Maude Julien - The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir

Praise for Maude Julien and The Only Girl in the World

A living testimony of resilienceAn 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 grievancesshe 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? Youd expect an agoraphobic, a traumatised madwomanWhereas Maude Julien exudes vitality. Libration

Despite appearances, this is not the umpteenth book about a miraculously saved victim. It is much more, and much betterOne of the most fascinating things about this book is the extraordinary resistance that Maude developedher ability to develop a world for herself. Le Journal du Dimanche

This story is never maudlinit 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 LObs, 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, Amlie Nothomb and Vronique 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 Derrire 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 childrenBiography. Psychologically abused childrenBiography. Adult child abuse victims writings. Psychological torture.

CONTENTS

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

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.

Its unclear whether there was a financial transaction. The miner agreed. Jeannine left to live under Louis Didiers 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 dont 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 shed 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 childs education.

Louis believed that the child Jeannine brought into the world would be, like her father, chosenand that later in life she would be called upon to raise up humanity. Thanks to her mothers 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.

When I first come to the house Im not yet four. Im wearing a red coat. I can still feel its texture against my fingers, thick and felted. Im not holding anyones hand and theres no one beside me. I can just feel my fists bunched in my pockets, gripping the fabric, clinging to it.

Theres lots of brown gravel on the ground. I hate this place. The garden seems to go on forever; I feel like its swallowing me up. And then theres 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 dont 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 its my fault we had to leave Lille and bury ourselves in this hole. That Im not normal. I have to be hidden, otherwise Id 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. Its a terrifying place, filled with screams and commotion.

Its true, Im 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 wasnt afraid. I felt brave, nothing could break me.