The people of Houviers poked each other in the ribs when they first saw the young of the dirt lice burst from their mothers’ bodies. The pharmacist had already been watching through the lenses of his shiny new microscope. He claimed the lice sons mate with their sisters even inside the mothers’ bodies, then are eaten as the daughters eat their way out.

       “Your young will eat anything; one must watch,” laughed a townswoman.

       “Certainly, Old Cabbage,” said another. “And the existence of these poux de terre”—these dirt lice—“explains in a modern way our own dirt-eating daughters.”

       The townspeople claimed they had suspected all along. There had to be something in the soil the human girls had eaten. But did that mean sensible people should walk, in fear of ground, on stilts?

       “Go to Father,” shrugged the pharmacist.

       Long before, when they had all been younger, Father Sempier had convinced with homilies on “earth that crawls with lust,” but now the hungry girls were dead, so what was the harm in nibbling a speck of dirt once again? Some of the oldest people recommended the practice; times had been bad before and might get bad again. No use thinking your portion would always be duck with mustard sauce.

       Yet the discovery of the dirt lice inspired the priest to new heights of excoriation.

       “Father’s been nipping Calvados on the sly,” said the woman who washed the altar cloths. Indeed the carved confession box had become so fumy some of the parishioners had stopped confessing altogether, maintaining their sins would wait. They consoled themselves with snacks of dirt, joking about the tastiness of the wicked lice.

       Even so, prudent people nodded their heads solemnly when the priest fulminated against the miniscule creatures the townspeople had now seen clearly under the pharmacist’s microscope.

       “Better eat only holy wafers,” said the dotards who sat around the fountain in the square. “At the least boil your meat well.”

       Old Bostiac, the pharmacist, might have charged a few sous for peering into his microscope at the soil, but instead, to spare his white hands and clean shirt, he taught the townspeople to prepare slides.

       And the rumor that now and then he popped a crumb of soil in his mouth? Really, it is shameful to recount it. The pharmacist was a man of science, living in Houviers proper, and the truly benighted dirt-eaters, the hungry girls and those whom they seduced, had been mostly ignorant peasants living in the village of La Bouchoire.

       On a farm outside La Bouchoire lived Mathilde Sabot, the mother of the first hungry girl. In 1846—otherwise a good year, thanks to Louis Philippe—there was no rain, so no wheat and no potatoes, and Mathilde Sabot, like so many others too proud to seek charity, ate the thatch of her roof, then ate dirt. Later it was said her Jeanne was not born but gnawed her way from Mathilde’s stomach, as if a rat had bitten her from within. Mathilde Sabot would have died if Couviard, the horse doctor, had not smelled her blood from the road, doused the hole with carbolic acid, and sewed her up with sheep gut.

       When Couviard came into Houviers for his weekly game of Patience with Bostiac, he professed his astonishment. “Imaginez! A human baby born with teeth! Poor girl. She was already looking for good things to eat.”

       By the time Couviard had sewed up Mathilde, Jeanne had caught a starving rat by the tail and was biting off its head, but Couviard did not mention that to Bostiac lest he ruin the Sabots’ reputation. Besides, though he was young, he had been long enough among animals to have forgotten the ways of people. Even as he had been trying to sort out what was proper, Jeanne had finished off the rat and climbed into her mother’s lap.

       “Ah well, the lass has tender feelings after all,” the doctor had muttered. Packing his bag, he had been relieved to let it go at that.

       By chance no other women in or around La Bouchoire were pregnant that year. So, though many ate dirt, only Mathilde Sabot gave birth to a baby through a hole in her stomach. It was just as well, for Jeanne kept the village busy. When good years followed the bad, and the householders again kept hens, Mathilde’s child was forever wringing their necks and eating them.

       “A good egg-layer like Madame Rostiard’s Froumelle,” Mathilde would say to Jeanne, wagging her finger fiercely.

       The child would only smile. She said not a word—in fact, she never learned to talk, though she could hum a tune.

       Mère de Dieu. Neither Mathilde nor her husband, Robert, knew what to think. Jeanne was large and round, with thick, powerful arms and legs and a huge head, while both the parents were thin and bony, with concave chests, scrawny limbs and small heads.

       “You ought to stop that child eating dirt,” said the neighbors, who had long since hidden their hens, but Mathilde only shrugged. The child had devoured most of the rats around the village, and many of the cats and dogs. Mathilde could not send her on an errand lest she get at piglets and calves. Only geese, hissing and flapping their powerful wings, sent the enormous toddler waddling away hungry and red-faced, screaming frustration.

