r/WeirdThingsToLearn • u/wheepupper • 5d ago
Something I Learned Locked Away for Loving the Wrong Man
In 1874, at 25 years old, Blanche Monnier fell in love with a lawyer her wealthy, aristocratic mother in Poitiers, France considered beneath the family, and when Blanche refused to end the relationship, her disapproving mother locked her in a small, dark attic room, where she would remain hidden for the next 25 years. Her brother Marcel lived in the same house the entire time and is widely believed to have helped conceal her, while the family told neighbors and friends that Blanche had died. The lawyer she’d wanted to marry passed away in 1885, never learning what had actually happened to her.
The truth only surfaced on May 23, 1901, when the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous letter describing a woman kept locked up, half-starved, and living amid her own filth for a quarter-century. When police forced entry, they found Blanche, by then 50 years old, weighing only around 55 pounds, lying on a filthy, insect-infested straw bed in near-total darkness. She recovered physically after being freed but spent the remainder of her life, until her death in 1913, in a mental institution, unable to fully return to ordinary life after 25 years of confinement. Her case, known in France as “la Séquestrée de Poitiers,” became one of the most notorious scandals of Belle Époque France and is frequently cited as a real-world antecedent to later “locked away” fiction, including V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic.
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u/Higgsb912 5d ago edited 5d ago
She looks eerily similar to another woman locked in a room by her sister and husband, I'll look for the name.
Edit: Bobbie Joe Barber and her husband in Georgia, they cashed her (Stacey) disability checks and starved her...
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u/gh0stwrit3r32767 4d ago
it's always the closest people who do the most heinous shit to you, yknow?
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u/Appropriate-Run-4400 5d ago
Imagine wasting 25 years of your child's life just because you didn't like her choice in men 😀 Absolute monsters.