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.
Life in the wilderness
This story is from the June 2022 edition of BBC History Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the June 2022 edition of BBC History Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The Aztecs at war
RHIANNON DAVIES discovers why war was so important to the Mesoamerican people - and why they believed a badly cooked meal could prevent a soldier from shooting straight
Towering achievement
NATHEN AMIN explores a 13th-century stronghold that was built to subdue independent-minded Welsh people, yet has since become a symbol of courage in the face of overwhelming odds
Eighteenth-century mushroom ketchup
ELEANOR BARNETT shares her instructions for making a flavourful sauce with roots in south-east Asia
Goodbye to the gilded age
JOHN JACOB WOOLF is won over by an exploration of the Edwardian era, which looks beyond the golden-era cliché to find a nation beset by a sense of unease
The power of the few
Subhadra Das's first book catches two particular waves in current publishing.
The 'badass' icon
One of the problems with biography, if an author is not careful, is that it can quickly become hagiography.
Ghosts of Germany's past
KATJA HOYER is impressed by a study of a nation's attempts to grapple with the crimes it perpetrated during the Second World War
A window onto England's soul
SARAH FOOT has high praise for a book that traces the evolution of English Christianity over the course of 1400 years, through the lives of its greatest thinkers
"There was a general perception that Queen Victoria's mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”
JUDITH FLANDERS talks to Rebecca Franks about her new book, which delves into the customs surrounding dying, death and mourning in Victorian Britain
"Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families"
HIDDEN HISTORIES... KAVITA PURI on the legacy of Canada's residential schools