The name Blanche Monnier first appeared in a local newspaper in Poitiers in May 1901. The case of that woman, locked by her mother for 25 years in a room, shocked the country until it fell into oblivion.
An anonymous letter sent to the attorney general uncovered the grisly case. Blanche died in 1913 in the psychiatric hospital of Blois washed, fed and clothed, but she kept begging to be taken back to her "little cave" and locked up.