by Maude Julien
Praise for Maude Julien and The Only Girl in the World
‘A living testimony of resilience…An account as gripping as it is inspiring.’ Elle
‘Maude Julien delivers a staggering testimony, one that remains full of hope.’ Ouest-France
‘A serious subject: manipulation, in which the author is now a professional therapist. Maude Julien does not write with resentment, or bear grievances—she delivers a clear message of hope.’ Livres Hebdo
‘Once you read The Only Girl in the World, you wonder: how on earth can this have happened, and how can the product of this conditioning have managed to integrate into society? You’d expect an agoraphobic, a traumatised madwoman…Whereas Maude Julien exudes vitality.’ Libération
‘Despite appearances, this is not the umpteenth book about a miraculously saved victim. It is much more, and much better…One of the most fascinating things about this book is the extraordinary resistance that Maude developed…her ability to develop a world for herself.’ Le Journal du Dimanche
‘This story is never maudlin—it is so absorbing that you have to remind yourself to breathe from time to time.’ Le Point
‘Her book offers a ray of hope.’ Metro Belgique
MAUDE JULIEN works as a psychotherapist, specialising in mind and behavioural control, emotional manipulation and trauma, and conducts anthropological research among Indigenous Australians. She lives in Paris.
URSULA GAUTHIER is a journalist at the French weekly magazine L’Obs, and the author and co-author of many works. She lives in Paris.
ADRIANA HUNTER is the prize-winning translator of works by writers including Catherine Millet, Amélie Nothomb and Véronique Olmi.
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Copyright © 2014 by Maude Julien and Ursula Gauthier
Translation copyright © 2017 by Adriana Hunter
The moral rights of Maude Julien and Ursula Gauthier to be identified as the authors and Adriana Hunter as the translator of this work have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in France by Stock in 2014 under the title Derrière la grille
This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by The Text Publishing Company in 2017
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph by Jean Garnett
Page design by Jessica Horrocks
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Julien, Maude.
Title: The only girl in the world: a memoir/by Maude Julien, with Ursula Gauthier; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.
ISBN: 9781925498110 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925410440 (ebook)
Subjects: Julien, Maude. Abused children—Biography. Psychologically abused children—Biography. Adult child abuse victims’ writings. Psychological torture.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LINDA
PITOU
LINDBERGH
KENNEDY
MADAME DESCOMBES
WE SAGITTARIANS
THE SWIMMING POOL
CAP GRIS NEZ
THE CELLAR
ARTHUR
THE KILLER
SHOOTS AND ROOTS
THE SCHEDULE
THE HOLE
RAYMOND
WHITEY
RED TOOTHPASTE
THE CAVE
GREGOR AND EDMOND
THE ORANGE BOOK
CUVÉE 1945
FROM UNDERGROUND
THE PYRAMID
THE TIGER RUG
HIRAM OF TYRE
RAVAILLAC
THE BRICK WALL
THE GREY VEST
THE CRYSTAL BALL
PÉRISAUT
MENIE GRÉGOIRE
HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY
ASPRO
NIETZSCHE
MATHILDE
THE CALF
THE KEY
THE FLYING MACHINE
FRIENDSHIP
THALES’ THEOREM
GOODBYE, LINDA
GUARDIAN OF THE TEMPLE
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING…
MONSIEUR MOLIN
MARIE-NOËLLE
MONSIEUR DELATAILLE
THE SANTINAS JAZZ BAND
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE TO MY ENGLISH LANGUAGE READERS
Some names and identifying details have been changed in order to protect the privacy of certain individuals with whom Maude Julien came into contact.
TO MY MOTHER,
the first victim of the Ogre
INTRODUCTION
In 1936, Louis Didier was thirty-four and financially well-off. A man from humble origins, he had risen remarkably quickly through the ranks of French society and he now ran a company in Lille. Initiated into an esoteric lodge of Freemasonry, he adhered to an extremely dark spiritual vision of a fallen world governed by grim forces.
That year he met a man, a miner from the town of Fives, who was struggling to feed his many children. Louis Didier suggested the miner ‘entrust’ to him his youngest child, a flaxen-haired six-year-old girl. ‘Jeannine will never want for anything; she will have a brilliant education and enjoy a very comfortable life. My only condition is that you will no longer see her.’
It’s unclear whether there was a financial transaction. The miner agreed. Jeannine left to live under Louis Didier’s protection and never saw her family again.
Louis Didier kept his promise. Jeannine was sent to boarding school and received an excellent education. When she reached the age of consent, she came back to live with her guardian. He had her study philosophy and Latin at university in Lille, and made sure she earned her degree.
I don’t know when Louis Didier revealed his grand project to Jeannine. Did he talk about it when she was still a little girl who spent only holidays with him? Or did he wait until she’d grown up and become his wife? I think that deep down Jeannine ‘always knew’ what her mission was: to give him a daughter as blonde as she was, and then to take charge of the child’s education.
