Behavior Toward Firearms
The animals known as La Bête seemed to learn over time that men with rifles were to be avoided.
Respect for Cattle
A number of those attacked were surrounded and protected by the cattle they tended. The ancient Salers breed of cattle of the Massif Central are known to be actively defiant of predators when it comes to their offspring. Similarly, Goodall tells of a confrontation between a wildebeest cow and a hyena stalking the bovid’s calf. The cow “charged, bowling [the hyena] over.” A minute later it pitched both predator (and prey) “some four feet up into the air.” The cow even pinned the hyena down with her horns. Though the wildebeest mother managed to severely injure one of the predator’s front paws, the hyena won in the end, seizing the calf, itself now wounded, by the neck. Says Goodall, “It seems that, like wild dogs and wolves, hyenas are prepared to risk kicks from large prey, but are afraid of teeth and horns if the quarry turns to face them.”
Locality
La Bête seemed at home both in remote wild habitats and human environments. The Beast was seen in fields, pastures, along roadways, in villages, and in household gardens. Pourcher reported that a February 1765 letter from Mende stated, “La Bête Féroce, emboldened by the long immunity she has enjoyed, is not at all frightened to show herself in the most frequented places, at the edge of woods, in the hamlets, in the villages and on the most beaten tracks.”
Range
The Beast ranged a large territory. A review of the maps of the region published by historians, as well as the one in this book, shows that the Beast covered an area approximately sixty miles long by fifty miles wide. The attacks started in Les Hubacs and continued to the northwest, a movement believed to be caused in part by the frequent hunts. This extent of movement, however, is not unusual with regard to wolf behavior. For example, wolf specialist L. David Mech reported that wolves in Alaska traveled from six to forty-five miles between kills.
Injuries Inflicted
The damage the Beast visited upon it victims was horrific. Heads were separated from bodies. Limbs were torn away. The creature came from behind or from the side, going after the face and neck. There were sixteen decapitations, with instances of heads and/or bodies going missing. Wolves’ jaws are capable of fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.
Evisceration
The Beast by all accounts fancied hearts and livers, as well as blood, intestines, and soft parts. Goodall speaks of disembowelment as being a typical way that hyenas, wolves, and wild dogs consume their prey. “Wild dogs, like domestic hunting dogs, wolves, and hyenas, are quick and efficient killers. They attack their prey where the skin is thinnest and thus quickly reach the internal organs and dispatch the victim.” Goodall states that hyenas even eat bits of each other during a feeding frenzy. Squeamish readers might gain a bit of comfort from Goodall’s statement that perhaps this is the quickest way to go.
Victims
It is generally held that the Beast’s victims were primarily children and women. However, Barnson, in tallying the attacks of the Beast, notes that more than a quarter of those exposed to the creature—via actual physical attacks, belonging to a group under attack, or simply being menaced by La Bête—were men.
Aberrant Behavior
The Beast’s behavior often seemed to be highly irregular, especially when compared to that of wolves. As stated earlier, it allegedly was observed walking and wading on its hind legs. It fell when shot, yet was able to rise again and escape on a number of occasions, resulting in a belief that perhaps it was some sort of armored creature. How else could it withstand the musket balls of its hunters? Boarskin, once used to protect dogs used in battle, is a material cited as a possible covering for the Beast.
It also supposedly looked into the windows of peasants’ home, watching a mother feeding her child, or a victim’s funeral preparations, and so on.
Time of Year
Most canids (members of the family Canidae—dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes), and for that matter hyenas, are nocturnal hunters. The Beast had no set schedule. “‘This animal,’” it was said, ‘prowls the evening and the morning.’”
Time of Day
Most canids and, for that matter, hyenas, which are carnivores, are nocturnal hunters. Our Beast had no set schedule. “‘This animal,’ it was said, ‘prowls evenings and mornings.’”
Lone Attacks
The Beast’s behavior was also aberrant in that the creature was, for the most part, observed on its own. Wolves generally hunt prey in a pack, displaying highly efficient cooperation. Other wolves were seen in the company of the Beast, and François Antoine killed a she-wolf and cubs associated with the Chazes wolf, but there seems to be no record of wolf pack behavior.
Vocalizations
The Beast was said to “cry out” when it was hit with a bullet. The Beast was also expressive; it was said it could make noises like a human in trouble. It was also said to have “hissed” at cattle when bovines sought to protect their young caregivers.
Victims’ Garments
Victims’ clothing was often found in shreds, yet bizarrely, were sometimes said to be found placed neatly beside the body. In a side note, naturalist C. H. D. Clarke mentions Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton’s painting Awaited in Vain, completed when Seton was an art student in France. The painting depicts a Frenchman being devoured by wolves a short distance from his cottage. Clarke states the work was not well received. In one critique, fellow Canadian Dr. William Brodie, says Clarke, “drew attention to the neatness with which the wolves had piled the defunct’s clothing,” very similar to accounts of La Bête.
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It is now time to shift our attention to werewolves.
