Beast
Page 23
There was no sewer system, garbage dumps made everything unsanitary, medicines and vaccines were unknown. Rats were everywhere. The Parisians’ solution: They simply threw the corpses of plague victims over the walls every day, to dispose of the bodies and in hopes that the ravenous wolves below would become infected. They didn’t. The humans’ situation was horrendous; the wolves’ nirvana. The animals became even more confident, starting to enter the city through sections of crumbling ramparts. By now they were also attacking people, especially the weak and injured, easy prey for healthy apex predators craving the over-abundant human flesh. The king and his officials were panicking. Something had to be done. And a plan was created.
Initially deceased and beaten beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes would be used as bait to lure the wolves further inside the city, setting up a human trap from which the animals could not escape. The wolves fell for it, little by little. In the beginning, they ventured cautiously down a couple of streets. As time passed, they gained confidence, roving the narrow byways of Paris, memorizing the ins and outs of alleys and passageways, a labyrinth of alien scents and unknown dangers. The wild animals were no longer “home,” in a natural habitat, where the world was understood. Goaded by the ready supply of meat, they began to forget Courtaud’s “rules.”
In the end, according to Mannix, the pack was reduced, hunted down in the streets, and cornered.
According to A Parisian Journal, Courtaut (a different spelling) was killed, placed “into a wheelbarrow with the jaws wide open and taken about all over Paris. Everybody left whatever they were doing … to go and look at Courtaut. They got more than ten francs in takings.”
Other Infamous and Ferocious Bêtes
Wolves have inhabited France, and Europe, since prehistoric times. Archaic predecessors of modern wolves appeared approximately two million years ago in Italy during the Pleistocene. The valley of the Arno river harbored the prehistoric species Canis etruscus, a true wolf, though a bit smaller in size than the modern species, but almost identical in general appearance, anatomy, and morphology (and possibly in ecology and behavior). Canis lupus (more precisely C. l. mosbachensis) appears at the middle of the Pleistocene (around 500,000 years ago). The Lunel-Viel wolf, even closer to the modern specimens, lived around Montpellier, southern France, about half a million years ago. During all this time, interaction with humans was nearly impossible to avoid. In prehistoric times, such contact was probably scarce, although as Homo sapiens developed and expanded its territories and populations, the two species tracked closer to one other. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau has been documenting such episodes with available written records. As anyone can imagine there have been all sorts of wolves which have allegedly attacked humans: cursed wolves, ferocious beasts, loups-garous, man-eating clans, rabid individuals, sick and injured wolves, wounded animals in poor health, desperate females with litters to protect, and so on. The following list is somewhat exhaustive but shows the sheer variety of animals that, through time, have accompanied the well-known Bête from the Gévaudan:
A historical engraving depicting the Bête du Gâtinais (1653), a short-snouted, long-legged dog-like animal.
Bête de l’Orléanais
Bête de l’Yveline
Bête de Touraine
Bête du Chartrain (1660–1662)
Bête du Gâtinais
La Bête (1690–1695)
La Bête d’Evreux (1633–1634)
La Bête de Bailleau (1687–1695)
La Bête de l’Auxerrois (1731–1734)
La Bête from the Eure valley (1711–1714)
La bête de Xaintrie (1742–1744)
La Bête du Gévaudan (1764–1767)
La bête from the región of Othe (1713–1714)
La bête du Toulousain (1600–1605)
La malbête (“bad beast”) du Limousin (1698–1700)
La maudite bête (the cursed beast) (1482–1483)
The wolf Courtaud (1439)
The wolf from La Croix-en-Touraine (1711)
The wolf from Primarette (1746–1752)
Les bêtes de Touraine and Vendômois (1742–1755)
The ten wolves of Varzy (1801)
The wolves from Bourgogne
The wolves from Dauphiné
The wolves from the interior of Cannes (1714–1715)
The wolves from Ville-aux-Clercs (1595–1600)
The wolves from Saint-Aignan (1715)
The wolves from Cévennes (1809–1817)
The wolves from Bourbonnais (1596–1600)
The wolves from Genevois (1748–1752)
The wolves from Livradois-Forez
The wolves from Lozère (1625–1636)
The wolves from Morvan
The wolves from Valromey
The wolves from the Jura Mountains
The wolves from Varassieux (1697)
The wolves from the lower Dauphiné (1752–1756)
The wolves from Lyonnais (1755–1756)
Since a detailed analysis of each of these cases is beyond the scope of this book, we will offer the reader a condensed table including concise and most relevant data connected to the better known “beastly” episodes.
