Lust in the Dust

In 1901, French authorities received the following letter:

Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half starved, and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth.

Police immediately went to investigate the home and found a severely underweight Blanche Monnier hiding under foul, bug-infested sheets, completely naked and terrified, in a padlocked room. Now 49-years-old, Blanche had not seen the light of day for 25 years. Upon discovering that Blanche had been in a relationship with someone her mother did not approve of, she was forced to live locked up among pests, rats, filth, and her own excrement for over two decades. When she was first found, Blanche weighed only 55 pounds.

“I separated the joints, the arm joints, the leg joints, and had to do two boilings. I think I used four boxes of Soilex for each one, put in the upper portion of the body and boiled that for about two hours and then the lower portion for another two hours. The Soilex removes all the flesh, turns it into a jelly like-like substance and it just rinses off. Then I laid the clean bones in a light bleach solution, left them there for a day and spread them out on either newspaper or cloth and let them dry for about a week in the bedroom.”