Beast Read online

  In the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus, was in conflict with the Jansenists, a growing faction of Catholic conservatives opposed to the faith in favor at the time, including the concept of “easy grace,” whereby one’s salvation could be acquired by such means as indulgences, written statements offering amnesty from punishment for one’s sins. The Jesuits quelled the Jansenist movement for a time, but their own approval ratings were dropping due to various offences, such as favoring papal supremacy over Bourbon paternalism (the king, or father of the country, Louis XV, was a member of the Bourbon dynasty), and even for possible involvement in an assassination attempt upon the king. The Society was exiled from France by Louis XV in March 1764; by 1767, the priestly order was nullified by Pope Clement XIV. Back in Mende, Bishop Choiseul-Beaupré was known to be forbearing of Jansenism and even to have inclinations toward it. His December 31, 1764, mandement included reference to St. Augustine, the teachings of whom are the basis for Jansenism. Could that mean that the Jesuits, seeking reprisal, might have somehow been behind the Beast?

  Further, according to tradition, in the days of the early Christians, Saint Severian was the first bishop of Mende, and his feast day was celebrated yearly on January 25. But in the eighteenth century, says Pourcher, Mende’s bishop Choiseul-Beaupré, in exchange for support for a roadway project with which to boost the local economy, was asked by his cousin, the king’s secretary of state, to supplant the old church breviary, or calendar (a book of church services, prayers, feast days, and so on, for each day of the church year) with a new one that omitted Saint Severian’s feast. It was opined that this irreverent action had provoked God to set the Beast loose on the diocese.

  In 1858, Charles Dickens, writing in his publication Household Words, states, “It was generally supposed that the wild beast of the Gévaudan was an allegory … for, in the Gentleman’s Magazine of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, we read: ‘By the wild beast is meant the heretics; by the children killed are intimated the converts that are frequently made by them to the protestant faith; and by the dragoons sent out against the wild beast, the violent attacks of the clergy are signified, who are always persecuting the protestants with the utmost rigor.’”

  Finally, during the hunts for the Beast, Duhamel and other hunters actually used a number of the victims’ cadavers as bait, hoping the Beast would return to its kill in each instance. Locals wondered: Could the gruesome presence of these bodies strewn about augur the time of the Apocalypse, as foretold by the Scriptures?

  Pourcher and the Deception of François Antoine

  One hundred twenty-four years after François Antoine and Rinchard killed the large animal at Chazes, the Abbé Pierre Pourcher published his famous chronicle of the Beast, and in it, accuses the king’s gunbearer of trickery. He holds that François Antoine, once situated in the Gévaudan, realized that he was facing something unique. But he sought fortune and fame as a great and speedy deliverer of the region, and thus tricked king and court by killing and displaying a mere wolf, albeit a sizable one. But where was La Bête, the true monster? Pourcher writes that the Beast “disappeared from the scene and remained hidden during all Antoine’s hunts at Chazes,” Further, the Abbé believed François Antoine could somehow foresee the victory that would be achieved by Jean Chastel two years later, and so the gunbearer abused Chastel and his sons, throwing them into jail until his own departure from the region in November 1765. “[The Chastels’] innocent joke [luring a royal gamekeeper into a bog] perhaps created enemies for them at Court and from competitors who were jealous of losing the glory of killing La Bête and conscious of the Chastels’ superior hunting skills … And so, Antoine succeeded in imposing his will with an audacity which would not be acceptable today.” Doubters of François Antoine also said he actually killed a domesticated wolf brought in from the royal hunting complex. Others, such as Monsieur Ollier, a cleric of Lorcières, France, wrote many letters insisting the Beast was not dead because it was not a wolf.

  The Inscrutable Chastels

  Some of the many facets of the tale of the Beast of the Gévaudan relate to the Chastel family of La Besseyre-Saint-Mary. Patriarch Jean Chastel, according to the story, slew a second man-eating Beast on June 19, 1767, with a gun and ammunition blessed the day before during a pilgrimage at the church of Nôtre Dame de Beaulieu. This was after a previous pilgrimage to Our Lady of Estours. La Bête appeared before Chastel at Sogne d’Auvers as he prayed to the Virgin Mary, devotional book in hand. Chastel saw the Beast, but, as he was a good Catholic, he took the time to finish his prayers. The Beast, meanwhile, waited patiently. The hunter put his book and spectacles away, raised his gun, and killed the marauder.