Two historical documents representing the infamous Beast d’Orleanais, showing its scale-covered body. L.-F. Coudray-Maunier, La Bête d’Orléans, légende beauceronne, Chartres: Petrot-Garnier libraire, 1859.
Modern mystery marauders. The French countryside is idyllic and inviting. River birds swoop along the water’s edge. Sheep bleat far off in the distance hills. Cow bells clang softly in the meadows. But … something disrupts our bucolic scenario: A feline silhouette, sleek, silent, and disturbing. Rare cats supposedly roam free through cultivated fields and dairy farms. What is their true nature?
French researcher Michel Meurger has written extensively about this topic, and his analysis establishes two crucial periods in which there have been numerous sightings of mystery carnivores allegedly identified with big cats:
Wild wolves shot in Indre (Argenton-sur-Creuse, central France). Top row, right, head of a wolf-dog hybrid, all of them shot in 1884. Revue d’Histoire Naturelle.
• 1946–1956, called by Meurger “the Bête from Cézallier cycle.”
• Post-1960 period, in which a number of “beast” sightings occurred, including that of the famous Vosges Bête. During this period, 1977–1988, the Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx) was controversially reintroduced in France, sometimes illegally, complicating matters.
The following table and map synthesize much information about these well-known and well-documented cases. We include at the end other less-known “beastly” animals, some modern examples, and a few reports from neighboring Spain and Switzerland, which received media coverage at the time.
Quite clearly, the previous maps and tables indicate the activity and an anomalous presence of large carnivores in Europe, including the vast expanse of France. These elusive animals seek refuge in mountainous areas, massifs (peaks), and woodlands, as any wild animal would do. The maps also clearly indicate the movements of some of these creatures from country to country via natural boundaries, for example, mountain ranges such as the Pyrenees and the Alps. It is typical to find sightings and evidence on both sides of each boundary, such as the Huesca and Arize massif cougars (Spanish and French Pyrenees, respectively).
Called Alien Big Cats (ABC) in English, this phenomenon is also extensively found in the United Kingdom. Within continental Europe, such carnivores may be trying to establish small populations. The southern region of Spain should be carefully studied as its mild climate could be ideal for some highly adaptable tropical species, such as leopards or jaguars. These creatures, possibly escaped from private collections or illegally introduced, may pose a serious threat to local wildlife. Are these cats the modern equivalents of ancient wild beasts of France? Some of the descriptions given and certain historical evidence seem to corroborate it.
CHAPTER 26
The Beast and Wolves Toda
y in France
[The Beast] … was returned to Monsieur de Beauterne [gunbearer François Antoine], who kept him till the Revolution came, and amongst other institutions swept away the terror of the Cévennes.
—Charles Dickens
On the Trail of the Beast Today
Two and a half centuries after the time of the Beast, its home turf—the Massif Central, Lozère, the Cévennes—is no less impressive. A car trip here from the direction of the south of France allows one a jaw-dropping portal to the Beast’s world through the sky across the Millau Bridge. A modern wonder of the world, the cable-stay bridge, completed in 2004, is more than one and a half miles long, with a central pillar taller than the Eiffel Tower. Or one could follow in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and walk his “frontiers of hope,” the GR70, as well as other “Beast walks” and trails across undulating mist-covered mountains, volcanic peaks, and seeming lunar landscapes. Guidebooks and tour services are readily available through Internet searches. Throughout the region, one finds echoes of the former Gévaudan and its Beast in signs, sculptures, and emblems of multiple municipalities. Polite requests may yield information from locals about key sites, such as the area where young Portefaix fought back, or the neck of the woods where Jean Chastel did his deed. Driving at night along the area’s narrow, twisting byways above fathomless river gorges might transport one back to 1764, as is the case with author Sánchez, when he and his wife came across an immense black dog on a murky, mist-fogged road.
