Marie-Angélique Memmie LeBlanc

Marie-Angélique Memmie LeBlanc (* in today's Wisconsin , 1712; † December 15, 1775 in Paris ) was a so-called " wolf child " discovered and captured in 1731 in the vicinity of the village of Songy near Châlons-en-Champagne (northern France) .

The following important information is missing from this article or section:

The article contains many ambiguities. What happened after she was captured? What is speculated about their past life? Was she able to speak French when she was captured? See discussion.

Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Marie-Angélique learned to speak French ; numerous well-known scholars published reports of conversations with her in the following years. Carl von Linné took the girl as a further variation of a "wild man" ( Homo ferus ) in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae published in 1768 and referred to it there as Puella Campanica (" champagne girl").

Marie-Angélique got the name "Memmie", as she told Madame Hecquet, after the first bishop (3rd century) of the Diocese of Châlons , where she was resumed into civilization. On the other hand, Memmie le Moine was the name of her godfather, the head of the nursing home in Châlons, where she was housed in 1732.

Marie-Angélique was first seen in the company of another young woman (probably of black African origin) who seriously injured her in an argument. Their whereabouts afterwards remained unclear. In 1748 Julien Offray de La Mettrie repeated the rumor in his work The Human Machine that Marie-Angélique had eaten her companion.

Marie-Angélique died as a pensioner for the Queen of France.

On the basis of extensive archive material, the surgeon Serge Aroles (see secondary literature ) determined that the girl was born in what is now Wisconsin as a Fox Indian in 1712 and was accompanied by a French family - Madame de Courtemanche with three daughters - from what is now Canada ( Labrador ) South of France was brought. These four people apparently arrived in 1720 during the great plague epidemic prevailing there and stayed there until Marie-Angélique went on a ten-year wandering through the nature of France in 1721.

further reading

Primary literature

• Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet (co-author: Charles-Marie de la Condamine ): Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l'âge de dix ans . Paris 1755. - Full text in the Gutenberg project .
• Strange life and incidents of a girl of ten years, who grew up in the wilderness, recently found in the forest and afterwards became a nun, published by Frau H = = T. Frankfurt and Leipzig 1756. Full text at Google Books .
• An Account of a savage girl, caught wild in the woods of champagne. Translated from the French of Madam HT. With a preface, containing several particulars omitted in the original account . Edinburgh 1768. Full text on Google Books.

Secondary literature

• Serge Aroles : Marie-Angélique (Haut-Mississippi, 1712 – Paris, 1775): Survie et résurection d'une enfant perdue dix années en forêt . Charenton-le-pont , Terre éditions 2004, ISBN 2-915587-01-9 . - A biography of Marie-Angélique with facsimiles of 30 archival documents.
• Serge Aroles : L'Énigme des enfants-loups. Une certitude biologique maize un déni des archives. Editions Publibook, Paris 2007, ISBN 2-7483-3909-6 . - About wolf children in general, based on archive material .
• Julia Douthwaite : Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne". In: Eighteenth-Century Studies. Volume 28, Number 2, 1994-1995, pp. 163-192, JSTOR 2739199 .
• Marie-Angélique Leblanc: Monstrous Femininity. In: Julia V. Douthwaite: The wild girl, natural man, and the monster: dangerous experiments in the Age of Enlightenment. University of Chicago Press , 2002, ISBN 0-226-16056-4 , pp. 29-53.

Web links

• marie-angelique.com - Collection of source texts ( English , French with translations into English), bibliography , digitized copies of original documents (with tooltips on the content), artistic processing, ... also for similar cases.
• Marie-Angélique, l'enfant-loup. In: La Catalaunie dans tous ses états. October 7, 2007, accessed on December 1, 2014 (French, presents Marie-Angélique's first 19 years of life on the basis of Serge Aroles' archive finds with the historical background.). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage , p. 50. Text from Google Books.
2. ↑ Strange life and incidents of a girl who grew up in the wilderness , p. 26f. Text passage on Google Books.
3. ↑ AM N…: Lettre écrite de Châlons en champagne, le 9 December 1731, par M. AM. N… au sujet de la Fille Sauvage, trouvée aux environs de cette ville . In: Mercure de France . tape II , 1731, p. 2983-2991 ( passage ).
4. ↑ Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage , p. 12ff. Text passage on Google Books.
5. ↑ Strange life and incidents of a girl who grew up in the wilderness , p. 15ff. Text passage on Google Books.
6. ↑ Photo ( Memento of the original from July 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the document for the entry of the negro slave on www.marie-angelique.com. 
7. ↑ Text passage ( Memento of the original from October 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on www.marie-angelique.com. 
8. ↑ Photo ( Memento of the original from July 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of a document on www.marie-angelique.com along with other information ( memento of the original from July 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) : The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
9. ↑ Cf. fr: Peste de 1720 in the French Wikipedia.
10. ↑ See other documents at www.marie-angelique.com ( Memento of the original from July 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.