CHAPTER THREE

Lord Monboddo and the Savage Girl

I: The Savage Girl

Into the dangerous world I leapt …

William Blake, ‘Infant Sorrow’, Songs of Experience

She came to the village in the late summer evening, as the September twilight fell. The first ones to see her took fright, crying out that the devil had come to Songi, and fled into their houses, securing their doors and windows against her.

She was armed with a small club, thicker at one end than the other. One of the villagers set a bulldog in an iron collar upon her, hoping to drive her away; but when she saw the enraged dog running at her, she calmly held her ground, gripping hold of the little club and stretching herself to one side so as to give more force to her blow. The dog snarled closer and closer, its teeth bared; but just as it was within range, with all her strength she brought the club down on to the beast’s head. With that single blow the dog was dead and, ecstatic with victory, she jumped several times over the bloody carcass. She then tried the door of one of the houses, but it was locked fast. So she ran back eastwards into the countryside towards the River Marne, clambered up into a tree and fell asleep among the leafy branches.

She was perhaps nine or ten years old. Her feet were bare, but she wore a scanty dress of rags and skins, and on her hair a gourd leaf. Her face and hands were ‘black as a Negroe’s’ the villagers said. Perhaps it was thirst that had made her abandon the refuge of the woods and risk this foray into Songi. It was the end of a long, burning summer and water was scarce in the arid countryside. It was not the first time she had been spotted near Songi: a shepherd had seen her some time before around the vineyards outside the village, skinning and eating frogs, and chewing leaves.

They quickly took word of the savage girl to the Viscount d’Epinoy who was honeymooning just then at his chateau at Songi with his new bride, the beautiful former Mademoiselle Lannoy. His curiosity aroused, he gave orders to the villagers to catch the child – particularly charging the shepherd who had discovered her those weeks before with responsibility for finding her.

One of the cannier villagers came up with a cunning plan for taking her. Guessing that the girl must be thirsty, he advised that they should place a pitcher of water at the foot of the tree in which she was still sleeping, tempting her to come down from her hiding place to drink. The villagers stole up to the tree, left the water there as advised, and retreated some distance so that they could watch the young savage unobserved. Sure enough, some little time later the girl crept down from her perch in the branches and went to drink from the pitcher, plunging her chin into the water and lapping at it like a cat. But something startled her, and before any of them could reach her, she darted up the trunk and into the branches right to the very top of the tree.

Once again the canny villager suggested a stratagem. He told them that they should place a woman and some children near the tree, as these would be less intimidating to the girl than the men, and that they should smile to her and placidly act out a show of great friendliness. The villagers did as he said: a woman with a child in her arms approached the tree, carrying root vegetables and two fishes in her hands. She held out the food to the savage, who, pressed by hunger, came down part of the way, before taking fright and scurrying back once more to safety. The woman calmly persisted in her gentle invitation, smiling and gesturing her friendship by laying her hand upon her breast ‘as if to assure her that she loved her, and would do her no harm’.1 Betrayed into trust, the girl slipped down from her place of refuge to receive the fishes and vegetables that were offered to her. The woman continued to entice her, but moved imperceptibly away, still smiling and acting out for the girl her generous love. The girl followed her further and further from the tree; and the men who had lain in wait seized their chance to spring out from hiding and take her by force.

They took her to the chateau. She was brought to the kitchen while the Viscount was told of her arrival. The cook was just then dressing some fowls for the Viscount’s dinner. Before anyone knew what was happening the girl flew at the dead birds and had one of them held tight in her teeth, tearing at the raw meat. M d’Epinoy arrived and, seeing what and how she was eating, ordered that she should be given an unskinned rabbit: the little girl instantly stripped its skin and devoured it.

They examined her and questioned her, but she could not understand a word of French. At first they assumed she was black. However, once they had washed her several times, they found that she was white, her apparent blackness being the result of dirt and, possibly, paint. Her skin was a little dark-complexioned perhaps, but the flesh on her upper arms and on her breast was white. Her hands were oddly shaped, the palms being as small and neat as any little girl’s, while the fingers and thumbs were curiously enlarged. Later they conjectured that this formation was the result of leaping from one tree to another, like a squirrel, her strong hands grabbing at the branches.

She wore a necklace, some pendants, and a pouch fixed to a large animal skin that was wrapped around her body and hung down round her knees. In the pouch were a club and a small knife, inscribed with strange characters, unfamiliar to everyone.

The Viscount d’Epinoy was the first among several dignitaries who took up the savage girl’s cause. He gave her over to the care of the shepherd who had first seen her, being anxious that she should be well looked after, and offering the man handsome payment. In order to tame her, the shepherd kept her closely confined in his house, so that sometimes she was driven to make desperate attempts to escape, scouring out holes in the walls or in the tiles of the roof. Once outside, she would run upon the rooftop, unconcerned whether she fell or not, in that way evading capture; or sometimes she squeezed herself through holes and openings so narrow as to arouse the wonder of her guardians and pursuers. In this way, on one evening she escaped in the midst of a severe frost and snow storm. Fearing M d’Epinoy’s anger, the shepherd’s family was thrown into a panic of anxiety about the young savage and searched every corner of the house to find her, never supposing that in such freezing weather she would have dared to return to the snowbound countryside. At last they gave up their search in utter dejection, only then to spy the girl sheltering from the swirling snow in the leafless upper branches of a winter tree.

A great number of visitors came to M d’Epinoy in order to see the wild girl for themselves. They watched her digging for roots in the gardens, using only her thumb and forefinger to scour out rapidly a deep hole, or fishing in the ditches, or climbing to the very tops of the trees and there imitating the songs of birds. The quickness of her eyes was amazing too: ‘Their movement was so extremely quick; and their sight so sharp, that they might be said to see in the same instant on every side…’2

The villagers began to call her ‘the shepherd’s beast’. However, either because M d’Epinoy began to fear for the education of his charge, or because the shepherd no longer felt able to support such a wayward child, on 30 October of that same year (1731) the girl was taken to the hospital general of St Maur in the nearby town of Chalons, one of the largest towns in that region of Champagne. (However, she appears to have continued to spend much of the next two years at Songi with the shepherd and his family, often staying with the Viscount d’Epinoy at his chateau.)

They began to fit her for the manners of social life, but there were many setbacks in her domestication. When M d’Epinoy received guests, he would send for the young savage, who increasingly proved of a happy and amiable disposition. On one occasion she was brought to the chateau for a great feast. Observing that there were no dishes fit for her to eat, everything being cooked, she ran outside to the Viscount’s ponds and came back laden with frogs, which she distributed among the guests. When the other guests tried to throw away the frogs she’d brought them, she gathered them all up together and threw them back again on to the dinner plates and table.

At first, she had a horror of being touched. She still could not speak, and could only express herself through squeaking cries, brought on by the harsh treatment she sometimes underwent; but it was when someone made as if to touch her that she would shriek and her restless eyes would grow more wild.

Once, while she was staying briefly at the hospital of St Maur, a man attempted to touch her. She was in the house of M de Beaupré, the Intendant of the province of Champagne. The man – a visitor – had heard of her distress at being touched by a stranger, but resolved nonetheless that he would embrace her. He found her happily standing and eating raw beef in one of the upper rooms. Before approaching her he had some of her familiar attendants contrive to catch hold of her clothes; he then advanced towards her and laid hold of her arm. Enraged, she immediately struck him with the hand that clasped the chunk of meat with such violent force that he fell back stunned and momentarily blinded, hardly able to stand. Then, in an instant of intense fear, she fought her way free of their hands and sprang for the window, intending to jump down and make her escape to the trees and river beyond; but they caught her and held her fast, and kept her there.

By slow degrees, the girl grew more tame. The Viscount d’Epinoy grew increasingly fond of her: she was his girl, the one he protected and had rescued from the harsh life of the abandoned. A bond grew between them. Her mouth was strangely small and round and when she laughed, her upper lip trembled and she drew her breath inwards.3 She began to learn to talk, acquiring French slowly but not with as much difficulty as might be expected. From this, some of her teachers wondered if she had not already been among French speakers. As to her original language, this was now completely lost.

At St Maur, they began the next step in her reclamation, first attempting to wean her off her savage diet. The Viscount d’Epinoy had taken great care to keep her fed with the root vegetables and raw meat that she so loved, but as she began to spend more time in the hospital of St Maur she was fed increasingly on cooked meats. At first they gave her wine to drink and food preserved with salt. The unforeseen result was the loss of her teeth and her nails – all of which were kept as treasures for the curious. Salted bread pained her; biscuits and cooked meat made her vomit, even cough up blood. A physician came and bled her severely, saying that it was necessary to get some French blood into her veins. She began to experience terrible pains in her stomach, bowels and throat, and soon her health was so bad that they hurried to receive her into the Roman Catholic Church, lest she should die unbaptized. So on 16 June 1732, in the parish church of St Sulpice in Chalons, they baptized her Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc.

