As in reports of the Beast of the Gévaudan, other werewolves were said to have neatly disrobed their victims. Otten cites an example: “The clothes of the children which they have killed and eaten have been found in the fields quite whole and without a single tear; so that there was every appearance of the children having been undressed by human hands.”
Wolf Masters
George Sand (a pseudonym for writer Armadine-Aurore-Lucille Dudevant, née Dupin) recounts eerie and entertaining folktales from the region of central France in her nineteenth-century Légendes rustiques. One finds stories of spectral laundresses, Huguenot-destroyed and haunted furniture, and more, among them stories of werewolves and meneurs de loups, wolf masters or lords. Sometimes these last are considered loups-garous, or werewolves, themselves.
The Wolf-Charmer (1881) by John la Farge (1835–1910). HIP/Art Resource, NY.
In tales told by country grandmothers (such as her own who lived in Berry, France), says Sand, there are two types of wolf leaders. First, the wolf masters of long ago: evil warlocks who became wolves themselves to prey upon and eat children. As the generations passed, these attributes shifted. Wolf lords were no longer child-devouring sorcerers, but venerable, wolf-whispering woodsmen or gamekeepers, possessing arcane knowledge with which they charmed Canis lupus.
Sand also includes personal accounts from her then present-day France countryside, of two acquaintances who claimed to see “an old forester” gesturing oddly near a crossroads. The pair then watched as thirteen wolves appeared and behaved as dogs, listening to the ranger’s talk and allowing him to pet them. Then wolves and man vanished into the trees. Sand says other acquaintances happened one night to be in the forest of Châteauroux when they observed a pack of agitated wolves outside a woodcutter’s cottage. The woodsman opened the door, came outside, and moved about the animals, talking in an unfamiliar language. The lupines left, apparently reassured.
In the highlands of Morvan, France, at the northern tip of the Massif Central, fiddlers were considered wolf leaders, says Sand, their music a result of a pact with Satan. In the Black Valley, a church bell ringer was reportedly ensorcelled by a musette, a set of country bag-pipes, playing an unearthly tune by themselves in the middle of nowhere. The bell ringer, Julien, was found there by his priest a day or two later, playing “the devil’s own song” on the pipes and leading three hundred wolves. The priest convinced him to come away and play at church for his flock, but Satan’s song was heard even there, no matter what Julien tried to play. It was only when the priest lifted the communion host and recited the words of consecration that the bagpipes ruptured, releasing a sound like “the soul of the devil.”
In the present-day region of the attacks of the Gévaudan, casual conversation with locals reveals that many are convinced the Beast was a loup-garou, werewolf, or meneur de loups, a wolf leader, but not in the supernatural sense of which Sand speaks. Contemporary natives believe our notorious wolf lord of the 1760s was a sadistic nobleman outfitted in wolfskin, who’d trained a dog or wolf to do his bidding and assist in attacks on solitary young shepherds and shepherdesses. There is a striking sculpture representing this version of the story in the town of Le Malzieu (see photo in this book’s color insert). Here the menacing loup-garou clutches a claw-like implement (perhaps a handheld garden cultivator of old?) in one hand as he slinks toward his prey.
O’Donnell deems this kind of werewolfery as “sham lycanthropy” as it is not traditional human-into-wolf transformation. He cites “rationalists” who attribute this behavior to two types of people. First, troubled persons who, convinced they are man-eating animals, slay children and women, as they are most defenseless. Second, persons who are not mentally ill, but who resort to “vulgar trickery,” using wolves, legends of werewolves, and fear and dread of the same, to carry out and/or cover up murders or cannibalism. “Rumors (most probably started by the murderers themselves) speedily get in circulation that the mangled and half-eaten remains of the villagers are attributable to creatures, half human and half wolf, that have been seen gliding about certain places after dark.” He describes African leopard cults where “human vampires” prey upon travelers and others, slaying them and—very much like the Gévaudan Beast—removing choice pieces. They further disfigure the remains with a leopard’s claw or nails, and withdraw to a secluded refuge, where, like La Bête, they “successfully defy capture.”
