Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet

Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet (born June 12, 1686; died 8 July, 1764) was a French biographical author of the first half of the 18th century.

She was the wife of the Abbeville merchant Jacques Homassel and the semi-anonymous "Madame H–––t" who published a pamphlet biography of the famous feral child Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans, in Paris in 1755.[1] This appeared in an English translation in 1768 as An Account of a Savage Girl,[2] with a preface by the Scottish philosopher-judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, which anticipates some of the later evolutionary theories of the English scientist Charles Darwin.

However, just how much of Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage Hecquet herself wrote is not clear and the work has sometimes been attributed to the French scientist-explorer Charles-Marie de la Condamine, even though La Condamine himself publicly denied its authorship. The biography was advertised in Paris in 1755 as "Brochure in-12 de 72 pag. Prix 1 liv."[3] ("Pamphlet in duodecimo of 72 pages. Price 1 French livre") and was sold in shops in the city in order to provide a small income for Marie-Angélique herself.

At the time, La Condamine described Hecquet as "a widow, who lives near St. Marceau and, having met and befriended the girl after the death of M. the Duke d’Orleans who was protecting her, took pains to write her story".[4] Very little else is known about her other than that she was a correspondent and former childhood friend of Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis (1687–1760), a nun and mother superior of the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Quebec in Canada. In later life she is believed to have gone into a religious retreat at an unknown location, perhaps as a nun.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Madame H–––t [Marie-Catherine Hommasel Hecquet], Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans (Paris, no publisher, 1755) accessed 1 September 2013.
  2. ↑ An Account of a Savage Girl, Caught Wild in the Woods of Champagne. Translated from the French of Madam H–––t [trans. William Robertson] (Edinburgh, A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1768) accessed 1 September 2013.
  3. ↑ Annonces, Affiches, et Avis Divers, 19 February 1755, p. 1, Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris.
  4. ↑ Charles-Marie de la Condamine, "Lettre à M. de Boissy, de l’Académie Françoise", Le Mercure de France (Paris, April 1755), p. 75. accessed 26 November 2014
  5. ↑ Julie Roy, "Des femmes de lettres avant la lettre. Les religeuses et le livre manuscrit a l'époque de la Nouvelle-France" in Le Québec au miroir de l'Europe (Québec, Association internationale des études québécoises, 2004), p. 26 accessed 1 September 2013.

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