CHAPTER 19
Werewolves of France
Night after night … I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The “woods of Gévaudan” provide an ideal setting for werewolfery. Scholar Judith Devlin, in The Superstitious Mind, cites physician Louis-Florentin Calmeil, writing in 1870, that lycanthropy—a condition in which troubled persons believe they are wolves—is particularly found in “remote, half-savage mountainous and afforested areas” and among those with extremely isolated occupations, such as herders or woodsmen.
In this section, we change course toward fabulous and legendary pathways, prowling the realm of the werewolf, especially in France, in relation to the Beast. As we will see, there are surprising circumstances and elements from folkways and French writer George Sand’s “great dark night of the primitive” which resonate with accounts of La Bête and support the idea of the Beast’s identification as a werewolf—of one type or another.
Westerners are familiar with stories about humans who transform, in what is usually depicted as an agonizing process, into supernatural wolves, particularly when the moon is full and wolfbane abloom, after having been bitten by a werewolf. But these conventions are fairly recent.
The ways of lycans have shifted through time, from ancient myths and monstrous medieval crimes, to spiritual disputes and superstitions, to medical case histories, and, of course, popular entertainment. In early medieval times, many werewolves, such as “Bisclavret” of the twelfth-century lay (narrative poem) by Marie de France, were innocent humans trapped by others (often disloyal wives) in bestial form. Later, lycanthropy was held as a form of sorcery; werewolves were witches.
Shape-shifting creatures around the world are known by many names: loup-garou in French; in Spanish lobishome, lobisome, or lobizon. Petronius’s Satyricon presents a story of a versipellis (turnskin) at the time of the Roman Emperor Nero. Native American culture speaks of skinwalkers. In Britain and Ireland and in the New World, too, stories ar
e told of Black Shuck and other phantom black dogs, creatures that share attributes with the Beast.
The word lycanthropy itself has multiple meanings: One is that it is a form of mental illness in which a person believes he or she is a wolf, as mentioned earlier. The word is also defined as a belief in werewolves, and a conviction that people can become wolves.
Dr. Calmeil enumerated a threefold manifestation of the first definition, in which individuals believe themselves wolves. First there were despondent persons convinced they were helplessly bedeviled, alleging that they had wreaked hurt and havoc after dark, at times in the company of wolves; second, troubled, frenetic persons who took to nighttime roaming; third, dangerous persons who were unable to control themselves, believing they were wolves, attacking humans and animals, uttering wailing cries as they went about on hands and knees.
The medical definition of lycanthropy comes from the words insania lupina (wolves furie). Records of instances of this condition are available from days long past. More than a millennia ago, Paul of Aegina, a physician in Alexandria, Egypt, noted the types of symptoms familiar to contemporary mental health professionals: Subjects frequent graveyards or wilderness areas, howling and moving about on their hands and legs in imitation of a wolf. Devlin states that Calmeil considered poisoning a possible factor. Ergot (Claviceps purpurea), a fungus known to prompt hallucinations and hysteria, is thought to be a cause. The fungus forms on grain and cereal plants, especially rye, a staple used in making flour for centuries. And for the peasantry, there was no life without bread.
A New York Times piece by Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses medical cases in which celiac disease, the autoimmune condition caused by a reaction to gluten proteins found in grains such as wheat, barley, and rye, may in some instances affect the brain as well as the gut, causing “seizures, hallucinations, psychotic breaks, and even, in one published case, what looked like regressive autism.” Could there be a connection between celiac disease and lycanthropy?
Scholar Charlotte Otten tells us that the word “werewolf” was actually in use about five hundred years before “lycanthrope.” The first documented use of “werewolf” shows up in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of King Cnut (eleventh-century ruler of England, Denmark, and Norway), translated as “Therefore must the shepherds be very watchful and diligently crying out, who have to shield the people against the spoiler, such are bishops and mass-priests, who are to preserve and defend their spiritual flocks with wise instructions, that the madly audacious were-wolf do not too widely devastate, nor bit too many of the spiritual flock.” Otten cites the significance of the employment of the word “werewolf” instead of “wolf,” suggesting that Satan, the traditional “wolf” of scriptural texts, is employing men to work evil in the sheepfold.
Becoming a Werewolf
Scholars, saints, and the superstitious have perpetually advanced hypotheses about therianthropy, translation between humans and beasts. There seem to be a number of ways; one of the best-known paths to wolfhood in contemporary entertainment is simply to have been bitten by another werewolf and to wait for the next full moon. In medieval times, one used various unguents or enchanted belts obtained from a witch or a mysterious Man of the Forest. Sometimes a seventh son would become a werewolf. Fallen angels were also likely candidates.
The controversial twelfth-century compilation of writings, De spiritu et anima, once attributed to Saint Augustine, stated that the spells of sorceresses and the devil’s power would do the trick, and a man under these influences “to himself seems to be a quadruped,” but it is a false notion, an illusion, as in reality such a transformation is not possible: “The Devil creates no new nature.”
One medievalism held that excommunicated persons became werewolves for a time; in Normandy, France, they shifted for either three or seven years; in the Vendée, for seven years; there, the offender was also required to haunt unlucky locales. “In Basse-Bretagne, any person who had not been shriven [gone to confession] for ten years nor used holy water could become a werewolf. This belief was still current in the middle of the eighteenth century.”