Viscount d’Epinoy was terrified lest she might die. He hurriedly sent for a doctor, who advised that she should be allowed to eat raw meat from time to time. However, she was now too ill to eat even her accustomed food, and could only chew at the pieces of flesh, sucking what juice she could from the meat. At other times she was brought a live chicken or pigeon from which she sucked the warm blood, which revivifying ‘licquor’ aided her slow recovery; though the illness she went through at this time permanently weakened her health.

The Viscount loved his little savage, but he died within a year or so of her capture. If he had lived, how differently might Memmie’s later life have gone; but it was her fate always to lose or be dropped by her protectors. On his death the savage girl was put in the care of the Convent des régentes at Chalons. For a while, the girl’s fate hung in the balance: the Viscount’s widow had a whim that the girl should live with her, and be brought up to a life of fashion and elegance; but the superior at the convent fought for Memmie to remain in the holy seclusion of the cloister. Mme Epinoy was persuaded and Memmie stayed where she was.

There she learned to sew and to do Dresden work and be weaned from her wild pursuits. The curates at Songi told her that it was not fitting for girls to swim or to climb trees; she began to abstain from doing both.

Her next encounter with a possible champion in the nobility came in 1737. The Queen of Poland, the mother of Maria, the Queen of France, was travelling through Champagne to take possession of the Duchy of Lorraine. Having heard of the savage girl still living in the convent at Chalons, the Queen ordered that she should be brought before her.

Marie-Angélique, familiarly known as ‘Memmie’ (after either her godfather or the first bishop of Chalons), was now about fifteen years old, but her voice and behaviour were like those of a child of four or five. Her voice was weak though shrill and piercing; she could speak very few words, and those confused and brokenly expressed, so that often she was at a loss to convey her meaning. Her disposition was childlike and fawning, her attention directed to those who caressed her most. Struck by her childish softness, the Queen caressed her extremely, and Memmie dutifully and wonderingly watched her.

They told the Queen how Memmie ran as swiftly as the wind. It may be true that her running was ungainly, but it was also inexpressibly agile. She did not so much run as gallop, not at all putting one foot down and then the other, but skipping, jumping, almost flying along, at such speed that it was hard for the eye to follow. To run beside her would be impossible. The Queen was intrigued and declared that she wished to take Memmie hunting with her. Out in the countryside again, Memmie was her old self and ran in pursuit of the hares and rabbits that the royal entourage started – chased them, caught up with them, took them and, running back at just the same pace, brought them, still warm and bloody, to the waiting Queen.

The Queen was impressed: she resolved to take the girl with her to Nancy, where she would leave her in the care of the convent there; but the nuns begged that the Queen should not disturb Memmie by taking her from her life at Chalons. The Queen listened to their pleas and acquiesced. However, she promised instead to write in Memmie’s favour to her daugher, the Queen of France. With the letter she enclosed a strange plant made of artificial flowers that Memmie had made herself and presented to her – an art in which she had already acquired great skill.

We know little of what happened to Memmie over the next ten years. She learned how to speak French fluently; she willed herself to lose her savageness. The traces of her savage girlhood disappeared; she grew into a young woman.

She almost became a nun. Only the consciousness that the others at the convent had seen her in her wild state kept her from making the final commitment. A complicated shame possessed her: she could not bear the insinuating glances of the nuns, reminding her always of what she had been. So, in September 1747, she left Chalons to go to the convent at St Menehold, where the people would be strangers.

However, she could not so easily escape her past. On her arrival at St Menehold, just as she entered the inn there, she met a M La Condamine, a fastidiously elegant and aristocratic middle-aged gentleman, his good looks marred slightly by smallpox scars. The meeting appeared fortuitous; he was friendly and courteous and dined with her and the hostess. What she did not know was that La Condamine had gone there simply in order to meet her.

As one of the most famous scientists of Europe, La Condamine was to prove a valuable ally for Memmie. Of particular importance for her cause was La Condamine’s famous scepticism: he had especially impressed English readers by discrediting the miracle of the yearly liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius, and that despite being himself ‘a Papist’.4 For the sceptics of the time, to have such a rigorous empiricist on Memmie’s side would prove sufficient gaurantee for the truth of her story.

La Condamine had returned only two years before from a gloriously successful expedition to the torrid zone of South America, where he had measured the circumference of the earth at the Equator. Having set out in 1735, La Condamine and his fellow scientists, Godin, the astronomer, and Bougeur, decided to head back to France by separate routes, thereby multiplying their opportunities for discovery. La Condamine, characteristically, took the longest and most difficult route home, deciding that he would map the River Amazon. Judging from his writings on the Indians he met there, we may assume that it was not romantic regard for the ‘savage’ that drew La Condamine to Memmie. He describes the natives he encountered in the rainforest as gluttonous, narrow-minded, cowardly (except when drunk), idle, incapable of foresight or reflection, sometimes joyful in an immoderate, childish way but generally stolidly insensible – in short, passing their lives without thought and growing old ‘without having taken leave of infancy’.5

Through La Condamine’s offices Memmie left St Menehold and went instead to the convent of the Nouvelles Catholiques in the Rue St Anne in Paris, where she was to be supported by the Duke of Orléans (who had met Memmie in 1744). She advanced in her religious education, received confirmation and for the first time attended mass. She then moved to another Parisian convent (of the Visitation, at Chaillot) and again made preparations for becoming a nun; but just then disaster fell. A window at the convent collapsed and struck her hard upon the head; she fell ill, and once again her life was in danger. Memmie was taken from the convent to the house of the Hospitalières in the suburb St Marceau where she could receive the best available medical help, the Duke of Orléans paying all her expenses. Once again, however, Memmie’s luck with beneficiaries took its usual bad turn: just at the most crucial moment the Duke himself died. Memmie was left stranded: sick, friendless and penniless, her hopes thwarted and her health lost.

She spent the next years in destitution, ill health and poverty, until by another stroke of good fortune she met a benefactress in the shape of her biographer, Madame Hecquet, the woman whose account of Memmie Le Blanc’s life has preserved her story for posterity – a work published in 1755 as Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans. Here is how Madame Hecquet describes their first meeting:

It was in these disagreeable circumstances that I saw her for the first time, November 1752. They were hardly mended, when Le Blanc had recovered as much strength as to be able to come herself to tell me, that the Duke of Orléans, the inheritor of his father’s virtues, had undertaken to pay the nine months board that had fallen due to her since his father’s death, and that she had besides some reason to hope to be put on that Prince’s list, for a yearly pension of 200 livres for life; adding, at the same time, that until this point should be settled, which could not happen till the beginning of the following year, she had accepted of a small apartment, which a person she mentioned had offered her. [This is probably a reference to La Condamine.] But how, says I, do you propose to subsist in this apartment for two months, and perhaps more, in your sickly situation? For what purpose, answered she, with a firmness and confidence that surprised me, has God brought me from among wild beasts and made me a Christian? not surely, afterwards to abandon, and suffer me to perish for hunger, that is impossible; I know no other father but him, nor no other mother but the blessed Virgin; their providence therefore will support me.6

The simplicity and piety of Mademoiselle Le Blanc’s answer chastened Madame Hecquet; and yet there was something in Memmie that made her wonder. Her history since that September evening when she had arrived in Songi was clear enough; but what of those years before, that were empty, dark and speechless? Where had she come from? How had she lived? And, above all, there was the question of the inner identity of this woman before her – ill, sallow, near enough thirty years old. They had called her Mademoiselle Le Blanc, they had given her the name Memmie; but what did such names mean in face of the strange mystery of those nine missing years? Who was she really?

II: The Unhappiest One

The unhappiest one will always, therefore, be found among the unhappy rememberers …

Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Unhappiest One’, Either, Or

James Burnett, the future Lord Monboddo, had been in Paris for eight months when, on Friday 28 March 1765, he first saw and conversed with Mademoiselle Memmie Le Blanc. With his clerk, William Robertson, he had left their hotel, the Hôtel d’Espaine on the Rue Guénégaut, and crossed over the river from the Quartier de St Germain des Près to the Rue St Antoine, where Memmie now lived in an apartment. Of all the men introduced to Memmie, none could have been more excited in anticipation than Burnett.

La Condamine was to make the introduction and so took the short journey with them. La Condamine made a point of mentioning Mademoiselle Le Blanc to men of distinction, to some of whom he likewise introduced her. Among such men James Burnett was to prove crucially significant in Memmie’s history.

La Condamine was now sixty-four years old and very different from the figure whom Memmie had first met some eighteen years before. His South American travels had wrecked his health: he was practically deaf and carried an ear trumpet everywhere he went. On his return from the Amazon his left leg had been partially lame, so that when he first met Memmie he was using a cane. Now he was completely paralysed, though no medical reason could be discovered for his incapacity.