Depictions of the Beast and Its Adversaries
Impressive statuary of our subject includes a giant wood-carved Beast licking its chops upon a hill overlooking Saugues. One cannot miss the statue of Marie-Jeanne Valet confronting La Bête in the hills of Auvers. There are two sculpture groupings in different settings in Le Malzieu; one depicts children fighting the animal, the other represents the theory of the sadistic wolf master. A bronze Constructionist-style statue and an abstract sculpture are found in Saint-Privat d’Allier and Marvejols, respectively. Weathered road signs mark the trail of La Bête between communities. And there is the stèle, or monument, to Jean Chastel, depicting our hero in profile, scowling, blunderbuss in hand, along the roadway at La Besseyre-Saint-Mary.
Bas-relief silver wolf head medallions dot the streets of Saugues, and painted wolf tracks lead to its Fantastic Museum of the Beast of the Gévaudan (www.musee-bete-gevaudan.com), where three-dimensional models and sound effects provide a glimpse of life in the Gévaudan in the 1760s. Note: The museum’s hours vary, and off-season it is only open by prearrangement; check before planning a trip. Les Loups du Gévaudan Wolf Park (www.loupsdugevaudan.com), Hameau de Sainte-Lucie, founded in 1985, is a forty-acre preserve and home to about one hundred wolves from various countries and regions, such as Poland, Canada, Siberia, the Arctic, and Mongolia. Its mission is to create awareness and understanding of wolves. It also possesses some documents related to the Beast.
Twilight of the Wolf in France
Thirty years after the reign of La Bête, following the French Revolution, the wolf seemed to be making a temporary comeback. A footnote to a story about a trip to Paris published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1797 reported, “Since the Revolution and the abolition of the corvées [roads constructed by means of forced labor], the roads have been so generally neglected as to be in many places almost impassable. This is not the only sad consequence of the horrors of war and revolution. In proportion as depopulation and neglect have thinned the country, wolves and other wild beasts have renewed the depredations frequent in uncultivated countries; and the race of the celebrated beast of Gévaudan have lately produced an extensive destruction.”
Approaching our exit. Photo Schwalb.
Devlin tells us that, at this time, wolves were indeed menacing areas such as Eure-et-Loir, in central northern France. However, extermination was actively underway. As the years went by, there were fewer and fewer wolves to kill. By 1918, it was believed that there were about two hundred indivduals in France. The last one is reported to have been killed in 1937, though some say this took place in the 1950s. A wolf was killed in Lozère in January 1951, per Jacques Delperrie de Bayac.
Reconquering France?
There are wolves in France today, apart from those kept in wolf parks, in zoos, as pets, and so on. In the early 1990s, wolves were observed moving across the mountainous border between Italy and France into the Mercantour National Park in the French Alps. “Nowadays,” reports the website Wolf in France (http://www.rdbrmc-travaux.com/loup/index.php?lang=en, page no longer accessible at time of publication), “the wolf population … spreads on all the Alps (up to Switzerland in the north) and starts to reappear in the Eastern part of the Pyrenees, in the Massif Central, and in the Jura mountains.” Wolf populations today are monitored by over twelve hundred trained field professionals who report their findings the National Office for Hunting and Wildlife (ONCFS).
The species Canis lupus is protected under the Bern Convention, a binding legal initiative that aims to conserve wildlife and habitats in Europe, as well as a European Union Habitats Directive, aimed at protecting animals, plants, and habitats. In France, an action plan launched in 2013 by ministers of agriculture and ecology, in consultation with the French National Council for the Protection of Nature, aims to promote biodiversity and protect wolf populations yet restrict livestock damages.
But the presence of wolves here, as is the case in the United States, Germany (where the species has been recently taking over immense Soviet training grounds largely unused since the Cold War), and other countries, is highly controversial.
