Humanity went through a very difficult 2020 amid a pandemic that killed more than 360,000 people worldwide and forced a highly complex measure: lockdowns for self-care.
This gave rise to many stories of people who, in the past, endured long periods of isolation with remarkable stoicism, distancing themselves from friends, life partners, and family — something clearly unnatural for human beings.
However, there were those who did not even have decent conditions, where even their own families turned their backs on them.
Blanche Monnier was a young woman from French high society at the end of the 19th century, a time when the wealthiest families formed clans and arranged marriages for convenience.
To this day, she is known as the Séquestrée de Poitiers (The Sequestered Woman of Poitiers), after having been locked in her bedroom for 25 years as punishment by her family.
Her story inspired numerous crime chronicles of the era, because when authorities finally found her after nearly three decades, she was in deplorable conditions: surrounded by feces, extremely emaciated, and showing symptoms of schizophrenia.
According to the newspaper El País, at age 25 Blanche told her family she intended to marry a lawyer from a Protestant family and son of a republican.
This did not sit well with her clan, who were staunch Catholics and monarchists, so they opposed the relationship.
Faced with the young woman’s insistence, her mother — a woman named Louise Monnier — chose to inflict the worst possible punishment: she locked her in her room so she would never again see the light of day. This action had the approval of her father, Charles-Émile, and her brother Marcel.
The writer André Gide, who published this story, noted that the other three family members continued living their lives as normally as possible, with the complicity of the domestic staff, who never said a word.
In fact, at first both Louise and Marcel told everyone they knew that the young woman had been kidnapped by thieves, while her fiancé died in 1885.
Her father also died two years later, making everyone else swear that the truth would never come out.
However, the story took a dramatic turn on May 23, 1901, when the Paris Prosecutor General received an anonymous letter reporting Blanche Monnier’s situation.
“I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious matter. I speak of an old maid who is locked in Madame Monnier’s house, half dead from hunger and living on a rotten mattress for the past twenty-five years — in a word, in her own filth,” the letter stated.
Gide recounts that this alarmed the authorities enormously, as it would be a scandal directly affecting one of the city’s most prominent families. Nevertheless, they went to investigate.
The police entered the house and found an elegantly furnished first floor. However, one of the officers noticed a foul smell of putrefaction coming from the third floor, so they headed there.
They finally came upon a room secured with three padlocks, which they broke immediately. Upon entering, they found the woman’s body. She was 52 years old at the time, looked frail, weighed only 25 kilograms (55 pounds), was surrounded by her own excrement, and said she was “hearing voices.”
“The woman appeared to be suffering from extreme malnutrition. She was lying completely naked on a rotten mattress. Around her was a crust formed of excrement and food remains. We also saw insects crawling across Miss Monnier’s bed. The air in the room was so unbearable that it was impossible for us to continue the investigation,” one of the contemporary reports stated.
Right there, she told them she had been locked up for 25 years, during which she was barely given food and no one cared about hygiene. Clearly shocked, the police transferred her to a hospital in Poitiers.
The young woman’s mother and brother were taken to jail. In Louise’s case, she never faced trial because she died a few months later from cardiac arrest. Marcel, meanwhile, was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
For her part, Blanche was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Blois, where she spent the last 12 years of her life in treatment. This time, at least, she could finally see sunlight again.
There was never an official explanation for the family’s decision, although people close to them told newspapers of the time that they felt ashamed of the young woman because she suffered from schizophrenia.
