ReportingFrancis, an octogenarian living in Nice, lived alone with more than a hundred felines, sick or dead. Despite the alerts of his relatives, it took more than two years for him to be hospitalized in psychiatry.
It is a small isolated villa on a hill, in the middle of holm oaks and fig trees. A beautiful place, a priori: from the terrace, you can see the city. But as you approach, the stench seizes you, acrid, penetrating; a smell of urine, rubbish, death too. It emanates from the walls smeared with excrement, from the mounds of half-empty tin cans, from the corpses of animals piled up almost everywhere. It is here, avenue de la Clua, on the heights of Nice, that were discovered, the December 4, 2021, a hundred corpses of decomposing cats in boxes, as well as around thirty still alive but in very bad shape. “The house of horror”, concluded the local press.
That morning, Joëlle Marchal, 64, remembers it well, it was freezing cold. This still practicing accountant receives a call before leaving for the office: her uncle Francis, 81, whom she has taken care of for years with her mother and daughters, and whom she considers her father, is in the hospital. because of his back. She lives about twenty kilometers away, but Francis, a former car salesman accustomed for ages to living as a bachelor, asks her to come to his place. “feed the cats”.
A suffocating smell
As soon as the door is open, a dozen of them, starving, escape. Inside, there are about twenty left, rickety and sick. The body of another lies on the sofa, devoured by its fellows. On the stairs, the bathroom, the laundry room, she discovers dozens and dozens of sealed plastic boxes full of rotting corpses. The smell is suffocating.
Joëlle Marchal knows how much her uncle’s psychological state has deteriorated. When she tries to bring him to his senses, he becomes aggressive, preventing her from going any further than the kitchen. For years she has been trying in vain to get him help from the social services. She no longer counts the calls that have gone unanswered. The proofs of her fight, she keeps them in a purple binder that she carries around everywhere. But here, it’s worse than anything. In a flat voice, she warns the police.
Everyone in the neighborhood seems stunned. A neighbor talks about a man “polite, discreet”, the kind ready to help out by trimming a hedge or sweeping a terrace strewn with dead leaves. “He always came out very clean, his shirt starched, clean-shaven. Even to go shopping, says Annie La Barbera, 63, who lives just opposite. It is true that for two, three years, we had noticed changes with my husband. It was dirtier than usual. He looked like he needed help, but he was far too ashamed to admit it. » To hear him, Francis was doing everything to keep up appearances. So, sometimes, in his absence, she cleared her garden of garbage bags and discreetly threw them away. “But we couldn’t imagine that at home it was like that…”
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