There are many reasons for this, according to Véronique Campion-Vincent, one being that wolves, unlike other predators such as bears and lynxes, “have traditionally carried the strongest and most negative image in European societies, not only in folktales and legends but also in naturalists’ descriptions since classical antiquity. In such stories, wolves regularly attacked livestock, especially sheep, occasionally humans, and especially children acting as shepherds.” Still, a large portion of the French public is in favor of the wolf. Campion-Vincent cites this striking modern turnaround, which has “launched a major rehabilitation campaign of the animal” (even recasting the Beast’s story, making man the culprit), and thus overhauling the nation’s “symbolic bestiary.”
She traces the complex peregrinations involved in the re-establishment “of species formerly considered as pests or vermin … [which] … rests upon new conceptions of Nature.” The wolves’ unexpected reappearance two decades ago excited the public imagination, but understandably consternated mountain sheep farmers in the Alps region. The farmers try to maximize meager incomes, supplemented by subsidies, by grazing as many sheep as possible with few or no caretakers. They also view themselves as preservationists of the traditional French rural landscape. And so clashes with environmentalists have ensued, amid the formation of various organizations taking sides. The State provides compensation for predator-killed sheep via certification by ONCFS agents. Campion-Vincent points out that the wolves’ comeback was not truly “natural,” and was more like “the outcome of measures of protection of the species adopted in Italy in the middle of the 1970s.” Still, many believe stray dogs cause much of the damage. There have also been “conspiracy theories” about the wolves being deliberately reintroduced by over-zealous nature-lovers.
As of 2013, according to the website of the International Wolf Center, www.wolf.org, there are an estimated 250 to 300 wolves in France, with about two dozen packs (about one hundred more individuals than a century ago). The media reports that the species’ “reconquest” of the country is progressing with surprising speed; wolves, we are told, may once more prowl Louis XV’s forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, in a few years’ time. French farmers have reported newsmaking wolf sightings in the Auvergne in 2012, and sheep and other livestock predations, even in unforested farm and vineyard areas, such as “Little Champagne,” a two-hour drive from Paris
, in the fall of 2013. In February 2013, it was determined that government hunters may kill twenty-four wolves per year, in favor of farmers, and trained shepherds may defend their livestock in the case of an actual attack. But, as mentioned above, and as suspected by US researchers in cases made famous in America one hundred years ago, wild dogs may be to blame for attacks on livestock. Wolves are carrion eaters, and may be seen consuming the remains of prey killed by dogs, and are thus mistakenly considered culprits. Sheep farmers are urged to employ herders, sheepdogs, and pens to protect defenseless livestock from all predators.
Ecologists remain hopeful about our potential to co-exist with the wolf in the twenty-first-century and beyond. Campion-Vincent says, “The stakes of the manipulations of wild fauna … would be clearer if there was less invocation of sacred principles, less conjuring up of the loaded term of ‘Nature.’ … Nature, yes, but nature shaped and organized by humans, whether to cultivate it or to re-establish animal species that had previously been removed.”
Historian Jean-Marc Moriceau says the eighteenth-century tale of the Gévaudan is “an indicator of relations” between man and wolf, and man and nature. He believes the “profoundly original” story of the Beast may be used as a cultural tool with regard to new discussions on wolves, forestry, urban growth, the management of space, and so on. “All these subjects put the field of history in a new light.”
Appendix
Details of the Autopsies
We begin by examining the animal shot by François Antoine, the Chazes Wolf, in September 1765. Here is the full account, with author notes and contemporary measurements in brackets [ ].*
Jaladon Report on Les Chazes Dire Wolf
On September 27, 1765.
I the undersigned Charles Jaladon, master and demonstrator of surgery, lieutenant of Mr. the first surgeon of the King, army surgeon of the regiment of Riom, member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in this town of Clermont-Ferrand, certify that under the terms of the ordinance of my Lord of Ballainvilliers, steward of the province of Auvergne, I visited his mansion with the intent there to see and visit the wild animal that caused so much devastation in Gévaudan and the mountains of Auvergne. On which I noticed the scars and wounds of which mention is made hereafter, and having it transported to my home I made the most exact searchings on all the parts of its body in the presence of Master Benoît du Vernin, doctor in medicine and dean of his college, and MM. François Fargeon, Master in surgery, provost of his company, J.-B. Raymond, also master and demonstrator in surgery, who kindly helped me with the examination and dissection of the aforesaid animal, after which searchings the following remarks result: