In the fall of 2009, I went with my spouse Alec on a dream trip – three weeks in the south of France. Our younger daughter, Ivy, joined us in Paris, where we planned to spend a few days before flying back to Canada. At that point I’d done a fair amount of research into the Wild Girl’s story and had just gotten started on the play I wanted to write about her. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but once in Paris I realized we were only a couple of hours away from the Champagne district, the place where Marie-Angelique first emerged in 1731. On our last full day in France, we booked train tickets to Reims, where we rented a car and drove a half-hour south of the city.
We’d seen many lovely places during our time in France, but the village of Songy was, not to put it too unkindly, unremarkable. There was a lovely old church, of course. But where was the bustling square surrounded by cafés and brasseries? Where was the boulangerie with pastries and fresh-baked baguettes in the window? Songy looked to be not much more than a single street, bordered by a stone wall on one side. There were houses, a few cars parked here and there. But not a living soul to be seen. I began to feel foolish, coming here with so little forethought, so little time.
We parked the car and walked through a little courtyard leading to the church. The heavy front door was unlocked, so we went in. We’d been in a lot of old churches in France – there’s at least one in every village – and though this twelfth-century structure was a gem; it didn’t make much of an impression on me. Maybe I had old-church fatigue. Alec and Ivy were still looking around the interior when I decided to go back outside. I exited through the side door, and that’s when I saw the statue.
It was in the middle of a small, grassy plot beside the church; a statue of a young woman in bare feet with long, flowing hair. There was a kind of sling hanging from her shoulder, in which she carried what looked like sticks of wood. It was a fairly generic depiction of a pastoral figure, one that could have been – and likely was – purchased from a garden shop. There was no plaque, nothing to indicate who the figure was supposed to represent, or why she was here. But I had a pretty good idea.
Just then a man came out of one of the nearby buildings – finally, a human presence! As he walked toward one of the parked cars, I called out to him in awkward French, asking if he could tell me anything about the statue. He answered in a rapid flow of words that whizzed right by me, except for one phrase: la fille sauvage.
“C’est elle?” I called out. “C’est la fille sauvage?”
“Oui!” he shouted and launched into more rapid French as he pointed to a stone wall on the other side of the road. I looked where he was pointing and noticed a stone tower at one end of the wall. I recognized immediately it from the photos on the Internet. It was the chateau where Marie-Angelique LeBlanc, la fille sauvage herself, had lived for a time after she emerged from the woods in September of 1731.
I could see that the man was beginning to get impatient with my poor French. He was trying to tell me to go to the building across the road. I pointed, shouting, “La?” to let him know I understood.
“Oui, oui, la!” He nodded vigorously as he got into the car.
Alec, Ivy, and I crossed the road and passed through the gate. Another empty courtyard. Why had the man told us to come here?
There was a door off to our right, and Alec went to knock on it. I was nervous, reluctant, but we’d come this far, what choice did we have? At least I knew that Alec’s French was up to the task of an apology to whoever was living there.
A woman opened the door. She was short, with a finely etched face. She thought we were there to buy wine – it turned out the chateau was now a winery, a cave à Champagne – but when Alec got to the words la fille sauvage, her manner changed. She grew animated and began to speak very fast, explaining that her husband would very much like to speak with us. He was away at the moment but would be back very soon. Could we please come back in, say, half an hour?
I looked at Alec. We didn’t have a lot of time. We had to drive back to Reims, drop off the rental car, and catch the 5:30 train back to Paris.
“Of course we will come back,” he replied to the woman.
We repaired to a café in the village up the road, where a cold buffet disabused us of the notion that it’s impossible to find a bad meal in France. Nearly an hour had elapsed by the time we got back to the cave à Champagne. We saw the woman and her husband waiting in the courtyard. They waved and came forward to greet us as we parked the car. He introduced himself as Eric Phelizon and his wife as Marie-Ange. They ushered us inside, into a large room with a long table, on which sat several bottles of their own small-batch variety champagne. Marie-Ange opened one, poured it into tall-stemmed glasses, and set one before each of us. We drank and she refilled, several times over, from a second and then a third bottle, which contained a pale rose-coloured liquid. They offered us chocolates, nuts, madeleines.
For most of my adult life, I’d thought of champagne as a boring beverage that gets brought out for toasts on special occasions. As for pink bubbly, well, that was only fit for girls’ night out. But now I could see how wrong I had been. This tongue-dancing drink was a revelation. Instantly I acquired a new appreciation for sparkling wines – the good stuff, that is – and since that day my attitude has shifted 180 degrees. Bring on the bubbly, the pinker and girlier the better.
But this was not an afternoon to fritter away on small talk and wine. There was another subject of burning interest that had brought us to this place, a subject that – it quickly became clear – preoccupied Eric Phelizon almost as much as making wine; the fabled Wild Girl of Champagne, Marie-Angelique Memmie LeBlanc.
I explained in my halting French that that I was writing a play about la fille sauvage, that we’d come to Songy specifically because of its connection to her story.