  Some have purported that Antoine Chastel, son of Jean, procured a Beast for fellow suspect Count Morangiès. Many wonder if the Beast could have been a hyena, a creature Antoine acquired during his time on the Mediterranean island of Minorca, of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain. Others wonder if “lone wolf” Antoine kept a menagerie, which included a hyena. Beast buffs note that attacks mysteriously stopped in the autumn of 1765 when the Chastels were imprisoned by the royal gunbearer. Father Jean Chastel put a stop to the madness in June 1767, when he killed the creature. (The animal, we are reminded, would have recognized Jean as being part of its human “pack” with master Antoine Chastel, which explains why it would have sat patiently before the elder Chastel.)

  There is evidence that there was a living hyena among the animals of the King’s Garden, and a taxidermic hyena specimen in the King’s Cabinet (the foundation of the collection for the present-day National Museum of Natural History in Paris). The latter may have come from the Gévaudan, but there is no evidence this animal had anything to do with the killings. More on this to come.

  Antoine, it is said, made his way to the Mediterranean Sea years before, and was shanghaied by pirates. He was supposedly castrated and put to work as a menagerie keeper on Minorca, where he may have met Count Morangiès. He later returned to the Gévaudan, where he became a solitary forest warden, residing atop Mont Mouchet with his dogs. Some say he also had wolves as companions. Barnson tells us, however, that according to records, Antoine Chastel was married and actually had a number of children.

  Jean Chastel, like the elder d’Enneval and François Antoine, was a veteran hunter. He was born in 1708, and so would have been in his late fifties at the time of the Beast. He is said to have been an excellent marksman. The father of five or six children with his wife, Anne, Jean was a farmer, hunter, and operated a bar. And contrariwise to his being a reverent Catholic, he was also thought to be a sorcerer, or a meneur de loups (a wolf leader). A nickname for him was le fils de la masque (son of a witch). (Barnson adds that the expression porter la masque—to bring bad luck—is still in use today.) The Chastels were even been said to have been part of an occult group.

  There was a case in Marvejols, France, in 1762, in which a clan named Rodier—father, mother, and two sons—was charged with employing wolves to intimidate and rob passersby. The parents were hanged and the older son was sent to the galleys (prison ships powered by sails and the labor of slave or convict oarsmen). Perhaps the account of the Rodier family was the kernel of this concept. Some wolf leaders were said to set their trained animals on sheep belonging to enemies.

  Cannibal Soldiers?

  Another theorist, André Aubazac, proposes that the gruesome acts of the first Beast were carried out by humans, transients working on road projects and soldiers returning from the Seven Years’ War (which ended in 1763, the year prior to the Beast’s first appearance) who may have had to become cannibalistic in order to survive during the conflicts. Aubazac believes the second Beast’s crimes resulted from a Chastel family feud.

  Thinking Like a Conspiracy Theorist

  The Wall Street Journal column “Mind & Matter,” by Robert M. Sapolsky, touched on the topic of conspiracy theorists in the newspaper’s November 9 and 10, 2013, editions. Citing
studies of online discussions about 9/11 and about the death of Princess Diana, the column states that nonbelievers of various theories are more frequently persistent in spending time discussing real proof for their view. Cabalists are seen to concentrate on dismissing accepted notions and may take up theories that are actually inconsistent with one another. Sapolsky references philosopher Paul Thagard as writing about how such theories do help meet “our need for explanations that provide coherence to our view of the world.” He adds that doubting authorized information may in fact direct one to the authentic.