       When Jeanne was older, the villagers began missing a grandmother’s lace, a great-aunt’s teapot, even homely, useful objects—a teakettle, a flatiron, a bedwarmer. Of course the villagers suspected Jeanne, but no one could find anything in the Sabots’ house or yard, though Mathilde and Robert looked everywhere, digging holes all around their property. Mère de Dieu! They shook their daughter and yelled at her, to no avail. Finally the villagers decided the thieves could just as well be outsiders. A new road now ran from Rouen to Houviers, and doubtless remnant Jacobin riff-raff were wandering off it, looking for adventure and trouble.

       Still there were whisperings about Jeanne, rumors about what went on in the woods on moonless nights. Everyone knew the enormous girl slept outside. And many a wife woke to find her husband was not in his bed. He would return toward dawn, wet and dirty, claiming he had been to the privy. Mère de Dieu! The women began spitting at Jeanne when they passed the eight-year-old with her maman buying a paper of pins or length of cloth.

       Mathilde then prevailed on Robert to sell the farm and move to another in a remote corner of the parish. Yet though passers-by snickered at the great clumsy barefooted girl, the Sabots themselves were fond of her. At the age of nine, she took over the plowing from her father, driving straight and hard behind the ox, plowing in one day as much as her father could in a week. By the age of twelve she could plow without the ox, though her parents did not like her to do it, lest the neighbors gawk. Of course the parents would have sent her to school, but that was impossible. Mathilde and Robert had taught Jeanne to comb her hair and brush her teeth, and she had learned to cross her ankles when sitting, but they had not been able to housebreak her, so she pissed hot streams and laid steaming cakes of dung wherever she pleased. Her parents cured the dung for fuel and fertilizer, and the Sabot farm began to prosper.

       Imagine the grief of the parents to find one evening their useful daughter flat on her back in the fields, the ox having wandered off with the plow. The young woman’s body had been gnawed open, and a number of babies were crawling around her. Sabot slid on his shoes and ran all the way to Houviers, interrupting Couviard at his game, while Mathilde did what she could to make her daughter comfortable, stuffing the hole with a pillow and bathing the girl’s head with mustard water. Too late.

       The doctor advised the parents to gather up the infants crawling about the fields eating dirt and mice. He would examine them to make sure they had been born healthy. And while the grandparents were catching the babies, tying their ankles together and laying them down in a long, empty trough where cattle had drunk, Doctor Couviard began feeling around inside Jeanne, to see if any babies remained. And indeed, one young lady bit his finger—no surprise to the doctor, though he was amazed to find in Jeanne’s body cavity no internal organs, only a great many objects—including a Sevres porcelain clock the doctor recognized as his own and a number of little pots he had last seen filled with custard at Madame Hussier’s.

       “So! We have here the corpse of a thieving stuffcakes,” the doctor allowed, smiling and shaking his head. “A greedy fatkin!”

       Mathilde and Robert Sabot could not stop wringing their hands and shaking their heads when they saw the pile of objects Doctor Couviard was pulling from their daughter’s body. They were all for giving them back at once.

       “The andirons of Madame the Baker’s great-great-grand-father! The embroidery frame of Father Sempier’s housekeeper! And here is the pharmacist’s boot-scraper!”

       There was a large pile of unidentified objects, and Couviard feared there might be wrangles over these. He suggested that the Sabots sell all the objects; they could then use the money to raise the dozen babies writhing in the watering trough.

       And so Sabot loaded onto his haywagon flour sacks containing all the objects except Couviard’s clock. These he hauled on the little-used “old road” far past Houviers to the town of Anse-le-Marteau, where he sold them to a dealer in second-hand goods. The money he took in coins which he tied in a sock and tucked inside his blouse. When he got home, he gave most of the coins to his baby granddaughters to see what would happen. And sure enough, they swallowed some and stuffed others into their nostrils, ears, and the holes between their legs.

       “This is safer than a bank,” he said. “Now we must only wait until they give birth, then we can put our hands in their bellies and take out the coins and whatever else they have stuffed inside. We will want for nothing the rest of our lives, though we must continue to farm for appearances’ sake.”

       With the coins he had not given his granddaughters, Sabot invested in a great deal of seed and a dozen plows. He sold his ox and trained the girls to plow, having rented fields from the larger landowner in the fat thumb of whose holdings Sabot’s farm was a sliver.