Eric left the room and quickly returned with a file folder, thick with dog-eared sheets of paper. He launched into a full summary on the facts of Marie-Angelique’s remarkable story – how she was discovered living in the woods near Songy in 1731, wearing nothing but animal skins. How she ran like a hare, climbed trees like a cat. How her eyes seemed to look everywhere at once. How she killed a bulldog with a single blow of her club, terrifying the villagers, who ran about screaming, “The devil has come to Songy!”
Eric and Marie-Ange (whose name’s similarity to that of la fille sauvage did not escape me) spoke almost no English, which would normally have been a stumbling block. But I was so familiar with the story that I was easily able to follow their French. As I nodded eagerly, it became clear to Eric that I already knew everything he was telling me about Memmie LeBlanc. Did I know that she refused to eat anything but roots and raw meat? “Yes,” I assured him. “I knew that.” That she had extraordinary tolerance for the cold? “Yes, that, too.” Did I know of her habit of tearing off her clothing and jumping into the moat whenever she felt like it? That the local viscount’s servants had to constantly restrain her from doing so? Of course, I knew all that!
I could see that Eric was beginning to understand that he’d found a compatriote, someone who knew as much about – who cared as much about – this mysterious woman and her centuries-old, largely-forgotten story.
Turned out we weren’t alone in our keen interest. “Franck Rolin!” Eric exclaimed. “Franck Rolin is the man you must talk to! He knows everything about la fille sauvage.”
I noted the name in my notes but had no idea who this person was and what he might add to my already extensive research.
We asked about the statue. Eric and Marie-Ange explained that it had been purchased by the mayor, who hoped to use Memmie’s story to put Songy on the map – the tourism map, to be specific. But he hadn’t gotten around to getting a plaque made for it yet, and the hordes of visitors eager to learn about La Fille Sauvage were yet to materialize. (It dawned on us that we were the hordes.)
An hour or more passed. We went on talking, drinking champagne, nibbling madeleines. We decided to skip our train and catch the next one. We skipped that one, too, and finally had to inform Eric and Marie-Ange that if we didn’t get on the road very soon, we’d miss the last train back to Paris. We headed toward our rental car, but Eric said he had something to show us first. He led us through a field scattered with dried-out corncobs, left behind, he said, by wild boars who feasted on them. At one end of the field was a deep trench filled with water, stretching about half the length of a football field. Eric explained that this was part of his ongoing effort to restore the estate to the way it was in Marie-Angelique’s time.
Yes, Eric Phelizon was digging a moat – Memmie’s moat; the one the servants had tried so hard to keep her out of.
By now we were really in danger of missing our train. But a thought came over me – this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I swim whenever, wherever I can – mostly in oceans, lakes; fairly large bodies of water. This, however, was a moat. Memmie’s moat. Did I dare?
I excused myself, quickly retrieved my backpack from the car and ducked behind some bushes. I could hear them chatting even more freely in my absence, since I was definitely the weak link in the conversation. Eric and Marie-Ange had questions, but Alec and Ivy knew what I was up to.
I came out from behind the bushes wearing my tank suit and cap.
“Non!” Marie-Ange gasped as she realized what I was about to do. She crossed her arms across her chest. “C’est trop froid!”
“Pas de problem,” I reassured her. “Je suis Canadienne!”
I plunged into the moat. It wasn’t particularly cold, but it was awfully murky. It was a moat, after all. I estimated it was somewhere in length between twenty-five and fifty meters. I did a quick front crawl to the end and back, aware that we had to get on the road soon. But with its high sides, the moat was harder to get out of than it was to get into. I grabbed onto some nondescript vegetation lining the upper edge and was able to hoist myself up and out of the water. I threw on my towel, planning to change in the car, and we piled in. Just as we were pulling away, Marie-Ange came running from the house carrying a bottle of champagne rosé and passed it through the open window. Alec wanted to pay, but they wouldn’t hear of it. It was a gift for the woman who had swum in l’eau de la fille sauvage.
We arrived at the station, dropped off the rental car, and got to the platform just as the train was about to leave. Back in Paris, we pondered what to do with the sparkling rosé. We couldn’t take it on the plane – no liquids allowed in carry-on. And we couldn’t risk having it explode in our checked baggage. What choice did we have? We’d just have to drink it up tonight.
At one point, I felt a strange sensation on my skin – a surge of pins-and-needles. I kept folding and packing, waiting for it to pass, but instead it grew more and more intense. I started to worry. What was this? Was it dangerous? Should I go to a hospital? It was last thing we needed just hours before our flight home. I kept on drinking the sparkling rosé. When the pins-and-needles feeling finally started to subside, I was drunk enough that I’d stopped worrying about it.
I crawled into bed and drifted off into a pleasant stupor, dreaming of my swim in Memmie’s moat. In the coming years, I came to realize that our last-minute decision to visit Songy had done more than introduce me to the glories of champagne. It had laid the foundation for all the elements of Memmie’s story – both historical and contemporary – that would occupy my attention for the next decade.