Pyrénée

Pyrénée with the bear and her teddy bear.

Pyrénée is a 1998 French feral child graphic novel (bande dessinée) by Regis Loisel and Philippe Sternis, about a naked feral girl who is brought up in the mountains of the French Pyrenees by a bear.

Plot summary

When a huge earthquake devastates a town in the French Pyrenees, a bear escapes from a circus in the confusion and later finds a small girl whose mother has been killed in the quake. The bear rescues the girl (and her teddy bear) and raises her as his own cub like a female version of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, high in the inaccessible mountains, naming her “Pyrénée” after them. They came to a place where little Pyrénée took off his collar to set the bear free, and found the cave. Later on she also learns philosophy and wisdom from a blind old eagle, taught herself as a hunter and a fisherman, and eventually - like Mowgli - has to try to make her way back to human society.

Inspirations

The French Pyrénées were home to two people that may have served as inspiration for the story. The Girl of Issaux,^[1] lost in the snow at the age of 8 and captured at the age of 16 (circa 1719), and also La Folle des Pyrénées^[2] (captured 1807 at the age of about 40) who was not feral but lived with the bears. The story also draws some parallels to another story of a wild child of French origin -Victor of Aveyron.

See also

• Feral children in mythology and fiction

References

External links

• Pyrenee on nota-bene.org (in French)
• Official website of Regis Loisel (in French)
• Biography of Philippe Sternis (in English) on Lambiek.net
• Pyrenee fan-page (in English)