[4] Aroles speculates that Marie-Angélique had survived for ten years living wild in the forests of France, between the ages of nine and nineteen, before she was captured by villagers in Songy in Champagne in September 1731.

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.

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".

[23] Having escaped the plague that should have killed her, Marie-Angélique walked thousands of kilometers [miles] through the forests of the kingdom of France before being captured in 1731 in the province of Champagne in a state of savagery.

During these ten years, she did not live with wolves, but survived them by resisting their attacks with a wooden club and another weapon [a long stick with a sharp metal tip] that she either found or stole.

When she was captured, this black-skinned, hairy and clawed huntress was showing some characteristics of regression (she knelt down to drink water and had regular sideways eye movements, similar to nystagmus, the result of a life lived in a state of permanent alertness).

Her intellectual rebirth was important: she learned to read and write, became a nun for a time in a royal abbey, became destitute, was rescued financially by the Queen of France (spouse of Louis XV), maintained her dignity in the face of her long battle with an illness, and died relatively wealthy, as the inventory of her goods shows.