Sand discusses werewolf variations from the stories of her childhood: Lubins are mild-mannered moonstruck creatures, the custom of which is to loiter at ramparts and graveyard walls, yowling and chattering in strange tongues. They are giddy and usually bashful. “If someone comes to pass,” says Sand, “they run away crying: ‘Robert died, Robert is dead!’” (This is perhaps referring to a medieval legend of Robert, a Norman knight who was born a child of the devil; he overcame his wicked ways and died a hermitic saint.) In a footnote, Sand states the lubin is “a very good fellow” and a guardian of workmen.
But if a creature resembling a lubin breaches the cemetery to unearth and feed upon the graveyard’s occupants, it is classified as a lupin, as in “lycanthrope” or “werewolf.”
Sand relates a lupin story involving a hunchback tailor who walked by a graveyard wall one night and observed a company of “spirits” in the form of “black dogs or wolves.” When the spirits caught sight of the tailor, they became stock-still, studying him “with eyes that shone like fiery blood” and mouths agape, exhaling “nasty bad breath.” (Both qualities of La Bête.) Sand says perhaps the tailor’s deformity did not convey “the effect of a Christian.” Meanwhile, the frightened tailor dared not hold his nose so as not to slight the wolf-dogs. The lupins seemed pleased at this and began to talk and wag their tails, and the tailor exited the scene unharmed. Once home, the tailor shared his story with (insensitive) neighbors who scoffed, remarking that with his appearance, he could scare the devil himself. The next night, much to his dismay, the hunchback found he had to pass the cemetery again; he fervently hoped the previous evening’s incidents were simply a bad dream. Alas, there were the lupins, lollygagging by the wall once more. The tailor, affected by wine he’d had with a client a bit earlier, decided to whistle, thinking it would amuse them. It did not. Instead it brought one, then several, after him. They came close and “sniffed at the location where dogs are wont to sniff each other to see if they should be enemies or companions.” The alarmed tailor kept walking, but the lupins circled to his front, prohibiting his progress, apparently standing on two legs, reeking and rabid-like, baring yellow canine teeth. The hunchback pleaded for release but the lupins roared threateningly. Then the hunchback promised to bring them a sheep the next day. At this, they fell silent and reverted to all fours. The tailor ran home and dove into bed, where he stayed for more than a week. The local priest visited, chiding him for offering the creatures a sheep. The fleeced lupins, meanwhile, wanting revenge but not daring to come close to a priest, commenced a shock-and-awe campaign from afar, freakishly throwing their voices outside the tailor’s house and casting their shadows upon its walls. The other villagers were terrified and the priest could do nothing. Finally, the tailor worked up the nerve to set a trap. He tied a sheep to his door, admonished the neighbors to arm themselves with “bullets blessed well,” and told the curé to hide, goupillon (holy-water sprinkler) on hand. The tailor then tempted the sheep with grass, making the animal bleat. The lupins found this irresistible, left their wall, and drew closer, where they were “well received.” Betwixt holy fire and holy water, they fled. Only one was killed, an aging female, who, upon taking a bullet in her heart, cried out in a human voice, “The moon is dead!” Her head and legs were removed and displayed on the cemetery gate. The lupins never returned.
An image of werewolves by Maurice Sand from Légendes rustiques by George Sand. Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images.
What Else Is in the Woods?
The Beast was not the only creatu
re to haunt the French countryside. Peasants were also concerned about immense serpents and basilisks, even into the early 1900s. A “red man” of the Ardennes was said to lure children into the woods. Though rare, sometimes an abandoned child might dwell there, too, such as Victor of Aveyron, found in 1800. In 1731, a girl was discovered living wild near Châlons-sur-Marne, France; she’d killed another child. Historian Graham Robb tells us that in 1774 in southwestern France, a hairy, unclothed man, believed to have been an extant Neanderthal, was seen gleefully dispersing herds of sheep.
A phantom dog, or “beast-revenant,” was said to reside in a village of Normandy, France, province of the d’Ennevals. The pet of an enigmatic sojourner, it was killed by a local farmer. The owner inquired about the animal at the farm and was told the dog died naturally. The owner’s reply: “If you are right, you will know.” George Sand quotes her source as remarking that the tale expresses the concept that the animal possessed a soul, because “it shares with humans the ability to appear after his death.”