Memmie herself was also unwell. Her apartment on the Rue St Antoine faced the old road to the Temple, between the back of the Hôtel de Ville and the church of St Gervais. It was potentially a good place to try to earn a living as a public curiosity, which is what Memmie was at this time attempting to do. The Rue St Antoine, running from Porte St Antoine in the east to Place Baudoyers in the west, was one of the largest and most beautiful streets in Paris, and one of the best known to travellers, as it was here that the ambassadors made their entrées and where public festivities took place. The district northwards was busy but austere – the respectable home of Parisian lawyers. Towards the Tuileries or at the city walls it was customary for ‘freaks’, showmen, rope-dancers, tumblers, mountebanks, purveyors of curiosities and sleight-of-hand people to call down from the windows of their houses to passers-by on the street, enticing them inside for their entertainment; but Memmie was mostly too ill and too retired for this, and her apartment faced away from the street, looking back on to the houses between herself and the river.

Unsuccessful in this way, she supported herself by making artificial flowers and by selling copies of Madame Hecquet’s book of her life. On its publication the book had not done well and Memmie owned most of the copies, making a small profit by peddling them to the curious. She can’t have sold many books in that room of hers. Her life must have been very hard; apart from Burnett, no other visitor to Paris makes any mention of her; she is not listed as a curiosity to be visited in English guidebooks or in contemporary descriptions of Paris. Her life was hidden.

However, for James Burnett, long fascinated by the study of the primitive origins of humanity, it seemed that he was now to have the chance to meet a living, breathing embodiment of such origins. She was, he already knew, the key to a mystery. Her body, her life, opened up for the philosophical observer the image of essential humanity. Who would not take a day off from his stressful and pressing legal work to view such a creature? He would have travelled to France in any case to seize such a marvellous and unrepeatable chance.

Considering La Condamine’s mysterious paralysis, it must have been hard work to climb up to the third-floor apartment on that early spring day. Was what they then found a disappointment? She was ill, middle-aged, forgotten by the world at large. Her health had been permanently ruined at the time of her capture – by being forbidden to swim, Mademoiselle Memmie Le Blanc explained, and by the cooked foods they had charitably forced her to eat. All that was extraordinary about her appeared to have gone: she could neither run like the wind, nor sing like a nightingale, nor climb like a squirrel. By a conscious effort she had slowed the quickness in her eyes. She was merely herself. Perhaps only Burnett perceived how extraordinary this ‘mere’ self was, what miracles she represented. For the others there was just the distended belly of the savage and a trace of wildness in her look.

Burnett now sat, facing Memmie Le Blanc. How had she come to be in Songi? Where had she come from? And how had she managed to live in the woods of France? Surrounded by her visitors, Memmie talked and they listened; on his return to the Hôtel d’Espaine Burnett wrote down all that she had told him:

She supposed that she must have been only seven or eight years of age when she had been snatched away from her own country. She had been put aboard a great ship and carried off to a warm country. There they had sold her for a slave, but not before they had first painted her black all over. For there were many black slaves then, taken across the sea in great ships. In the hot country she had been put on board another ship and on that ship her master had put her to needlework, and if she would not work he had beaten her. But her mistress had been kind to her and would hide her away. Then the ship had been wrecked and the crew had all taken to the boat; but she and a negro girl had been left to live as they could. They had swum from the sinking ship, but because the negro girl could not swim so well as she, she had helped her, and the negro girl had kept herself from drowning by holding on to her foot.

So they had got to the shore. Then they had travelled a great way, moving only by night so that no one would see them and sleeping all through the day in the very tops of trees; and they had eaten roots, which they had dug out from the ground. When they could they had caught game and eaten it raw with the blood still warm, like beasts of prey; and once she had killed a fox, but the flesh had been bad to eat, so instead she had sucked the blood from it.

She had learned to imitate birdsong, for that was the only music known in her country; but she could not speak with the negro girl, for neither had known the other’s language. For then she had known how to speak, though afterwards she had forgotten all the words she had known; and so they could only talk with each other by signs and by the wildest cries, such as had frightened the French people when she was caught.

Two or three days before she had been taken, they had passed across a great river; and there, unknown to the two girls, a man had been watching them from the woods, and seeing only the two black heads of the girls in the water he had mistaken them for two water cocks, and shot at them. But the man had missed them, and the sound of the gun had made them dive down and swim away out of reach of the danger.

When they had come out on the riverbank she had had a fish in each hand and an eel in her teeth; and she and the negro girl had eaten them up raw and gone on into the country away from the river. ‘Soon after, she who is now become Mademoiselle Le Blanc, perceived the first a chaplet on the ground, which no doubt had been dropt by some passenger. Whether the novelty of the object delighted her, or whether it brought to her remembrance something of the same kind that she had seen before, is not known…’7 And she immediately broke into dancing. As she was scared that her companion would take the chaplet, she reached to pick it up; but the negro girl, seeing her do so, struck her outstretched hand as hard as she could with the club she carried. And although her hand was hurt badly, she returned the blow, striking the negro girl on her brow. The negro girl fell to the ground and she was screaming; and the wound bled and she was touched with compassion about what she had done and ran in search of some frogs. When she found one she stripped off the skin and spread it upon the girl’s brow to staunch the wound, binding the dressing in place with the thread from the bark of a tree.

With this the two companions wordlessly separated. The wounded girl took the way back to the river and the victorious one the path towards Songi; but she never said if she felt any loneliness then, nor anything of the pain and fear she felt on the day the French people trapped her.

Memmie gave this account on the first of many visits Burnett was to pay her. He was eager to have many more such conversations with her, for she was the greatest curiosity he had ever seen – a woman from the beginning of things, an atavism, a remembrance of all that we have lost. Steadily, determinedly, Burnett turned all his scepticism, shrewdness and philosophical fancy into two perhaps insoluble inquiries: who was Memmie Le Blanc? and where had she come from? And, more vitally, a greater question was forming in his mind: what could she tell him of the greatest mystery of all – the mystery of the origin of human nature?

III: A Paradoxical Man

He was much pleased with Lord Monboddo to-day. He said, he would have pardoned him for a few paradoxes, when he had found so much that was good. But that, from his appearance in London, he thought him all paradox, which would not do …

Samuel Johnson on James Burnett, in James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

James Burnett’s obsession with Memmie Le Blanc began on that spring day. For Burnett was pressed with a more than intellectual hunger. He knew that the truth lay in Memmie, though concealed, and he clung to her life in search of that answer.

There may have been other, more obviously personal reasons for Burnett’s fascination with Memmie. He was in France to secure from hostile forces the inheritance of a remote relative of his, the glamorous orphan, Lord Archibald Douglas. While he was in France, Burnett’s own mother died. He turned from his grief to his investigations into the life of Memmie and to the writing of an essay on Aristotle and intellectual elites. Burnett suffered from the abiding fault of many overthoughtful men: his life too readily turned into abstractions to shelter him from the blunt sufferings of experience. Yet in his captivation by Memmie Le Blanc we see a man forcefully identifying himself with the bereft. In Memmie’s abandonment there must have existed a dark comparison with his own losses.

A satirical caricature by John Kay conveys Burnett’s intense thoughtfulness. He sits writing at a desk, dressed in a black tailcoat with white cuffs and collar, wearing a grey powdered wig parted in the middle with heavy bunches at each side. His elbow rests on the table and he leans forward a little, a long finger pressed thoughtfully, rigidly, against his left cheek. A squashed, slightly crabbed face; the nose jutting over a sceptical mouth and the eyes piercing and rather sad, though the laugh-lines are strongly marked. His legs are crossed, daintily stockinged, and his neat, small feet are pointed in black buckled shoes. Behind him there is a picture on a wall in which men with tails dance in a ring – a playful image for a man too eccentric to play.

All who met Burnett commented on his sprightliness and slim figure – the result of a philosophical abstemiousness. In imitation of the Ancients, he ate frugally and drank little: it was typical of his rigour that Burnett should live out his stoical principles in a manner that contemporaries found alternately laudable and ludicrous. In these habits he might be said to have lived out in actuality an otherwise intellectual pursuit of the primitive. For Burnett, there was little distance between thought and action: meeting Memmie was another way in which abstruse research would lead to actual, living involvement.

A clearer portrait of Burnett emerges in James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Boswell himself stands at the edge of our story; some months after Burnett had met Memmie, Boswell arrived in Paris, where, like Burnett before him, he also heard of his mother’s death. Where Burnett had studied, Boswell dissipated grief by heading straight for a brothel. The differences in the two men only added piquancy to their friendship: Boswell was great at remorse and, though inconsistent and promiscuous, attached himself limpet-like to moral, thoughtful, older men.

In his account of their tour of Scotland, Boswell described a visit paid in 1773 by himself and Samuel Johnson to Burnett (who had been made Lord Monboddo in 1767). Johnson and Burnett were old intellectual enemies, but Boswell guessed correctly that their surface antipathy masked a deeper affinity. Burnett met them at the gates of Monboddo castle, informally dressed in a rustic suit. The two great men spoke of Homer and of the uses of biography. Johnson tested Burnett’s young son, Arthur, on his Latin knowledge, and was suitably impressed by the boy’s learning. Burnett’s black servant, Gory, also struck Johnson: Boswell ‘observed how curious it was to see an African in the north of Scotland, with little or no difference of manners from those of the natives’.8 Burnett himself comes across as affable, courteous, unaffected but nonetheless shrewd.

However, Burnett’s home – the place called Monboddo – fares less well in Boswell’s narrative. Lost in the bleakness of the Grampian Hills, as they rode on to Burnett’s house, Johnson wonderingly and grumpily remarked how odd it was to be in a landscape quite so devoid of trees. Boswell lapsed into melancholy; they approached Monboddo in the falling rain across a wild and dreary moor. Monboddo itself seemed wretched, the house decrepit with age, despite the sad grandeur of its twin turrets.

This was the world in which Burnett grew up. He was born there on 25 October 1714 and spent his early years at the estate under the tutelage of Dr Francis Skeene. James Burnett, his father, was a large landowner, though not a fabulously wealthy one; his mother, Elizabeth, was, like his father, a Jacobite in politics and an Episcopalian in religion.

His education was typical of the intelligent Scottish landowners of his time: he followed his tutor to college at Aberdeen and from there went to Edinburgh University. He made the almost unavoidable choice of entering the legal profession and so went naturally to Gröningen, where he studied civil law for three years. Returning to Edinburgh, he passed his bar exams on 12 February 1737, and five days afterwards was admitted as a member of the Faculty of Advocates.

For the next twenty-six years he pursued an efficient if drab legal career. He practised the law; he studied; he established a fittingly intellectual outlet for his natural conviviality in the form of ‘learned suppers’ – fortnightly dinner parties at his house in Edinburgh, where he entertained his circle of legal and philosophical friends. It must have been an earnest, abstracted, bachelor life, though not one that could be called in any way ‘retired’. In early middle age Burnett was a public figure: his career in the law was solidly successful and he moved as an equal among the best and brightest minds of his country.

Then, in 1758, at the age of forty-four, Burnett married. His bride was the ‘beautiful and accomplished’ Elizabeth Farquharson – stereotypical eighteenth-century adjectives that conceal more than they tell. In eight years she bore him three children: a daughter, a son, Arthur, and a second daughter.

In 1763, Burnett’s legal life took a turn towards controversy and excitement. He found himself involved as a defence counsel in the legal case that made his name – the hotly contested Douglas Cause, one of the most rancorous and fiercely disputed legal actions of the eighteenth century. It was this that took Burnett to Paris, and without it he would never have met Mademoiselle Memmie Le Blanc.

It was during Burnett’s third and longest trip to France to gather evidence for Douglas that he met Memmie. This third visit, which lasted well over a year, began in August 1764. He put up at the Hôtel d’Espaine in the Rue Guénégaut. (The pursuers, or prosecution, were staying at the Hôtel de Tours, one of the more expensive and exclusive hotels in Paris, just down the road from the defenders at Rue de Paon.) Paris must have seemed an alienating place to these visiting Scots. British visitors were struck by the lights of Paris at night: five thousand eight hundred glimmering lanterns of glass suspended from cords down the middle of the streets. There were other estrangements: the huge number of pet dogs, the lack of tea, the numerous convents and roadside Virgins, the arrogant trendiness of the French, the women’s penchant for heavy white makeup, and the new and inexplicable fashion for rouge. Paris was the capital of amusement: ‘Levity is the fifth element of the French … This is the Region of Pleasure. Lovers sigh not long, Jealousy torments no body.’9

Burnett was gathering evidence for Douglas, and there was plenty of evidence to be had. Rumours and stories circulated the city. But when he came to look for information regarding Memmie, Burnett was not to be so fortunate. Memmie appears to us in her fullness: alive, quick of spirit, and – even after the long process of her taming – a vivid, unignorable presence. Yet, in comparison to what we might know, the background that surrounds Memmie is insubstantial and vague. It is typical of the way in which she was continually treated that the first few years of her life among the French are filled with detail and anecdote, whereas the years that stretch before and after are virtual blanks. Memmie was born to experience again and again the raising and dashing of her expectations, as champions appeared, turned their curiosity upon her, and then effectively discarded her.

Hadn’t she been born into a life that did not have the depth to verify her identity? The meaning that would hold her in place was behind her and so lost as to seem irrecoverable. She was adrift in a Paris to which she did not belong: she had placed her secret, her self, in the hands of decent, curious James Burnett.

How mysterious to Burnett and how unknowable was the history of Memmie Le Blanc, cast adrift from solid fact and the provable; and if she was a mystery, how much greater was the mystery she herself embodied and lived: that drowned origin and pattern of the whole human race.

IV: On Eskimos

… no better authority than signs …

Madame Hecquet, An Account of a Savage Girl

As we cast further back into Memmie’s life, less and less is known for certain. So Burnett now engaged in an even harder process of detective work, reconstructing Memmie’s lost past, just as Madame Hecquet, Memmie’s biographer, had struggled to do before him.

A Mrs Cockburn had written to Hume that Burnett was, like himself, engaged in a quest for truth. Although Burnett knew that truth was necessarily relative and impure in this world of appearances, it was nonetheless his work and his passion to discover what could be known. With Douglas, he held fast to his faith; with Memmie Le Blanc, he would likewise set out to ascertain the truth about her.

In order to gather information for the Douglas Cause, Burnett travelled with Robertson, his clerk, to Rheims, in Champagne. The journey presented too good an opportunity to miss: Chalons, where Memmie had lived, was as near as it would ever be. So the two men took time off to journey on to the Convent des régentes at Chalons, and from there to Songi itself. At the convent, the abbess entertained Burnett with anecdotes of Memmie’s girlhood, of how she could imitate birdsong, or run along the rooftops. At Songi, Burnett interviewed several of the villagers, confirming much of what he had already heard from Memmie’s own lips; but Burnett was after more tangible evidence.

He had been immediately intrigued by what Memmie had told him of her club and knife. The strange characters carved on these weapons particularly had enticed him to Songi. If he could see them, copy them, even bring them back to Paris or Edinburgh, surely here would be the strongest possible clue for discovering Memmie’s home and how she had been brought to France. The weapons were in the possession of the new Viscount d’Epinoy. So, following Memmie’s footsteps, Burnett made the short journey from the village to the chateau. But he had no luck. Half an hour before Burnett and Robertson arrived, the Viscount left his residence at Songi. Not one of the household who remained behind could tell the Scotsmen anything concerning the bludgeon.

This dissolution of hard facts into doubtfulness seemed to occur at every point when Burnett, or anyone else, tried to really fathom out the identity of the savage girl. What, for instance, had happened to Memmie’s companion, the negro girl she had lived with and left wounded by the banks of the Marne? There were vague reports that she had been found dead some leagues from Songi; Memmie remembered that she had been seen at Toul in Lorraine, though she did not say whether she was dead or alive. Was that likely? Could she really have swum back across the Marne, wounded as she was? Furthermore, Memmie had told Madame Hecquet that various letters had been found concerning this same girl; but where were these papers now? Only one letter existed saying that the lost black girl had been sighted near Cheppe, a village not far from Songi, but afterwards had disappeared, never to be seen again.

Then there was the question of the story circulated by ‘M L–’. He had told Madame Hecquet of a report that he had once heard from M d’Epinoy’s family. In this account, the two savages had been sold in the islands of America. They had become their mistress’s favourites, but their master had disliked them and so had sold them both to slavers. The story was both convincing and likely; but there were doubts over its provenance. What could really guarantee its truthfulness?

These circumstances agree pretty well with those set forth in the letter already mentioned, printed in the Mercury of France: But it is apparent, that these particulars arise altogether from conjectures more or less probable, formed upon the first signs and expressions that were obtained from the young girl, when she began to speak French, some months after being taken; and certainly so circumstantiate a relation, founded on no better authority than signs, is very little to be depended on.10

Soon after her arrival speculation began about where the girl had come from. She might be a Norwegian or a native of Guadeloupe or St Domingo or any other of France’s possessions in the West Indies. After all, how else could she have learned her first words of French so easily? And hadn’t a gentleman of Chalons not given her, out of curiosity, some manioc, a West Indian bread, which she had appeared to recognize instantly, exclaiming for joy and snatching it from him to eat?

This concern with Memmie’s place of origin and hence with her racial identity marks out a new direction in the history of the feral child. In part, this is due to the particular nature of Memmie’s case and the fact that she was effectively a castaway in populous France, a mirror-image of Robinson Crusoe, a savage shipwrecked in the midst of civilization.

Most of us are familiar with the experience of being abroad, confronted by strange customs and an alien language. Memmie is the ultimate exemplar of such alienation. There were other stories like hers current at the time – as, for instance, Voltaire’s L’Ingénu re-imagines France through the eyes of a visiting ‘savage’. Like Voltaire’s Huron, or Shakespeare’s Miranda, Memmie comes upon a Europe that appears to her as a brave new world.