Further, some traditions hold that a lycan may also be a vampire, or may become one when it expires. A side note: Through Elliott O’Donnell, we learn that Louis XV, king of France at the time of the Beast, was also interested in vampires. According to Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, the king, like many Europeans, was fascinated by reports such as that of Serbian “vampyre” Arnold Paul (also spelled “Paole”), said to come back from the grave and terrorize neighbors, and requested information about the case from his minister in Vienna. Paul Barber notes the word vampire entered English in 1734 (the king would have been twenty-four) and that reports of vampirism created another early news sensation.
Continental Canids
Incidents of “disturber-brutes” (London Magazine) have been chronicled for centuries in Europe. Possibly the best known up until the Beast of the Gévaudan was that of German werewolf Stubbe Peter, who allegedly committed horrific crimes for twenty-five years in the late 1500s. He killed his son, was guilty of incest, and attempted to murder and then dine upon his in-laws. His diabolical activities, trial, horrific torture (it was said he welcomed any agony in order to save his soul), and death were graphically depicted on a pamphlet widely disseminated as “a warning to anyone who might be contemplating an alliance with the devil.” Stubbe Peter’s eyes, like the Beast’s, were said to be “great and large” and “in the night sparkled like brands of fire.”
Werewolves in France: “An Epidemic of Sorcery”
A twentieth-century researcher and collector of paranormal tales, Elliott O’Donnell flatly states: “In no country has the werewolf flourished as in France…. As far back as the sixth century we hear of them infesting the woods and valleys of Brittany and Burgundy, the Landes, and the mountainous regions of the Côte d’Or, and the Cévennes.” (This last is in the vicinity of our Beast’s neighborhood.) Montague Summers concurs that werewolfery was going on in Gaul (the ancient Roman territory comprising France, Belgium, and portions of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) far back in antiquity: “Shape-shifting … was part and parcel of the wizard lore of the Druids …” He notes that Breton warlocks don wolfskins, à la our Gévaudanais meneur de loups (wolf lord), discussed later, or “assume the shape of wolves” to attend wicked gatherings.
Some of the most notorious French lycanthropes lived in the sixteenth century, when “the rank foul weeds of werewolfery flourished exceedingly.” We detail two well-documented cases in our section on serial killers. Here we will review several other notable cases, details of which illustrate the wide range of werewolf motivations and permutations.
According to the Compendium Maleficarum, a woman of Thiaucourt, in northeastern France, “addicted to these evil practices [witchcraft, sorcery, and so on],” felt she had been cheated in a bargain she’d made with a local herdsman. In consequence, the flim-flammed femme went lupine and stormed his sheepfold. The herder in turn took up his axe and slashed her leg. She retreated, he followed, and found her, woman-formed, bandaging the limb with shreds of clothing. With this proof she confessed, and atoned “at the stake.”
In 1521, in Poligny, France, “a leash [in hunting, a set of three dogs] of witches,” Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and a third, Philibert Montot, were put to death for crimes committed as werewolves, including killing and eating children. Like our Beast, Burgot and Verdun might only leave a child’s arm uneaten, or, with “keen white teeth,” tear out the throat of a girl. “They loved to lap up the warm flowing blood.” They also confessed to mating with she-wolves.
In Auvergne, part of the realm of La Bête, there is an account dating from 1558 of a wolf woman who lived near Apchon. According to the story, a nobleman came upon a hunter acquaintance in pursuit of game, and asked for a portion of the spoils. Soon after, a wolf attacked the huntsman; as they wrestled, he retrieved his knife, and cut off a paw. The animal ran away, and the hunter put the paw
in his game bag. He made for the nobleman’s château, related what had happened, and reached for the foot. But it had transformed into a woman’s hand, and the hand wore a gold ring the aristocrat knew belonged to his wife. The nobleman confronted his spouse, who’d become suddenly unwell. She admitted she’d lost a hand, conceded to her wolfish ways, and consequently went to the stake soon after. The telltale wound that gives away the wolf has become a classic lycan plot twist.
In Burgundy, France, supreme judge Henry Boguet documented the many trials over which he presided in the late 1500s, says Summers, during the time of his region’s “epidemic of sorcery—as it may not unfairly be termed,” in his book, Discours des Soricers. Cases include that of a female lycan, Perrenette Gandillon—“a huge wolf without a tail” who, upon being killed, returned to the form of a woman—and her brother and nephew, Pierre and George, respectively, who admitted that all three had used unguents and in wolf form had devoured many children. Summers says the judge paints a picture of the Gandillon men as “having lost wellnigh any resemblance to humanity, loping on all fours … [having] foul horny nails, unpared and sharp as talons, keen white teeth, matted hair, and [like La Bête] red gleaming eyes.”
In nineteenth-century Paris, one Sergeant Bertrand, who claimed he did so against his own will, disinterred and disfeatured newly buried cadavers, so much so that one writer deemed him a “human hyena.”
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