A Grand’bête, “Great Beast,” visited Sand’s grandmother’s farm from time to time. Like a “dog the size of a heifer,” it was also called “the white dog” and “the devil’s cow,” among other descriptors, and was said to have wandered the countryside since time immemorial. It, like La Bête, had “eyes of fire,” and, as in the Gévaudan, the country people tried to ward it off with pitchforks, sticks, and blessed bullets. Once it was expected to appear during a storm; as a child Sand witnessed her family’s frenzied preparation. She and her brother were ensconced between beds. Prayers were said to small portraits that had over the years been purchased from peddlers (their subjects were assumed to be saints, though Sand says they were more likely prominent generals). Doors were braced shut. Animals became agitated. According to Sand, however, the Great Beast harmed no one and reportedly exited at any sign of trouble. But because it was a supernatural entity, the country people were truly beside themselves at its advent. Says Sand, “the attack of a hungry pack of wolves was less terrifying than the possibility of a visit from the ghost.” In this instance, the Grand Beast never came to call; instead, Sand’s tutor arrived in the rain to take her and her brother home.
In British and Irish traditions, spectral black dogs make frequent appearances. They are believed to foretell a death. Sometimes they guard humans against misfortune. Editor and writer Bob Trubshaw says they are “part animal, part specter, part fiend.” Again there are parallels to the Beast: Black dogs are said to be as large as a calf or a donkey, have glowing eyes, and “smell like death.” As a boy, Charles Dickens was frightened by his nurse Mercy’s tales of black dogs. Writer Crispin Andrews notes that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” features a kind of canid master, the character Jack Stapleton, who trains a mastiff to hunt Sir Henry Baskerville, covering it with phosphorus to achieve its ghostly nocturnal glow.
In North America, the Navajo people believed in skinwalkers, persons transformed into werewolves that committed diverse heinous acts. Stanley Young of the US Biological Survey offers a twentieth-century account, that of the Phantom Wolf of Big Salt Wash, Colorado, one of a tribe of famous wolves exterminated by hunters of the US government’s Biological Survey in support of stockmen in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Hunter W. J. Nearing was said to have pursued the Phantom Wolf from 1921 to 1923. In Young’s story, a local sheepherder from Mexico claimed the Phantom was a lobo de las animas, or spirit wolf, a werewolf possessed by an evil spirit. At one point Young claims Nearing was able to get off a shot and was convinced he’d killed the animal, only to find it had vanished, leaving a pool of blood, an incident that spooked him. When he captured the wolf later, he found the scar from that bullet.
The Werewolf in Culture
Stories about wolves and werewolves have frightened and entertained us forever. From the ancient myths and stories mentioned earlier, to the classic 1941 film, The Wolf-man, featuring actor Lon Chaney, Jr., to the contemporary explosion of books, television shows, and movies incorporating or featuring werewolf characters. The most popular entertainment based on La Bête seems to be Christophe Gans’s 2001 film, Le Pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf). Unlike vampire mythology, which returns again and again to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula as its wellhead, werewolves seems to be missing that one iconic tale. Still, the werewolf has shadowed scriveners throughout history, and influences of the story of the Beast are found in many tales published after the eighteenth century.
The short story “The Wolf” by Guy de Maupassant was published in 1889, one hundred twenty-five years after the first appearance of the Beast, and is set in France in that year, 1764. It tells of two brothers who are passionate about hunting; as the story begins, they are pursuing “a colossal wolf” that has eaten children, deprived a woman of her arms, “strangled” dogs, and audaciously invaded farm properties “to come snuffling under the doors.”
“A Story of a Weir-Wolf” was published in a periodical entitled Hogg’s Weekly Instructor in 1846; in it a father and daughter of Auvergne, in the country of the Beast, are rescued at the last from suspicions of evildoing and a sentence of the stake.
Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, wrote a tale entitled Le Meneur de loups, or The Wolf Leader, in 1857. The story itself is set in the late 1700s and describes a pact of revenge between the protagonist, a shoemaker, and an immense wolf that walks about on its hind legs.
