In 1936, a 34-year-old French businessman called Louis Didier struck a bargain with a poor mining couple in Lille: he persuaded them to give him their six-year-old daughter, Jeannine. Didier would provide the girl with material security and a university-level education and in return, her parents would never see her again. For Didier the handover was a day of grave significance, the first big step towards realising his life’s ambition.
His plan was to use Jeannine to give him a child that he would then sculpt into what he envisaged would be a superhuman. The child would be raised to be able to survive concentration camps and withstand torture under interrogation. Didier’s confused and hostile worldview took shape during the years between the First and Second World Wars and he was convinced that, if properly physically, mentally and emotionally trained from birth, it would be possible for a person to transcend normal human reality. He embarked on his project.
The supposed superhuman in question, Maude Julien, is now 60, tall and well-dressed, with the blonde hair and blue eyes that her father, a convert to Nietzsche’s theory of the Ubermensch, planned she’d have. Nothing about Maude hints at anything except a conventional French upper-middle-class background. Her manner is precise but warm, the blue heels and matching trouser suit imply she’s worn nice clothes her whole life. It’s a remarkable outcome, given that Louis Didier was her father. He died when Maude was 22; her mother Jeannine is still alive.
We’re near the Champ de Mars in an old Parisian art gallery, a three-roomed bungalow that smells faintly of essential oils. Its shelves and cheerful little side tables are packed with books on dreams, animals and psychology, while the small multicoloured signs she’s hung up on the bathroom walls encourage you “not to lose hope”. Maude is a psychotherapist and this has been her practice for over 20 years. She specialises in the treatment of trauma, phobias and mind control. Given her past, her choice of career isn’t entirely surprising, and yet – considering the strangeness of the things she’s experienced – it’s a wonder she’s on this side of sanity.
It’s important to point out that Maude’s story is not a misery memoir. “For me, it’s a jailbreak handbook,” she says. “One can endure very difficult things and still find a way out.” Readers have written to her, thanking her in particular for “escape tips”, such as passive-disobedience. “Now I am a person with a real life, happily married with children. I want this book to be a book of hope.”
The Only Girl in the World, a bestseller in France, is a portrait of a three-person cult – Maude and her parents. “A cult,” says Maude, “doesn’t always mean a guru with a beard… There are ‘two-person cults’, couples in which one consumes the other, or ‘family cults’ where the ogre is the mother or father, grandfather or grandmother.”
Jeannine was 28 when she gave birth to Maude, her only child. Three years later Didier liquidated his assets, bought a house near Cassel in northern France, and withdrew there with his wife and daughter to devote himself to carrying out his project. The phone was locked in a box and its key stayed in Didier’s pocket. The Didiers were considered rich. The house was large and remote.
Maude’s earliest memories recall a household that had become the physical embodiment of her father’s psychopathology. One where Maude, age five, underwent “alcohol and willpower training”, during which her father would feed her spirits and set her complicated tasks while intoxicated. “My father’s thinking was that those who can handle their drink will prevail,” she says – a useful tool “for getting information out of someone. I could encourage them to drink until they would be drunk and in my power.” She also learned the piano, violin, tenor saxophone, trumpet, accordion and double bass because “only musicians survive concentration camps”, her father said.
Emotions were dangerous weaknesses. If she showed any, her punishment was no eye contact with her parents for six weeks. “My father had the three characteristics you see in all cult leaders: he was in love with his mother [his own father was a terrible man – a career criminal]; he lost his sister when he was 10, so he was in mourning; and he was obsessive. The only time he spoke about his past with any feeling was when he described how his father tricked him into eating his pet rabbit. I think this cut off all feeling in him for any other living thing.”
The victim in this story isn’t just Maude, but the child who grew up to be Maude’s mother – her role occupies the grey area between victim and perpetrator. Jeannine was a terrorised disciple of Didier. Her relationship with her mother, says Maude, remains “complicated”. They last met 10 years ago when Maude visited. Maude still freezes up when she sees her. “The last time I saw her, she looked at me with such hardness. It is really terrible for me.” Because she’s an optimist, Maude has dedicated the book to her mother. “I’m sure my father was a coward, like a lot of dictators. The link between the predator and the victim is in all cases the fear.”
Maude’s escape was gradual and undramatic. There were small rebellions in her teens – using two pieces of toilet paper instead of one; breaking into her father’s office; a failed overdose. Then, late in her teens, Maude’s double-bass tutor flattered Didier into sending his daughter to study music away from home, at what he convinced Didier was a “harsh school”. Though Didier had already paired up his daughter for marriage (with a gay man in his late 50s – to make a “decent woman” of her), Maude’s tutor successfully suggested an alternative match in a young student called Richard. Maude went on to marry two more times. She has a daughter, now 35, with her second husband, Mark, and another one, now 27, with the man she remains happily married to.
She last saw her father in 1979, shortly before his death. They sat in silence, while her mother waited on him in an outhouse he’d had built in later years where he’d spend most of his days drinking.
“Have you seen Forrest Gump?” she says suddenly. “I was like that when I first left my father’s house. I was really stupid. I had to learn the alphabet because the dictionary was forbidden in our house. I had never spoken when eating. I had never learned to walk with other people. I had to tolerate being able to look at somebody.” Her husband Mark helped her to catch up on her teens, taking her to her first film and buying her comics. “His mother was the first woman to touch me with love. I was 25. She put her hand on my shoulder and I felt all my body, as if it was alive. I started crying, crying, crying.”
There is little in Maude’s book about her interior life since she left the family home, but she is clearly a happy and fulfilled woman now. Without a maternal role model: “I would go to public gardens and watch mothers with their young children, and I’d try to draw inspiration from those who had a good rapport with their children. I’d stay away from the ones whose children were too obedient.” Maude’s love of her children would have disappointed her father, because having a child was the catalyst for breaking with his influence. “I didn’t want to risk making my child suffer the consequences of my own traumas, with the ensuing phobias.” Motherhood was the difference between going into therapy when she had her first daughter in her 20s and possibly never going.
Two groups of people write to her often: mental-health professionals, who, like her, feel that a troubled past shouldn’t be viewed as a handicap to people working in their profession. “Getting out of my own traumatic past allowed me to help others,” she says. Psychoanalysis “helped me a lot: first to get rid of the feeling of guilt. I was able to understand then that they [my parents] were the problem, not me.”
The second group are those looking to find a way out of ongoing psychological battles with their own childhood ghosts. “I think that my main advice is to keep hope, and that life always finds a path – we have far more psychological resources than we realise – and not to believe those who condemn you with a verdict such as: ‘After what you’ve suffered, you’re never going to make it.’ It’s wrong. You might not get there by a direct path, but it’s possible to find a real balance.”
The Only Girl in the World by Maude Julien is published by Oneworld at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, visit guardianbookshop.com