Moreover, Memmie’s discovery of Europe parodies and inverts the European discovery of the New World. Like Peter the Wild Boy, she presents to us the possibility of seeing ourselves as strange and new. For in Memmie’s story, we find a curious inversion of the tourist’s dilemma. This was not a case in which the outsider alone felt the shock of strangeness. The French – those who were at home – were themselves perplexed and disturbed by Memmie. The inexplicable fact of her arrival might begin to endanger the security and certainty of the known. Without setting one foot outside the familiar streets of Paris, here could be had an experience just then being repeated across the Americas, Africa and the South Seas: the complex fear, shame, disgust and enticement that European colonists felt on their first contact with ‘savages’.

While Madame Hecquet was printing her biography of Memmie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his seminal work, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Rousseau looked back with regret to the primitive origins of humankind, seeing in our simple beginnings a dignity, grace and vitality lost in sophisticated society. Therefore Memmie appeared in France just at that moment in which Rousseau revolutionized our understanding of the ‘savage’. Just as had happened with Peter, the rapid colonial expansion into America and Africa meant that the European public was fascinated by the diversity of human beings. The experience of this diversity could for a while fit into a sense of the universality of human nature. However, the colonial enterprise and the economic necessities of the enormous Atlantic slave trade meant that Europeans increasingly saw in the ‘savages’ they met, not a counter-image of themselves, but a species of human so different as to make any possibility of connection painful.

The issue at stake in Memmie’s case was, as was always to be the way with feral children, the definition of what it was to be human. For here was a creature human in appearance, but acting in such a way as to seem inhuman. How could the civilized claim kinship with such a creature – dumb, vicious, bloodthirsty, dirty, bestial?

In the responses to Memmie we find the first indications of a wholly new solution to this problem. What if Memmie represented not a different way of being human, but instead belonged to the savage and animalistic place from which we have emerged? Might not Memmie, and all others like her, be simply that which we needed to conquer in order to become the civilized people that we are? In this way observers could console themselves with the idea that they had rejected the life that she had led, and had grown beyond the nightmare loneliness of her dark heart.

In Memmie’s story we catch the first strains of a motif to be played over and over again in the next two hundred years. Here are the first indications of a way of thinking that combines an interest in race with an evolutionary model of human development. If Memmie was to be understood, it seemed she must be known in terms of her racial origins. Once her home had been found, she could be finally known.

It was Madame Hecquet and Burnett who investigated Memmie’s origins most rigorously. Yet when Madame Hecquet began to explore Memmie’s past, she found herself brought up against a wall of things forgotten.

Memmie had told Madame Hecquet that she did not begin to reflect on her life until after her reclamation from the wilds.11 Before then she existed purely in an immediate, continuous now, aware only of her animal wants. Casting her mind back into that state, she could find nothing: no father, nor mother; no sister, nor brother, nor playmate. There were dim, unbodied recollections: she somehow felt that there could not have been houses in the place where she was born, only holes in the ground, or long barracks covered in snow into which the people crept on their hands and knees.

The only particular memory she had was of seeing a huge animal in the sea, swimming with two feet like a dog, with a round head and large eyes. The black creature had swum towards her and she, fearing that she would be eaten, had darted back to the shore. Could this be a seal? Madame Hecquet wondered; and, if so, what might that say about Memmie’s place of origin?

In fact, from all she learnt, Madame Hecquet was convinced that Memmie must be an Eskimo, brought hither to France from the frozen sea in the far north. Memmie’s love for the water, her indifference to the cold and the frost, her white skin and her love of raw food all seemed to indicate that the Arctic was her natural home.

However, how she had come to France was still unclear. Madame Hecquet speculated that it must have happened like this: a slave ship from Holland or the north of Scotland went to Labrador with the intention of getting slaves to take to the West Indies. There the savage girl was captured, and painted black, either for ‘a frolic’ or with the intention of passing her off as an African or, more specifically, a native of Guinea.12 Having brought the little Eskimo to the West Indies, by boat from Labrador or Greenland, her owners discovered that she would not acclimatize to the Caribbean heat. So the young savage and her negro companion were brought to Europe by sea. Perhaps then they jumped ship at the Zuyder Zee and made their way, journeying for several months, across the forest of the Ardennes. Or maybe they were taken for house servants to some French landowner, who bought them in the West Indies on a caprice. Finding them too unmanageable, once they were in France, the landowner encouraged or allowed their escape.

Madame Hecquet’s self-appointed task was to prove that Memmie was an Eskimo. She admitted that the ‘facts’ were all highly doubtful. Yet she sought a truth about Memmie that might circumvent the errors and misjudgements of language.

At one point in her biography of Memmie, Madame Hecquet decides to try a curious experiment with her subject. An old friend of Madame Hecquet’s, Madame Duplessis, had sent to Paris a collection of dolls from Quebec in the likeness of the New World savages. Among them were an Eskimo and his wife carrying her baby.

With these dolls, Madame Hecquet resolved ‘to try the force of nature’ in the savage girl.13 She sat with Memmie and produced the box full of ‘savage puppets’. On opening the box, Madame Hecquet carefully observed her subject, hoping to catch in her some indication of who she was. Memmie instantly picked out the Eskimo couple, despite the fact that the other dolls were more colourful and more interestingly adorned. She gazed at both, without speaking. Observing her delight, Madame Hecquet smiled and asked, ‘in order to make her speak’, whether she had found some of her relatives. Memmie could not be certain; and yet they reminded her of something. She had seen something like them before. ‘How! said I, men and women of that shape? Pretty much so, answered she; but they had not that, (pointing to a sort of glove which my figures have).’

As they spoke further, Memmie’s connection to the figures grew weaker and weaker. Madame Hecquet picked out some other figures, wearing earrings; Memmie explained that her people had rings that reached from the bottom of the ear down their backs; but as this had nothing to do with the Eskimos, Madame Hecquet reluctantly dismissed this new evidence:

As I could discover nothing about my figures, nor in the accounts sent me along with them, that could give me any idea of this difference [that is, between the dolls and Memmie’s remembrance], or which might have suggested it to her, I imagined that it had only occurred to her from the remembrance of something she had seen in her younger days, and of which she had just a confused idea. And, indeed, she immediately added herself, these ideas are so remote, that they are little to be depended on.14

However, crucially, Madame Hecquet chose not to depend on Memmie’s words at all. It was not what Memmie said in this scene that bore her authentic self; it was that instinct, that ‘natural unaffected sentiment’ that made her act by directing her hands and her gaze to the Eskimo puppets alone. Words deceive; nature does not: ‘Such, at least, was my reasoning on the distinction she made between them, and her saying so naturally, ‘We had nothing on our hands;’ which the truth alone, tho’ without her knowledge, made her utter.’15

In this scene the sense that Memmie exists as the unconscious authenticator of her own identity reaches a point of climax. Prejudice blinds Madame Hecquet, making her disregard objections to her favoured belief about Memmie’s origins. She allows a place to doubts that might arise from her troubled apprehension of the Eskimo figures, but only in order to class them as peripheral. Memmie becomes a cipher, a bearer of a truth she herself cannot understand.

It is crucial that the girl’s natural self appears in a physical action, the taking up of the Eskimo dolls, and not in her later, more ambivalent discussion concerning them. Memmie acts from a responsiveness, a sensibility, deeper than that of the civilized self. It is because she is ‘sensible’ – in other words, open to spontaneous feeling – that her actions display an inner, indisputable truth. The speaking presence of Memmie felt by the reader is immaterial to the writer’s own conscious concerns.

*   *   *

Burnett’s methods were somewhat different from Madame Hecquet’s, yet both of Memmie’s investigators shared a faith in the idea that beneath the confusion of signs an inner, essential truth is there to be discovered. Like Madame Hecquet, Burnett came to the disappointing – and, to us, irrelevant – conclusion that Memmie’s secret was one that could be solved in racial terms. However, as we shall see, he was also reaching towards a further solution for Memmie’s identity that moved beyond the barriers of race.

