, she had apparently slept easily in the branches of a tree, sung like a bird, and flown up and down tree trunks with the ease of a squirrel.

Local villagers (writes the author Michael Newton) fled from this feral child as if she were the devil itself. Meanwhile, Lord Monboddo, an early theorist of human evolution, took a more scientific interest in Memmie. When this girl learned (or recovered) language, she revealed that her wild life had not been an entirely easy one.

Ironically, though, it was her assimilation into French civilisation that nearly killed her. Wine and salt caused Memmie to lose her teeth, and heated rooms and cooked food made her dangerously ill. She recovered after a doctor prescribed live pigeons and chickens, from which she sucked the warm blood. On another occasion in a château kitchen she seized a rabbit, stripped off its skin in a flash and devoured it raw. Like other feral children wrenched into the human world, Memmie now learned shame and embarrassment chiefly from the nuns who sheltered her, and who were unable to wholly conceal their disgust at what she had been.