Louis believed that the child Jeannine brought into the world would be, like her father, ‘chosen’—and that later in life she would be called upon to ‘raise up humanity’. Thanks to her mother’s qualifications, this child would be raised away from the polluting influences of the outside world. Louis Didier would be responsible for training her physically and mentally to become a ‘superior being’, equipped to undertake the difficult and momentous task he had assigned her.
Twenty-two years after he took possession of Jeannine, Louis Didier decided the time had come for her to bring his daughter into the world and that the date of birth should be November 23rd, 1957.
On November 23rd, 1957, Jeannine gave birth to a very blonde little girl.
Three years later, aged fifty-nine, Louis Didier liquidated his assets, bought a house near Cassel, between Lille and Dunkirk, and withdrew to live there with Jeannine in order to devote himself entirely to carrying out the project he had devised back in 1936: to make his child a superhuman being.
That child was me.
Linda
When I first
come to the house I’m not yet four. I’m wearing a red coat. I can still feel its texture against my fingers, thick and felted. I’m not holding anyone’s hand and there’s no one beside me. I can just feel my fists bunched in my pockets, gripping the fabric, clinging to it.
There’s lots of brown gravel on the ground. I hate this place. The garden seems to go on forever; I feel like it’s swallowing me up. And then there’s that dark, disturbing structure: a huge house looming to my right.
I hear the heavy gate scraping along the gravel as it closes behind me. A screeching creak-creak-creak until the two sides of the gate clang together. Then comes the click of the lock, followed by a clunk: the gate is shut for good. I don’t dare turn around. It feels like a lid has just been closed over me.
Whenever the two of us are alone, my mother tells me it’s my fault we had to leave Lille and bury ourselves in this hole. That I’m not normal. I have to be hidden, otherwise I’d be locked up in Bailleul straightaway. Bailleul is the lunatic asylum. I went there once, when my parents took on one of their inmates as a maid. It’s a terrifying place, filled with screams and commotion.
It’s true, I’m not really normal. In Lille I had terrible tantrums during which I slammed my head against the walls. I was a bundle of indomitable will, full of joy and rage. It hurt when the uneven surface of the walls dug into my head, when my mother crushed my hand in hers and dragged me away by the arm. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt brave, nothing could break me.
My father had the walls coated with a roughcast of an even coarser texture in order to ‘tame’ me. It didn’t do any good. I still went and hit my head against those walls in fits of anger. I had to have my head stitched up so many times that my scalp is littered with scars. My mother, who would graze herself or tear her dresses against the walls as she walked past, was furious with me.
Since we’ve been in this house, I don’t feel as strong. I’m alone. I don’t go to nursery school anymore. My mother teaches me now, up on the second floor. I no longer go to my father’s garage, where the workmen used to make me laugh. We hardly ever go out and we have very few visitors.
What I want is to go to school, proper school, where I can have a teacher and lots of friends. Even though I’m terrified of my father, I ask, ‘Can I go back to school one day?’ and my parents look at me as if I’ve just uttered something outrageous. My mother seems disgusted. My father’s eyes bore into mine. ‘Don’t you realize,’ he says, ‘that it’s for your sake I’ve put your mother through all these years of studying? She had a hell of a time, believe me. She thought she’d never succeed. And I made her keep going. With the qualifications she has, she could teach a whole class. But you have her all to yourself until you take your baccalauréat at eighteen. You have such good fortune and still you complain?’
I don’t know what demon prompts me with this ill-advised idea: ‘If she can teach an entire class, couldn’t we have a class with some other pupils?’ An icy silence ensues. My limbs freeze. I know I won’t dare broach the subject again. I won’t be going to school.
Luckily for me there’s Linda. She came to the house at about the same time as us. We grew up together. In my oldest memories of her, she’s not yet fully grown. When she wags her tail it brushes my face. It tickles. It makes me laugh. I like the smell of her coat.
While she’s a puppy she sleeps in the kitchen because the nights are cold in northern France. But she’s not allowed into any of the other rooms. When we’re in the dining room, I can hear her whining down the corridor. She’s soon exiled to the unheated utility room.
My father can’t wait to put her well and truly outside. He has a painted wooden kennel delivered and puts it in the garden behind the kitchen. That’s where Linda has to sleep now. She’s absolutely forbidden from coming into the house—until a serious cold snap comes along, which brings the poor, shivering creature back into the utility room, her hair matted with ice.
My father is annoyed. ‘Dogs are for guarding the house,’ he says. ‘They belong outside.’ The cold spell ends, and Linda spends more and more time tied to the railings on the outside steps. That’s where I go to see her at every opportunity. She looks huge to me. I take her by the collar and bury my face in her fur. My father, who bellows orders at her, terrifies her. My mother, whom Linda views with cool courtesy, is exasperated. ‘That dog’s mine,’ she keeps telling me. ‘But of course you have to own everything. You act as if she’s yours. And you’ve managed to make the stupid animal believe it herself.’
I feel ashamed. I don’t understand who belongs to whom. Linda couldn’t care less, though. She continues to jump all over me in delight.