       The girls worked hard and did not fight among themselves as long as each was allowed her field. Robert kept them apart and fed them from separate boxes—hay and apples and dirt—and built a long shed with twelve stalls and a plank roof so the girls could find shelter from rain. At harvest time, he chained them to trees while he took to market what he did not keep for winter feed. One of the chained girls ate straight down past the roots of trees and buried herself alive, but the others waited patiently, only nibbling pits around themselves which, upon unchaining the girls, Robert filled with turnips, potatoes, and sand—his root cellars.

       Robert no longer worried what people would think of the hungry girls, who were growing even larger and rounder than Jeanne had. With the profits of his farming, and, eventually, the sale of the loot in the bellies of eleven spent granddaughters, he rented more fields and built more feed-boxes and sheds—enough for 132 great-granddaughters! But he was old by then, and tired of farming and of girls, so he spread word of dowries. With these handsome sums, the girls could actually get husbands, for it seems men who had been frequenting the hungry girls in the forests at night would just as soon marry them by day if there were profit in it. And there was nothing the decent girls of the parish could do but join the convent or go to Paris to work as domestics or whores.

       Soon every family in La Bouchoire had a hungry girl for a daughter-in-law, and the same was true in Lamouset, Brosse-les-Bains and Dix-Poulets. Even in Houviers, where the men were used to girls who wore shoes every day, not all the families turned up their noses at the Sabots. But of course it did not work out completely well, for the girls were thieving gluttons who upon dying left their husbands with thieving, gluttonous children—all girls who would require dowries. Then too, not every family in the parish had relied on Doctor Couviard. Most thought themselves too good for an animal man and called on the midwife, Chretienne Lavabo, or the physician, Doctor Nevers; these families did not do well with the hungry brides. Chretienne Lavabo disentombed an ancient Gallic decree declaring a midwife entitled to keep any goods or chattel she pulled from a mother. Dr. Nevers called in the gendarmes, who arrested whole families and accused them of killing the pregnant daughters-in-law by stuffing them with stolen goods. Townspeople were mortified, but in villages like La Bouchoire, they drew a different moral from the events that had passed.

       “Couviard’s the only decent doctor,” they said. And from then on they called on him with all their ailments, especially their births. They gave him whatever he wanted from the bellies of the girls and handsome fees besides. And soon Couviard had two assistants and a pretty dappled mare that pulled a smart yellow gig with red wheel rims.

       Meanwhile the Sabots had long since married off all their hungry girls but one. She was harelipped and blind in an eye—ugly beyond the redemption of any dowry Sabot was prepared to offer. The Sabots put the farm in her name and entrusted the deed to Couviard. They also gave the girl several sacks of seeds and two hundred plows. They themselves went far away, some said to Algeria, with a nice bundle of gold coins in a money belt.

       The girl had her babies without assistance, then died. Her young had no idea how to use the plows, or what to do with the seed, which they ate, along with the thatch of the roof and the furniture. Then, as in Mathilde’s time, they began eating soil.

       These girls were wild and furtive, larger than any hungry girls before, and hungrier. They even ate the bodies of the dead, it was said, beginning with their own mother, whose body was gone when Father Sempier, tipped by a neighbor, came to sprinkle it with holy water. No one would marry a girl from Sabot’s place now, so the young men all swore. Yet now and then a youth disappeared.

       One day Father Sempier—now an old man—was out hunting for mushrooms in the forest between Houviers and Lamouset. He heard a noise, a snuffling and grunting like a pig nosing for truffles.

       “Mère de Dieu! In this forest!” he exclaimed, his mouth watering. But the fuss was only one of the missing boys, stuffing dirt in his mouth, writhing and shaking like one possessed. Beside him on the ground there poked from a bag a pewter candelabrum and an embroidered cloth.

       When the boy saw the priest he bolted to the Sabot farm, where the discreetly trailing priest saw a number of huge, round, naked girls sitting like houses on the ground, their feet sticking out at the ends of thin little legs. The priest watched, astonished, as the young man disappeared inside a fat body.

       Watching longer, the priest saw that each of the girls sitting on the ground had at least one young man living inside her. He saw the young men lean ladders against the hungry girls’ sides so they could climb up on their shoulders and comb their hair and whisper in their ears. And he saw the hungry girls themselves dig up basketsful of dirt with their hands and eat them. One fellow drove a stage coach right into a girl’s body, six horses and a sizeable carriage with a great deal of baggage on top and behind! Father Sempier thought of trying to reason with the girls, or at least with their swains, but his outrage, revulsion, pity, and shame warred so fiercely within him he could only sputter.

