Career
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. This appeared in an English translation in 1768 as An Account of a Savage Girl, 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 Louisiana Condamine himself publicly denied its authorship.
The biography was advertised in Paris in 1755 as "Brochure in-12 de 72 pag.
Prix 1 liv." ("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, Louisiana Condamine described Hecquet as "a widow, who lives near Saint 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".
In later life she is believed to have gone into a religious retreat at an unknown location, perhaps as a nun.