One day some builders come. My father tells me that Linda is going to have a palace. I’m ecstatic for her. When it’s built, this ‘palace’ is a strange shape: the first part is high enough for an adult to stand upright, then there’s a lower area insulated with glass wool ‘to keep her nice and warm’. From now on Linda can stay outside no matter the weather.
Strangely, Linda refuses point blank to set foot in the back part of the kennel. My father tells me to go and sit at the far end so she’ll get used to it, and Linda soon comes to join me. For several days we have fun sneaking into the little alcove and snuggling up together.
A week later, my father calls for me in the middle of the afternoon, and orders me to go to the kennel with the dog. Hurray! An unexpected break from lessons! Linda races over to me, thrilled, and we curl up together in our little refuge. I think that’s when I hear the workmen come over. I don’t know why my heart constricts. They come into the kennel carrying a heavy metal gate with black and white painted bars. They lift it up and—clank—they set it onto hinges.
‘Maude, get out of there!’ my father yells. I obey him. I have no choice but to obey. I come out, leaving Linda behind the bars, her eyes full of sad incomprehension. ‘You see,’ my father says, looking me squarely in the eye, ‘she trusted you and look where that got her. You must never trust anyone.’
From that day until the end of her life, Linda is locked in her kennel from eight in the morning until eight at night. She trusted me and I didn’t see it coming. She is trapped because of me.
At first, Linda whines, scratches at the bars, and reaches out a paw when I walk by. I’m not allowed to stop. I look at her, wordlessly apologizing. As the weeks pass, she takes to sitting behind her gate in complete silence, the spark fading from her eyes, just wagging her tail when she sees me.
Then her character changes. She starts having aggressive outbursts and no one knows what triggers them. She growls and bares her teeth when she hears footsteps. After eight in the evening, when she’s free to run in the garden, she even chases my mother. She’s a big German shepherd and she can be very menacing when she wants. My mother defends herself by throwing buckets of water at her. Linda takes to shaking at the very sight of a bucket.
My father is satisfied. Linda has become quite a good guard dog. To fine-tune her training, he sometimes lets her out of her prison and tells her to guard his bicycle. She has to sit motionless next to it. He then makes me walk up to her, and as soon as she wags her tail he shouts. She immediately tucks her tail between her legs. Once she understands how to guard the bike, he pats her and rewards her with a couple of hours of freedom.
After a few months of this training, he decides to test her. When Linda is sitting stiff as a board, standing guard next to the bike, my father tells me to run over, snatch the bike and take it away. I do as I’m told. Seeing me running towards her, Linda jumps to her feet, leaps at me and sinks her canines into the flesh of my thigh. I scream in surprise and pain. Linda immediately lets go and lies flat on the ground, gazing at me with desperate eyes. ‘Absolutely anyone, no matter what stupid orders they’re under, will attack you—even this dog who you think is so faithful to you,’ my father says.
I still love Linda just as much; I’ll never believe she bit me deliberately. It was just an accident. My father often returns to this episode. H
e wants me to understand that he’s the only one who loves and protects me. That I should trust only him.
Pitou
Every evening at eight o’clock, I go and release Linda from her prison. Before letting her out into the garden for the night, I quietly tell her stories, and she listens attentively. I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m telling her, so I whisper in her ear. Sometimes it tickles her and she rubs her ear against my cheek. I often tell her about the ducks that live by the pond my father had dug at the bottom of the garden.
It’s migration season, and wild ducks are flying overhead. Some of them occasionally land in the grounds of our house. My father worries because our animals might be ‘polluted’ by these outsiders. He takes out his shotgun and fires at the intruders. My mother drives them out by pumping a big brown bellows at them, making an unbearable trumpeting noise.
We have to stop our own birds from trying to escape, so we clip one wing on each of them. I’m the one who has to catch them, because for some inexplicable reason, they readily come to me. It breaks my heart to see how quickly they come when I call. I hand them to my mother one at a time, and she toils away at removing their feathers with chunky scissors. Duck feathers are very tough. She crops them very short, sometimes so short she draws blood. All our ducks have a ridiculous waddle, their intact wing looking huge compared to the stump on the other side.
I tell Linda about the hideous crunch of the scissors on their feathers, the smell of the droppings they release out of fear. I feel like the ducks on the pond, with one wing that my parents want long and beautiful and the other cut to the quick.
Thankfully I also have some more cheerful stories to tell her. Like the one about Pitou, a Barbary duckling we managed to save from certain death. Pitou was quacking pitifully. The three of us ran over and spotted him, a pathetic tuft of feathers, pinioned under a big drake who kept driving the little one’s head underwater with his beak. The drake must have been his own father, intent on drowning him.
My mother grabs a stick and hits at the big drake to get him to let go of Pitou. But he’s tough; he dodges the blows without letting go. She doesn’t either. She runs along the narrow pontoon across the pond. And splash, she falls in. I lean over to reach out my hand, and I fall in too. ‘How the hell did I end up with such a pair of idiots!’ my father shouts, exasperated. We splash about in the filthy, stinking water; my mother’s chignon comes undone and her long blond hair trails through the sludge. Finally, she grabs me by the collar and lifts me onto the pontoon.