Burnett likewise found out as much as he could from Memmie in their meetings together in her apartment on the Rue St Antoine. She told him that the country she came from was very cold and covered with snow the greater part of the year; that the children there swam as soon as they could walk; that when she came to France she could not live if she could not swim and that she swam as well as any otter; that a child of a year old there could climb a tree; that there were flying squirrels there; that the people lived in little huts over the water, like the beavers did; that they ate mostly fish; that their clothes were skins; that they had no fires there, and that when she came to France she could not bear a fire in a room, nor even the close air; that there were another people there, bigger than her own people, and stronger; that they fought together, and if their enemies caught them they would eat them.16

Some idioms of her lost language she could still remember: to wound was ‘to make him red’ and to kill was ‘to make him sleep long’. For their greeting they said, ‘I see you’. She remembered too how they buried their dead. The dead one was put into a case, something like an armchair. His nearest relative then addressed the dead one, telling how they had eyes, but could not see; ears, but could not hear; legs, yet could not walk; a mouth, yet could not eat. What has become of you? And whither have you gone? And the burial was concluded with a cry of mourning and loss and utter despair, which she had used often to the terror of all those who heard her when she had been first caught.17

About one thing Burnett was certain: Memmie was anything but an Eskimo. He considered Madame Hecquet’s knowledge of Eskimos to be rather sketchy. She seems to have relied chiefly on the travel writings of Baron La Hontan and a letter sent to her by Madame Duplessis. This letter describes how the Eskimos are sunk in the deepest barbarism: ‘They are a nation of Anthropophagi, who devour men whenever they can lay their hands upon them. They are of a low stature, white, and very fat.’ Madame Duplessis believed them to worship fire, to eat their food raw and to dress themselves in the skins of seals. Eskimo girls were much valued as servants, and were often captured and civilized; but although they seemed happy in the houses of their masters, they very soon died, like all the savages who lived among the French.18

Burnett effectively discredits Hecquet’s Eskimo thesis. Most importantly, Memmie just did not look like an Eskimo: she was fair-complexioned, smooth-skinned, her features as soft as a European: ‘Whereas the people of the Esquimaux nation, are, by the accounts of all travellers, the ugliest of men, of the harshest and most disagreeable features, and all covered with hair.’19 (As we can see, Burnett’s information on Eskimos was as flawed as Madame Hecquet’s.)

However, Burnett was more convinced by Madame Hecquet’s theory that Memmie’s origin should be placed in the wildernesses of northern America. Memmie, Burnett declared, was a Huron. The evidence was plain enough: her language with its tell-tale lack of labial consonants (such as ‘b’, or ‘p’, or ‘m’) or lingual consonants (such as ‘g’); her weapons, which were typical of the Huron tribe; her looks; her ‘whiteness’.

So, what of Memmie’s own reports of her history? Madame Hecquet felt that the whole narrative was founded on the most insubstantial of facts:

Le Blanc acknowledges that in the various relations she has made to me on different occasions, there are several particulars of which she retains but a confused and indistinct remembrance, and which she suspects to be blended with circumstances that she may have imagined after she began to reflect on the questions asked her at first, and constantly repeated to her afterwards.20

Words were not enough. Furthermore, there was the question of how much of Memmie’s story had been suggested to her by her first questioners. How far might her guardians’ commentary on her adventures have formed her own idea of her life?

Like Madame Hecquet, Burnett knew the protean nature of language. His work as a lawyer on the Douglas Cause was daily showing him the erratic and puzzling nature of the reconstruction of the past. Yet like Madame Hecquet he saw in Memmie a clue, an indication, of something real, universal and innate – something that lay just beyond the arbitrary culture of language.

Burnett was an odd mixture of the sceptical and the stubbornly opinionated. He knew that the truth was difficult to find, confused, melting, insubstantial; and yet he also trusted wholeheartedly to the certainty of his beliefs. He saw in the Douglas Cause a maze of contradictory facts and yet never appeared to really doubt the authenticity of Archibald Douglas. In Memmie, he saw a puzzle, yet one that never ceased to entice him on to the settling of the greatest questions of all.

V: On Orang-Outangs

Man, the Prince of animated beings, who is a miracle of Nature, and for whom all things on this earth were created, is a mimic animal …

Carl von Linnæus, The System of Nature

We know of one further expedition that Burnett made during this final stay in Paris. Le Jardin Royal des Plantes was in the 16th Quarter of the city, a botanic garden of exotic trees and curious plants, looking out on to the countryside towards the Château de Vincennes. In the summer months students came to attend the morning lectures on botany and chemistry; there were also anatomy lectures given all year long in the great ampitheatre. The superintendent of the Jardin Du Roi was Georges-Louis Leclerc, otherwise known as Comte de Buffon, the most famous natural historian of the day and, as we shall soon see, a strong influence on Burnett’s ideas about Memmie.

At the botanic gardens, Burnett had come to see the King’s cabinet des curiosités, made internationally famous by Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. The collection was divided into three rooms. In the first there was a set of skeletons, a complete set of foetuses from the minutest embryo to a full-term baby, a fine collection of shells and coral, and all the newest inventions in machinery. In the second room you could find precious stones and rare geological samples; and in the third were more antique stones – agate, onyx, emerald, topaz – a collection of insects, fishes in spirits, serpents from the smallest to one six yards in length, skeletons of birds, a newly invented brazen sphere, and animals ‘anatomically prepared’.

It was one of these animals that had drawn Burnett to the King’s gardens: the orang-outang. The creature was stuffed and standing on a shelf. Burnett was struck by its exact resemblance to the shape and features of a man. He then found out from his guide that it also possessed all the necessary organs of pronunciation. The orang-outang had once lived for several years at Versailles, but had eventually died from drinking spirits. With a slight sexual and probably unintentional innuendo, Burnett notes of the dead beast: ‘He had as much of the understanding of a man as could be expected from his education, and performed many little offices to the lady with whom he lived; but never learned to speak.’21 Burnett’s guide described another orang-outang – likewise mute – who lived in India with his French master, and would accompany him to the market.

Later Burnett was to have the luck of seeing two living orang-outangs in London. He was strongly tempted to buy one, poor as he was, for the asking price of £50. Then he might have had him educated, raising him perhaps even to the level of an ordinary, civilized man.

Burnett’s curiosity about the orang-outang finally led him to the unshakeable belief that this creature was a kind of human that could be taught to speak. In popular understanding Burnett became famous for a series of such obsessions and cranky beliefs. The others were: that language was a social acquisition; that men had once had tails; that human beings had degenerated since ancient times; and his fascination with feral children. He pursued these ideas in two monumental works: the six-volume Of the Origin and Progress of Language, published between 1773 and 1792, and the equally enormous Antient Metaphysics, also published in six volumes, the last of which was printed in 1799, the year of his death, when he was eighty-five years old. These interests were generally condemned as eccentric – so much so that Burnett became in later years a figure of fun.

The most notable image of Burnett as visionary crank occurs in Peacock’s satirical novel of 1818, Melincourt. Here Burnett is recast as Forester, a dreamy and melancholy man who educates and befriends a great ape, Lord Oran-Hutan. Lord Oran is a courteous if completely silent companion whose unusual airs soon mark him out for a glittering social career, culminating in his election to Parliament.

However, Burnett’s fascination with the orang-outang was not as strange or as eccentric in his own time as may at first appear. Burnett took his place among a growing number of naturalists and natural philosophers becoming fascinated by apes and monkeys. For, as with the child of nature, here was something that dramatized the distinction between animals and humans, a living creature that challenged and so defined the limits and essence of humanity.

Burnett had come to the end of what could be known of the external facts of Memmie’s history. If he was to think about her interior identity, he must now look elsewhere, turning to the writings of the natural historians. Maybe, in the work of Buffon and Linnæus, Burnett would find a clue that would solve the mystery that surrounded Memmie Le Blanc.

It was Linnæus and Buffon, the two giants of eighteenth-century natural history, who fixed the central importance of the orang-outang for Burnett. The great project of these natural historians was to establish and codify the essences, elements and distinctions that separate species. They approached this enterprise from radically different standpoints.

Buffon is often seen as a precursor of evolutionary thought. He places a potential for instability into his description of the natural world. His enormous forty-four-volume natural history is a surprisingly lively read, filled with eloquent anecdotes and improbable tales. His animals act like creatures in stories and possess an almost human capacity for changefulness.

Contrariwise, Linnæus depicts the static nature of animals and plants, the austere regularity of his work showing a creature removed from the flow of time and held up to an examining eye. Yet this should not imply merely the dry work of classification. In Linnæus we find the discipline of order raised to the level of vision, a hymn to the plenitude of existence:

‘Awakened, as if from a dream of ignorance, I have seen darkly, as he passed, the Eternal, Infinite, Omniscient, Almighty God, and am amazed! I have read of him in some traces of his wondrous works, the smallest of which, though comparatively insignificant, even to a degree of nothingness, evinces the most incomprehensible perfection of Power and Wisdom.’22

It is not too far a leap from this to William Blake seeing heaven in a grain of sand.

In the classification of primates, Linnæus places the orang-outang among the order of ‘Simia’. Yet in this division the orang-outang continues to play an ambiguous and destabilizing role:

2. Orang-outang. – 2. Simia Satyrus. I

Has no tail. Is of a rusty brown colour; the hair on the fore-arms is reversed, or stands upwards; and the buttocks are covered with hair. Amoen. acad. vi. 68. tab. lxxvi. f. 4.

Homo sylvestris, or wild man of the woods. Edwards, av. v. 6. tab. 213. – Orang-outang. Camper kort beright, &c. Amsterdam 1788, p. 8.

Inhabits the island of Borneo. – Is about two feet high, and walks mostly erect. The body and limbs are universally covered with brown hair, about an inch long, which is thinly interspersed with reddish hairs; the hair on the fore-arms, towards the wrists, is reversed, or lies with its points turned towards the elbow; the buttocks are covered with hair: The head is round, having a naked forehead; the margin of the mouth is hairy, the eye-lashes are black, the upper being longer and thicker than those below, and a range of transversely placed hairs occupies the place of eyebrows: The nose is very short, and is covered with down: The palms of the hands are smooth, and the thumb is shorter than the palm; the feet resemble those of man, except that the great toes are considerably shorter than the others, which are very long.

Much as this species resembles mankind, even possessing the os hyoides, it must still be referred to the genus of Ape, with which it agrees in wanting the flat round nail of the great toes, and in the structure of the larynx; besides those circumstances, it is evident, from the direction of the muscles, and from the whole figure of the skeleton, that the animal is not designed by nature for an erect posture.23

It is clear from this that Linnæus had no doubt that the orang-outang was not human. Yet confusion remains. Through the semantic and scientific identification of the orang-outang with the Homo sylvestris, or wild man of the woods, the orang-outang could be placed on both sides of the human-animal divide. Linnaeus’s ‘Four-footed, mute, hairy’ ‘Wild Man’24 could wrongly be felt to include the orang-outang in the context of the human species.

Confusions could likewise arise from a study of Buffon on the orang-outang. Buffon bases his analysis of the orang-outang on an account left by Andrew Battell, a sixteenth-century English sailor shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Battell describes the Pongo and the Engecko, two species of ‘Monsters’ that he specifically separates from ordinary apes and monkeys:

The greatest of these two Monsters is called, Pongo, in their language; and the lesser is called, Engeco. This Pongo is in all proportion like a man, but that he is more like a Giant in stature, than a man; for he is very tall, and hath a man’s face, hollow-eyed, with long haire upon his browes … They feed upon Fruit that they find in the Woods and upon Nuts, for they eate no kind of flesh. They cannot speak and have no understanding more than a beast.25

In his Natural History, Buffon equates the ‘Pongo’ with the orang-outang and the ‘Jocko’ with the chimpanzee. Buffon describes the activities of one orang-outang as he himself witnessed it:

The orang-outang which I saw, walked always upright, even when it carried heavy burthens. Its air was melancholy, its deportment grave, its nature more gentle and very different from that of other apes. I have seen it sit at table, unfold its napkin, wipe its lips, make use of the spoon and the fork to carry the victuals to its mouth, pour out its drink into a glass, touch glasses when invited, take a cup and saucer and lay them on the table, put in sugar, pour out its tea, leave it to cool before drinking, and all this without any other instigation than the signs of the command of its master, and often of its own accord. It was gentle and inoffensive; it even approached strangers with respect, and came rather to receive caresses than to offer injuries …26

Here is a litany of politeness in which, through Buffon’s rapt precision, the familiar becomes enchanted and strange. The ape performs the everyday etiquette of drinking tea; he both reduces that etiquette to a bestial charade and reveals it as a miraculous wonder. In this mirror of ourselves we are not just impressed by the accomplishment of a human task, but also forcefully grasp the fact that this experience is truly a convention in which we too are hapless mimics.

Like Linnæus, Buffon is clear that the orang-outang is simply an ape. Yet his descriptions of it reveal to us an animal capable of politeness, sensitivity and the most delicate tact. We see an orang-outang who covers her genitalia (‘those parts … which modesty forbids the sight of’); even one ape that dies of a broken heart, pining away from grief after his ‘wife’ has died.

Likewise the captain, named Begg, of a Liverpool ship related the following story to Burnett:

In a voyage to Old Callabar in Africa, I purchased a female Ourang Outang from one of the natives. She was, as I was informed, about eight months old, four foot six inches high, of a dark brown colour, but white about the breasts; of a gentle disposition, walked generally upright on her hind feet, sometimes on all four; but the latter seemed to me not to be her natural motion … She would often drink a tumbler glass of wine and water, and always put the glass fairly down on its bottom, and never broke one. She was very fond of the girls and boys, but more particularly of the latter, and would weep and cry like a child when she was vexed; but never shewed any signs of great ferocity, and was easily appeased. I gave her a blanket for a bed, which she would take great pains to spread in such a manner as to make it smooth and easy, and then would lie down. She always slept with her hands (if I may use the expression) under her head, and would snore when asleep, resembling the human species. She lived three months, and died of the dysentery.27

It was primed with these images that Burnett made the short journey across Paris to the Royal Gardens to take his first look at a orang-outang; but what did this journey have to do with Memmie Le Blanc? In short, everything: Burnett’s impassioned, obsessive defence of our own kinship to the orang-outang is the key for understanding all that he saw in Memmie Le Blanc. Burnett was famous for establishing a theory of evolutionary continuity; it was only when he brought together Memmie and the orang-outang in his mature philosophy that he found the answer to his questions concerning human life.

Burnett’s philosophy is now little read, even in the universities. If he is remembered at all, it is as an Enlightenment precursor of Darwin, another signpost on a journey towards our own post-Darwinian, DNA-based image of ourselves. Paradoxically (and Samuel Johnson had declared Burnett all paradox),28 it is where Burnett’s philosophy looks most modern that it is most traditional. People have thought his work prophetic of evolution when it is an echo of scholasticism, pre-Darwinian when it is post-Aristotelian. Yet it is precisely this ‘old-fashioned’ quality in Burnett’s writings that make him of continuing and lasting interest. His problems are our problems; his immersion in a tradition we have lost offers us the surprise of a possible solution.

Throughout his philosophical writings, Burnett returns over and over to the figures of the orang-outang and the child of nature. In these figures, Burnett could see that an answer might be found regarding the most important question of all: what makes us ‘human’?

Burnett imagines a world continually in motion driven onwards and upwards by the power of ‘mind’. He rejects the Newtonian universe of mechanical bodies, placing in its stead a world of actual striving and desire, in which the energy of ‘mind’ actively seeks to realize itself in time. This principle of mind in human beings embarks them on a journey from a life purely physical to one spiritual, absorbed in the contemplation of the highest of all minds, God. The story of human life tells of a transition, a history of changes.

In this ascent of human nature, a moment comes in which the tendency of humans to gather together socially leads to the invention of speech. Growing out of the impersonal, necessary messages that we see in the animal kingdom there emerges in human terms a mode of communication founded upon the personal and the gratuitous. The artifice of human society allows human beings to change from a pre-linguistic to a language-using creature. With the moment of language the human gives itself up to the fabrication of its own world. For language brings the equivocal gift of self-consciousness, an apprehension that humans share only with the highest primates.

An immense series of imperceptible and minute changes draws the human being away from its animal origins. Burnett links this process to our development from infancy to adulthood, in which an individual likewise passes through a continuous series of changes. Burnett imagines a model of life in which humanity is not given, but is instead something acquired at some indefinable point in a series of subtle gradations.

This is what drew Burnett to Memmie Le Blanc, what took him on that visit to Peter the Wild Boy, and what fascinated him in travellers’ accounts of the orang-outang. The child of nature and the orang-outang are living records of an evolutionary process that all humanity has passed through. The orang-outang exists in the infinitesimal gap that separates the human being from the animal. Possessing humanity itself, it is an interval, a bridge between us and the beasts.

Burnett believed that the finite system of the chain of being abhors a vacuum: it wishes to fill every space with things that look backwards to that which they emerged from, and forwards to that which they will become.

Burnett describes the three prior conditions of humanity: the most primitive is that represented by Peter the Wild Boy – silent, bestial, solitary; then the orang-outang, still silent but possessing the possibility of speech and sociability; and finally the last hesitation before the full realization of the human embodied in Memmie Le Blanc, both social and language-using, yet separated from full humanity by the minutest of discrepancies. Human and yet different, she lives in the state of nature that we have left behind.

When Burnett arrived in Edinburgh, he suggested that Robertson, his clerk, might translate Madame Hecquet’s work into English. Burnett himself provided a preface for the book. Here he indicated that for the ‘philosophical reader’ there are things in Memmie’s story that those who read it purely for the Robinson Crusoe-like romance would miss. What would this ideal ‘philosophical reader’ find in Memmie Le Blanc?

He will observe with amazement the progression of our species from an animal to wild, to men such as we. He will see evidently, by this example, that though man is by his natural bent and inclination disposed to society, like many other animals, yet he is not by natural necessity social, nor obliged to live upon a joint stock, like ants or bees; but is enabled, by his natural powers, to provide for his own subsistence, as much as any other animal, and more than most, as his means of subsistence are more various. In tracing back the long line of man’s progression, he will discover another state of our nature even beyond that in which this girl was, however near it may seem to the original, I mean the state before language was invented, that is, the communication of general ideas, by the articulation of the voice, when men were literally, as the poet describes them, mutum et turpe pecus [a mute and disgraceful herd]: For it is impossible to suppose, that language, the most wonderful art among men, should have been born with us, and practised by us from mere instinct, unless we could at the same time suppose, that other arts came into the world with us in the same manner; nor can we believe that it was sooner invented than other arts much less difficult, and more obvious.

In this manner, the philosopher will discover a state of nature, very different from what is commonly known by that name: And from this point of view, he will see, – That these superior faculties of mind, which distinguish our nature from that of any other animal on this earth, are not congenial with it, as to the exercise of energy, but adventitious and acquired, being only at first latent powers in our nature, which have been evolved and brought into exertion by degrees, in the course of our progression above mentioned, from one state to another – That the rational man has grown out of the mere animal, and that reason and animal sensation, however distinct we may imagine them, run into one another by such insensible degrees, that it is as difficult, or perhaps more difficult, to draw the line betwixt these two, than betwixt the animal and the vegetable.29

Here is Memmie’s significance for Burnett and for ourselves: in her we find a mirror of what we essentially were. Memmie’s life is the world from which we have grown. In meeting her, in reading of her, we see in reflection the deepest origins of our selves; and isn’t the orang-outang also a kind of mirror, a mimic of those actions we assume to be most natural to us: drinking our tea, wiping our lips with our napkins, turning on our side to sleep, neatly arranging our beds, acting out our modesty, crying, missing someone, dying from grief?

Imitation fascinated Burnett – that process by which we ‘become another man’.30 Perhaps language also emerged from mimicry. Burnett saw that humans develop through imitation, through acquiring the process of analogy; and this principle of resemblance – of analogy – is at the heart of Burnett’s understanding of Memmie Le Blanc.

The question Burnett asked himself was this: when, in the woods of Champagne, Memmie was silent, when all her own words had left her and she had not yet been stranded on the other shore of speaking French, what then made her human?

His answer was simple and surprising. It was the observable likeness of her behaviour, of her appearance, to our own, that made him certain she was human. Hadn’t Linnæus declared man to be a mimic animal? Memmie was human in so far as she was caught in the web of resemblances.

Alongside Burnett’s investigations into the origins of humanity, we find other, more divisive explorations of the human. Lord Kames, Burnett’s fellow judge on the Douglas Cause and great philosophical rival, was similarly intensely interested in delineating the origins of the human. However, whereas Burnett extends the definition of the human to include, for instance, the orang-outang, Kames tends to limit humanity by multiplying distinctions between races, so that he ends by declaring a separate origin for the native Americans. What might particularly disturb us is that both Kames and Burnett place our ability to distinguish human from animal in a natural faculty that relies on external marks: human identity resides in a surface that can be read. The fact that this same innate sense leads Burnett to incorporate the diverse and Kames to reject the different indicates its weakness.

Burnett states the classical idea of the universally human, but in such a way as to indicate the later racialized direction of writing on feral children. In 1799 Charles White likewise used the orang-outang as a basis for defining human beings:

All those who have had opportunities of making observations on the orang-outangs, agree in ascribing to them, not only a remarkable docility of disposition, but also actions and affections similar to those observable in the human kind … They discover signs of modesty: and instances are related of the strongest attachments of the male to the female. When sick, these animals have been known to suffer themselves to be blooded, and even to invite the operation; and to submit to other necessary treatment, like rational creatures … They have been taught to play upon musical instruments, as the pipe and harp. They have been known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women, with a view of making them subservient to their wants as slaves, or as objects of brutal passion: and it has been asserted by some, that women have had offspring from such connections.31

White also repeats Burnett’s model of an evolutionary chain of being. However, White lays more stress on the boundaries within the genus ‘Homo’. He places the ‘lower’ races such as the African at the bottom of a hierarchical scale that ascends to the European races at the summit.

This was a model that was to be transcribed on to Burnett’s other models of human development. A four-fold development emerged: from ape to human; from ‘savage’ tribes to European; from infant to adult; from feral child to civilized man. The wild child could therefore embody the condition of beast, savage and infant. The child of nature was now placed firmly at the bottom of every possible scale of development. By the middle of the nineteenth century, these hierarchical models would be played against each other as analogies – and as more than analogies. As we shall see, these models of development would grow to constitute a ubiquitous method for understanding the world. The seeds of our own thought are there to see in Burnett.

In his own view, Burnett had satisfactorily answered the questions that Memmie had raised. Almost despite himself, he had reduced living, breathing Memmie Le Blanc to an image, a necessary stage in an argument. In philosophizing her life, Burnett had unwittingly played his part in her subtle vanishing from her own story.

VI: On Aristocrats and Orphans

They named it. But my poor island’s still

un-rediscovered, un-renamable.

None of the books has ever got it right …

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Crusoe in England’

In the autumn of 1765, Burnett went home. His task in Paris was done. Back in Edinburgh, he began work on organizing the evidence gathered in France into the Defender’s Memorial for Lord Douglas. (A ‘memorial’ was a compendium in prose form of all the evidence gathered by defence or prosecution in a Scottish legal case.) He relaxed by continuing his study on the lives of savages, reading John Byron’s account of the Patagonians. His wife fell pregnant; they looked forward to the birth of their third child. But on 28 October 1766, Elizabeth Burnett died giving birth to a daughter. As had happened following the death of his mother, Burnett came to terms with his grief through the study of philosophy; but he was properly sentimental and moved enough to name his newest child after his wife.

For the next few years his interest in Memmie Le Blanc continued unabated. He supervised Robertson’s translation of Madame Hecquet’s biography of the savage girl, and wrote an introduction to the translation, in which he set out his first ideas on Memmie; but Memmie’s influence did not end there: years later he was still recounting the way in which he had met her and using his conversations with her as the basis for his philosophical speculations.

Burnett lived on in Edinburgh for another thirty-two years, outlasting two of his children – his son, Arthur, the boy who had been tested in Latin by Johnson in 1773, had died only a year later at the age of eleven. Eliza Burnett, immortalized in verse by Robert Burns as a great beauty (without mentioning her rotten teeth), died of a respiratory seizure caused by consumption. In a letter Burns had said of her: ‘There has not been any thing nearly like her, in all the combinations of Beauty, Grace and Goodness the great Creator has formed, since Milton’s Eve on the first day of her existence.’32 Now she was dead. There is a story that, on returning from her funeral, her brother-in-law covered her portrait while Burnett watched. ‘Quite right,’ he said, ‘and now let us turn to Herodotus.’33 A heartless comment? Those who knew Burnett would doubt it. Death was the one thing not mysterious for James Burnett. His views on death were firm: he did not doubt for an instant the Christian immortality of the soul, or the stoical consolations of philosophy.

It might have been hoped that he would settle into the old age of a respected and renowned philosopher. However, while well regarded on the continent, in his own nation it was Burnett’s fate to become a kind of joke, a stock character to represent the wildest reaches of the abstract and over-excited brain. He died in Edinburgh in the spring of 1799. Before he died he told Dr Gregory, his doctor and his friend: ‘I know it is not in the power of Art to cure me: all I wish is euthanasia – a happy death.’34

There is no record in Burnett’s later writing – or, indeed, in anyone’s writing – of what happened to Memmie Le Blanc. By 1779 La Condamine was dead, the mysterious Madame Hecquet vanished, and Burnett was a world away in the bleak Grampian Hills. So Memmie fades from our sight. Did she carry on, sick and impoverished, selling what few copies remained of her tale, reliant on the visits of the curious? Could we predict another rescue for her, an answer from the providence to which she held fast?

For Burnett she had been the solution to a mystery; and now, after over two hundred years, could we still find such a solution in poor Memmie Le Blanc? For La Condamine, Madame Hecquet, James Burnett and for ourselves it is the fantastic surprise of her story, her self, that amazes. A small child cast adrift on the shores of an unknown continent; a Robinson Crusoe in reverse; a ‘savage’ alone and isolated in the midst of civilized Europe; a philosopher’s conundrum; a wonder to royalty; an inspiration to the pious – Memmie had been all these.

For us, the additional amazement is Memmie’s presence here at all, an alien child connected by the faintest attachments to the lives of philosophers, monarchs and aristocrats – all those whose names habitually survive the erasure of time. Knowing what we do of the continental upheavals of the colonization of the New World and the vast Atlantic slave trade, what may strike us now is the very ordinariness of Memmie’s suffering – a refugee, an exile, one of millions of human lives caught up in a slave trade that transformed all those countries facing the Atlantic Ocean, a world in which it was not unusual to be painted black so as to ease your sale, or to die in captivity, pining, disorientated and lost. This additional strangeness in Memmie Le Blanc is the fabulous fact of her fleeting visibility: among the countless dead, among the orphans and foundlings of Paris, somehow she found a way into the crowded interstices of history.

To think of the abandoned child of legend is to move to the safety of a fairy-tale story of abandonment and restitution, a family romance in which kings and queens are the real parents; but if we continue to think of Memmie? Perhaps it is only in a story that does not end fittingly, in which no judgement is reversed, in which nothing is confirmed – a story outside the fumbling, parodic certainty of the law – that a real semblance of the truth is ever found.

The brief miracle of Memmie’s visibility ends, as all brief miracles end, with the unanswerable question mark of silence.