  Political Issues

  The reign of King Louis XV was marked by costly wars, humbling losses of international territory, religious and political disputes, and continuing issues such as the famine pact, in which the public suspected the nobility of hoarding grain in order to raise prices. Born in 1710, Louis was fifty-four years old at the time of the Beast’s first appearance. He’d been crowned nearly half a century before, at the age of five (though the French Regent was in charge until Louis turned thirteen). Afterward, he ruled with his first minister, Cardinal Fleury, until the Cardinal’s death in 1743, at which time Louis took sole control of the throne. Historians paint a picture of Louis XV as a monarch who seemed uninterested in his duties. The king frequently withdrew from court to go hunting. His many mistresses scandalized his subjects. But the ravages of a monster in a far-flung district of his kingdom piqued his interest; he was said to be fascinated by the accounts and ordered its remains be brought back for his personal collection. As the Beast’s attacks continued, the king’s advisors saw that involvement in the plight of the people of the Gévaudan might boost public opinion and help distract from its problems. In February 1765, as Duhamel and his dragoons and local hunters continued to miss the mark, it was proclaimed that the concerned king would offer a startling six thousand livres (pounds) for the destruction of the Beast. This was in addition to a number of other rewards, for a total of ten thousand livres, an incredible sum. The public eye was certainly focused on the Gévaudan as a result.

  More on Those Attacked

  The Beast sometimes killed one or two people per month, one or more per week, or one or more within the course of twenty-four hours. Beast Number One was responsible for eighty deaths (Barnson), fifty-nine deaths (Moriceau), or fifty-six deaths (Abbé François Fabre, a cleric/historian who published his own Beast chronicle at the beginning of the twentieth century). Beast Number Two was responsible for twenty-four deaths (Barnson, Moriceau, Fabre).

  Researcher Phil Barnson tabulates more than two hundred attacks altogether. Barnson’s figures comprise individuals attacked or menaced themselves, those attacked as part of a group, and individuals attacked more than once. Barnson indicates a number of men in this number, more than a quarter of those attacks. The ages of those attacked range from babies and a three-year-old girl to a sixty-eight-year-old woman. The majority are children and teens, individuals less than twenty years old. Women were the second largest group attacked.

  The consensus is that not all the attacks and deaths are accounted for. There is a remarkable amount of information available in the French archives about the case of the Gévaudan, but gaps in the record remain. Barnson tells us, for example, that in about sixteen killings, the victims’ genders are not known.

  Those left behind may not have wished to share their family’s misfortune with authorities who might want to use a loved one’s body as bait. Or because the Beast was depicted as a scourge of God, a death might bring dishonor.

  Some discrepancies may be due to the fact that the testimonies of those who experienced or witnessed attacks and those who observed the Beast’s movements would require translation into the official langue d’oïl, the French spoken in the north. It is possible or probable that some information was mistranslated, contributing to discrepancies. Some accounts of deaths may be duplicates.

  In any case, as Father Pourcher comments, “Peasants do not write diaries.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Modus Operandi

  Singular cunning and inconceivable agility.

  —From an account from the meeting of the Estates of Mende, March 1765

  Here, based on the various accounts, we offer a basic “profile” of the chimerical Beast and its more iconic qualities and patterns of behavior. How was the Beast described? How extensive was its range? What types of wounds did it inflict? Contenders for the Beast are more closely examined in sections to come.

  General Impressions

  What would someone in the 1760s see if the Beast lunged into their line of vision? In reality, many victims likely heard only “a twig snap,” per researcher Derek Brockis, or nothing at all, perhaps only a flash of reddish fur from the corner of an eye. Many would have had their nostrils assaulted by something truly foul before being forced to the ground and plunged into pain, shock, and darkness.

  Time and again, we read that the Beast was “like a wolf, but not a wolf.” And we read that the people of the Gévaudan knew wolves. Phil Barnson reports that the more than one hundred witnesses said they observed some kind of animal.

  To further follow in the tracks of such an animal or animals, which specialized in killing people, we might formulate intriguing questions, such as: What did the creature(s) look like? What might it have resembled? A new species or something known? Hybrid animal, mutant, or giant wolf? How was it described by those who saw it eye to eye? Let us consider some of these inquiries.