       Later he spoke to his bishop, who considered calling in an exorcist but decided on a more politic approach. He dropped a word in the ear of Dr. Nevers, and soon enough the gendarmes began shoving the hungry girls onto big flat wagons and carting them off to the lunatic asylum at Anse-le-Marteau, the jail having too few accommodations.

       In the asylum was a common room, a stone hall with high vaulted ceilings and thick, wide, heavy oak doors. With ropes and pulleys, the girls were pushed and pulled into the room, then left to be questioned later. It had taken all of one day, that night, and most of the next day and night to bring them in, for the largest had to be slid along inclined planes. Moreover the numbers of girls grew as word spread of the arrest. For suddenly families and neighbors realized how very tired they were of the girls. Even husbands were tired. It was one thing to visit the girls in their wallows and quite another to have them rooting around day in, day out. How convenient if they were lunatics, to be chained to their beds and forgotten!

       The asylum was run by the Sisters of Sainte Marie Couverte; many of them were the daughters of the best families of the region. These sisters showed their usual kindnesses to those placed in their care. The food they doled out was what they ate themselves, watery porridge, blackened radishes, and shrivelled apples, all in modest portions. The girls ate what they were given and banged on their metal plates for more. Failing to get it—there was no more—they threw their plates at the stone walls with such force they made holes as big as cannon balls. Ah, the huge, sullen girls, who had glowered and mooed as they were herded into the asylum—they were now frenzied. They threw themselves at the doors, but the doors did not even shake. The girls then tugged at the bars on the windows, and some of the bars gave way, but the windows themselves were too small for the girls to climb through; they could only stare at the neatly plowed fields beyond the asylum walls.

       “It was frightful to see their gloom,” said the Mother Superior later.

       Soon the girls were quarrelling over the possessions the guilty in-laws had sent with the married ones—toothbrushes, wash rags, embroidered linen towels, scented soap, rosaries, and even—though the wife in question could not read—a novel in a lavender wrapper. The most damaging altercation broke out over a wicker suitcase, nicely lined, with ribbons and covered boards to hold the clothes in place. In the suitcase was a change of underwear and a muslin nightgown made from curtains. All the hungry girls wanted the gown, and the mouselike felt slippers that went with it, some to wear but most to eat. The girls began clawing and pummeling each other, sitting on each other’s chests to stop each other’s breath. They twisted noses, snapped fingers, gouged eyes, kicked and bit and punched till every girl was a quivering hulk. The groans were heard all along the new road, as far away as Rouen and farther. Indeed, as far as Calais! Fishing boats at sea heard the girls, and rich people floating on their yachts. It has even been claimed that across the Channel the Archbishop of Canterbury heard!

       The sisters sent for Father Sempier, who sent for Couviard, who sent for Bostiac. The now white-haired pharmacist proclaimed there was not enough morphine in all of France to stop the moaning, so the sisters did not demur when arthritic old Couviard painfully raised his pistol to the foreheads of the girls, one by one, though not before babies had crawled from holes in the stomachs of a few.

       “These creatures are hardly human,” said the sisters, crossing themselves repeatedly. “Holy Mother, hear our prayers. . . .”

       Dr. Couviard said nothing. He was wincing as he put down the babies crawling from their mamans. The certificates of death—which no one challenged—were to say the girls and their infants had died of natural causes.

       Father Sempier presided over their burial in an abandoned quarry a few miles from Houviers. They were covered with gravel, then with rubble, with mortar and bricks, and only then with earth. On top of the hill where the quarry had been, a fine stone chapel was erected, financed by auctioning the loot from the girls’ bodies and selling the Sabot farm.

       Several people of Houviers now make a nice living peddling relics of the girls at little booths near the chapel, though needless to say the chapel is consecrated to the Holy Mother. The most popular relics are splinters of bone said to have been blown from the bullet holes in the girls’ heads. There are also small vials of dirt in which the concessionaires claim are poux de terre—dead ones, of course. And there are special little cakes, baked as puffs with nuts inside, called poucettes.

       The tour guides who meet the busses laugh at the rumor that babies were born from some of the dead girls’ bellies long after they were buried. The guides find equally amusing the rumor that these hardy infants dug and ate their way up out of the quarry and began luring men to bring food and wealth to out-of-the-way places.

       “Food runs out, wherever one is,” they say. “Money is spent and men disappear, along with teapots and platters. Can one really blame the hungry girls who are many feet beneath the grass?”