Did He Live Before?

Vosges region of France

Marc Liblin, a shy, young boy of 6 years, was busy growing up in the town of his birth, a small village in the foothills of the Vosges in eastern France, when he began having odd dreams. He told his parents that in his dreams, a professor would come and teach him physics and an unknown language. He began speaking in this odd language which nobody in his village had ever heard. Over the course of several months, he began conversing in the words of the unknown language more than the French he had been taught since birth and told people it was his "native" language.

Kids can be cruel, especially to someone not exactly like them, so they made fun of little Marc, physically picking on him, calling him a dunce and weird. He began staying at home more, rarely going out to play. His friends were the books his parents brought home from the library. His schoolwork was not exceptional, but certainly within the normal so he passed each grade with his teachers totally confused as to why he insisted on speaking this foreign language far more than French. People from nearby towns began hearing about this odd boy. Most considered it a passing phase of a youngster who possessed an over-active imagination, but the phase didn't go away.

Marc completed his schooling, but couldn't acquire a job of substance as he continued speaking mostly in a language only he understood. As an adult, he earned money by doing odd jobs here and there and from the occasional handout, living a meager life on the fringes of normal society with few friends and no prospects. 

When Marc was 33, two language professors from the University of Rennes heard about this odd fellow who insisted on speaking a language of gibberish. Intrigued, they located Marc and interviewed him. Rather than the mentally unstable drunk they expected to find, Marc impressed them with his demeanor and his educated manor of speaking. They were totally unaware of the language he spoke so easy and naturally, but it was clear to them it was not gibberish at all. It had a rhythm to it with intonations and inflections which sounded like other languages they were familiar with. For the next 2 years, they fed the strange words and sounds Marc spoke into the database of a giant university computer which ran special programs used to decipher and translate speech into one of the world's known languages. After the 2 years was up, it became apparent their work had been in vain; the computer and every language expert they asked was stumped.

In a last ditch effort, the professors decided to ask the sailors who frequented the harbor bars in Rennes to see if any of them had ever heard this language during their world travels to exotic and out-of-the-way places. After several weeks with no luck, just before giving up, they had Marc speak in his language in another bar to a bunch of Tunisian sailors. The barkeeper, a retired Navy man, interrupted Marc, saying he had heard this tongue before on a very remote Polynesian island. And not only did he recognize the language, he knew a lady who speaks it. The lady, Meretuini Make, was divorced from an army officer and lived in a small cottage in the suburbs.

Rapa Iti

The professors quickly arranged a meeting. All three arrived at her door several days later and when Meretuini opened it, Marc addressed her in his language. Marc's life changed right then and there when she answered him right away in the old Rapa language of her homeland. Only 400 native islanders on Rapa Iti, one of the most remote and almost unknown islands in the world, spoke the language which Marc and Meretuini were excitedly and laughingly talking to each other in.

Not unexpectedly, Marc and Meretuini quickly struck up a friendship. They visited each other often and the friendship turned into love. Marc, a person who had rarely been away from his little village in the French countryside and had never been outside of Europe, married Meretuini and they moved to her little native island. There they settled into a quiet, loving and satisfied life, raising 4 children in a small community in the mountains. Marc became a teacher and taught physics to the native children. He was considered an excellent teacher and his students loved him. He also learned all he could about Rapa Iti; the oral history, the language, and the people. He wrote thousands and thousands of pages of documentation, preserving important stories and history and decoding the Rapa language. 

Marc, Meretuini and 1 of their 4 children

Unfortunately, not all of the natives felt toward him the same way his friends, neighbors and students felt. The mayor, a man known to distrust and not want outsiders on the island, discovered Marc did not have a college degree. He tried to have him fired as a teacher, but the community rose up in defense of Marc and so it was decided he would be reclassified as an Auxiliary Teacher rather than a full teacher. This meant Marc had to repay part of the salary he had been paid over the years. The repayment caused him and his family a lot of financial hardship and he had to take extra jobs to make ends meet. It bothered him that this prevented him from working on his Rapa Iti documentation.

With his documentation work still unfinished, Marc passed away due to cancer at the age of 50 on May 26, 1998. He never tried to financially capitalize on his story, indeed, he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone to be with his family and to document all he could of "his" island. When he passed, he left behind his wife, Meretuini, the only person who had ever understood him away from the island, their four children, a large, unfinished body of documentation work, and an unsolved, very strange tale.