  Here is an English translation of the description of the creature that appeared in the Gazette de France, the official state newspaper:

  A very strange wild beast has lately appeared in the neighborhood of Langogne and the forest of Mercoire which has occasioned great commotion…. Those who have seen him say he is much higher than a wolf, low before, and his feet are armed with talons. His hair is reddish, his head large, and the muzzle of it is shaped like that of a greyhound; his ears are small and straight; his breast is wide, and of a grey color; his back streaked with black; and his mouth, which is large, is provided with a set of teeth so very sharp that they have taken off several heads as clean as a razor could have done. He is of amazing swiftness; but, when he aims at his prey, he crouches so close to the ground that he hardly appears to be bigger than a large fox; and at the distance of some one or two toises [a unit of measurement of Old France; one toise is nearly six and one-half feet long], he rises upon his hind legs and springs upon his prey, seizing it by the neck or throat. He is afraid of oxen, which he runs away from.

  An additional quality ascribed to the Beast is singular strength. It was able to travel vast distances at a rapid clip, decapitate victims, and carry young children for surprising distances. It was flexible; media accounts alleged it could bend from head to tail. The Beast was, of course, anthropophagous (a man-eater). It was malodorous. At the beginning of its tenure, it seemed to be a lone animal. Later, it was observed with another, smaller wolf, which in turn was seen with pups.

  Size

  The Beast was big. Historian Jay Smith states that François Antoine at first thought the Chazes wolf was a donkey. Donkeys’ height may vary, from about thirty to about sixty inches, as measured at the withers or shoulders. (Robert Louis Stevenson said his Cévennes donkey, Modestine, was small, the size of a dog.) People frequently said La Bête was the size of a yearling calf. Calves’ height varies by breed, from about forty-four to fifty inches at the shoulders. The ancient Salers cattle of the Massif Central are among the larger breeds. The average wolf measures about thirty-two inches high. A hyena stands a little shorter.

  Coat

  The coat of the Beast was described as reddish gray, sometimes the color of roasted coffee. It was also described as coarse. Its tail was bushy and long. Its head and legs were short-haired and said to be the color of deer. The Beast possessed a black dorsal (of or on the back) stripe. It had a white, heart-shaped mark on its chest.

  Eyes

  We are told that the Beast’s eyes sparkled. In a lament
cited by Pourcher, the Beast’s “flashing eyes with redoubtable glare, are two glowing coals.” More than one hundred years later, in an article on the Beast, Charles Dickens commented, “His eyes sparkled so with fire, that it was hardly possible (for a regiment of dragoons) to bear his look.”

  Jean Chastel’s Beast’s (La Ténazeyre Canid) eyes were “cinnabar red.” Barnson suggests this may have been the result of petechiae, trauma-induced bursting of blood vessels, caused by the shot that ripped the animal’s throat and broke its shoulder.

  Odor

  La Bête’s odor was often mentioned in accounts. Pourcher’s account states that the hunters hoped their dogs would be “attracted by her bad odor.” Dickens spoke of a report stating that the stench of the Beast, when it was said to have “vaulted” into and out of a horse-drawn carriage, “was past description.”

  Aspect

  Pourcher’s account tells us the Beast exhibited “singular cunning and inconceivable agility.” As described in our report of the doomed shepherdess Madeleine Paschal, the predator did not hesitate to harm a herder’s livestock to get to its human prey. According to one account, La Bête allegedly buried a sheep alive to lure its caretaker out in the open. Regarding documented predatory mobility, Jane Goodall says the wolf, as well as the jackal, is “capable of lightning movements—they can thus nip and get away before the larger animal has chance of retaliating.”

  A Primate?

  Clergyman Trocelier of Aumont, France, a hunt facilitator and Beast witness, discussed the belief of some that the animal might be a type of monkey due to the creature’s ability to move on its hind legs, especially in water. But Trocelier concluded this was not probable after studying the creature’s tracks and body.

  Tracks

  Royal gunbearer François Antoine, a venerable hunter of many decades, determined La Bête’s paw prints were the tracks of a large wolf. Yet, contrariwise, Pourcher’s account states that “La Bête did not stop approaching the villages and hamlets during the night, this was known from her tracks, which were said to be different from wolves.” Later in the story, it is mentioned that the tracks were abnormal, as if they might have been made by an injured animal. Perhaps La Bête (like many of the American “super wolves” discussed later in this book) had been caught in a trap and lost part of a foot in escaping it. Brockis tells us Pourcher thought it might be a deformed animal, though one sent by God to correct the Gévaudanais.