Dracula character Jonathan Harker, in Bram Stoker’s 1914 short story “Dracula’s Guest,” encounters a wolf which is described by soldiers as, “A wolf—and yet not a wolf! … No use trying for it without a sacred bullet.” Professor and writer Bourgault du Coudray connects Stoker’s prose with influences by Baring-Gould.
The Wolves of Paris by Daniel P. Mannix, based on a true story of a pack of wolves that lay siege to Paris during the fifteenth century, reverberates with influences of the story of the Beast, down to the royal louvetier (wolf hunter) Boisselier quoting Jean Chastel in saying, “Beast, you will kill no more.”
A French Werewolf in Kent, England
Stories of werewolves have been fare for popular magazines since the 1800s. The July 1838 edition of a British publication, Court Magazine, Monthly Critic, Lady’s Magazine, and Museum. A Family Journal of Original Tales, Reviews of Literature, the Fine Arts, Music, Drama, Fashions, &c. &c. Under the Distinguished Patronage of Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, includes a tale entitled “Hugues, the Wer-wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages,” presented by writer Sutherland Menzies, with an introduction to werewolves preceding the story. In the tale, a clan by the name of Hugues, “(or Wulfric, as they were commonly called by the Saxon inhabitants of that district),” whose ancestors came from Normandy, France, live a meager existence in the formerly forested tracts around Ashford, Kent, in southeastern England, at the time of “our second Henry” (Henry II, 1133–1189). The Hugueses/Wulfrics are known by their neighbors “as belonging to the accursed race of wer-wolves” but their habitation is protected by archaic woodland law.
The family is ostracized by the community, though to all outward appearances, they fail to live up to their lycanthropic reputation. Still, they are accused of nefarious behavior, witchcraft, and being culpable for many sorrows: untimely deaths, accidents, fires, and incidents of starving real-world winter wolves digging up the deceased in the graveyard.
Starving themselves, the Wulfrics become very ill, and give up the ghost in quick succession: father, mother, and daughters. Hugues, the son, is the only survivor. Desperate for food, he seeks employment in Ashford, to no avail; however, he begins to attract the attention of local females, owing to his pitiable circumstances and his looks. It turns out Hugues is a hunk: “one … could not have failed to admire the savage beauty of his head … crowned with a profusion of waving hair, and set upon shoulders whose robust and harmonious proportions were discoverable through the tattered attire investing t
hem.” Further, “the tone of his naturally soft voice accorded admirably with the purity in which he spoke his ancestral language—the Norman French.”
Hugues beseeches the Virgin Mary to end his sufferings. He wishes he could become a wer-wolf, not to kill his neighbors, but to torment those who drove his family to isolation and death, and to perhaps find carrion to eat. Shortly after, while scrabbling for fuel to throw on his fading fire, Hugues discovers a long-forgotten chest, which turns out to contain “the complete disguise of a wer-wolf:—a dyed sheepskin, with gloves in the forms of paws, a tail, a mask with an elongated muzzle … furnished with formidable rows of yellow horse-teeth.” (Note, however, that the chest lacked the usually requisite lycan ointment.) Hugues is at first horrified by his find, then recalls wild tales recounted by his grandfather years before, as “his mother wept silently.”
Menzies offers a striking description of Hugues’s subsequent transformation, employing classic symptoms of the lycanthrope:
Hunger and despair conjointly carried him away: he saw objects no longer save through a bloody prism: he felt his very teeth on edge with an avidity for biting: he experienced inconceivable desire to run: he set himself to howl as though he had practiced wer-wolfery all his life, and began thoroughly to invest himself with the guise and attributes of his novel vocation. A more startling change could scarcely have been wrought in him, had that so horribly grotesque metamorphosis really been the effect of enchantment; aided, too, as it was, by the fever which generated a temporary insanity in his frenzied brain.
Hugues becomes “a confirmed wer-wolf,” but unlike other French lycanthropes, he does not undertake to roam the countryside, eviscerating women and children. Instead, he extorts choice cuts of meat from the local butcher and seeks the company of the butcher’s niece, Branda, who in turn acquires feelings for Hugues.
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