Beast Read online

  Stevenson traveled the Gévaudan in September of 1878.

  A little over one hundred and a dozen years earlier, in August 1764, the Beast’s second official victim would die.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lafont

  August 1764

  The summer of 1764 in south-central France advanced through July and into August, hastening toward its conclusion. The countryfolk continued with the farming and trade activities vital to their existence, most largely unaware of the Beast or its predations, owing to the region’s sparse population residing in individual, isolated communities.

  During the first week of August 1764, a little more than six miles from the site of Jeanne’s death, but in the Gévaudan proper, a girl named Marianne Hébrard, from a tiny community called Cellier, went missing, but not as Jeanne had, at the close of day.

  Marianne vanished in broad daylight.

  Like Jeanne, however, Marianne was found “throttled and half-eaten.” Searches were said to have turned up scattered remains and remnants of cloth. Official chronicles state that she was set upon by a roving beast that had recently encroached upon the area.

  Forty-eight hours later, in another rural village named Masméjan, the Beast came out of nowhere to stalk, surprise, and savage another girl, her name unknown to historians. She was fifteen years old.

  On August 30, two months after Jeanne Boulet’s demise, a sunburned youth near Les Pradels, France, was keeping one eye on the family cattle as they grazed in the heat, snorting and swishing their tails, and the other eye trained on an insect struggling in the tentacles of a flesh-eating sundew plant.

  The quiet landscape was shattered by another Beast attack. The boy was bushwhacked. The cattle’s bellowing brought rescuers too late.

  With the end of August and the arrival of September came sporadic violent storms, épisodes cévenols, the result of cold winds from the Atlantic Ocean in the west colliding with those of the warm Mediterranean to the southeast, causing alarming formations of clouds in the sky, torrential rain, and flooding.

  There were also more deaths.

  September 1764

  Forty-five-year-old Étienne (Stephen) Lafont, knife in hand, reached for a goosefeather quill and began to trim it thoughtfully.

  Lafont’s office in Mende, France, was small but orderly. Tidy stacks of correspondence lay alongside maps, agricultural samples of grains and chestnuts, an inkwell, sealing wax, writing paper, and quills—he preferred quills made from shorter goosefeathers, with which he could write faster, as opposed to traditional quills from longer-length feathers. Bundles of letters, along with a coat and three-pointed hat, hung from pegs on the wall above a bookcase filled with leather-bound reference works.

  Lafont was disturbed by the reports he’d been receiving of an animal which had attacked and killed several children in the Vivarais and the Gévaudan. The accounts did not ring true. It sounded as if the animal were something other than a nuisance wolf or pack of wolves. He knew of other instances where wolves had attacked people, but generally it was because they were rabid or famished from lack of prey during the region’s harsh winters.

  A former attorney who had practiced law in the Parliament of Toulouse in southern France, Lafont was a native of the Gévaudan; he’d grown up in Chirac, near Marvejols, with his brothers Jacques and Trophime.

  Lafont put his quill knife away. Now, as a regional administrator with fifteen years in as trustee of the Gévaudan diocese, he was no stranger to the kind of persistent predators that made off with valuable livestock, affecting the local economy and its farmers’ already tenuous livelihoods.

  Lafont also served as a subdelegate to the intendant or supervisor of the province of Languedoc, Saint-Priest (full name: Marie-Joseph de Guignard de Saint-Priest), who was based in Montpellier, France, a city to the southeast, on the Mediterranean Sea.

  Subdelegates were representatives of Louis XV himself on a local level, charged with disseminating state information. Their responsibilities also included monitoring of and reporting on issues and activities in their jurisdictions, including construction projects, agricultural practices, and homeland security. They spent much of their time on the road. Lafont also attended the annual meeting of the Estates of the Gévaudan, in which the landholders of the diocese conferred with their bishop in Mende.

  When not traveling, subdelegates concerned themselves with the never-ending paperwork that came with their positions, writing letters, reports, and preparing accountings.

  According to historian Jean-Marc Moriceau, a subdelegate received little rest. The better ones, like Lafont, were “selfless.”

  ***

  As trustee of the Gévaudan, Lafont reported to the bishop of Mende, Gabriel Florent de Choiseul Beaupré, now well into his seventies. A member of a well-connected French family, His Excellency was the cousin of King Louis XV’s secretary of foreign affairs, Étienne François, Duc (duke) de Choiseul (whose implementations included the arrangement of the marriage of Marie-Antoinette of Austria to Louis-Auguste, grandson of King Louis XV). According to an unusual agreement called a paréage, put in place four and a half centuries earlier, the bishop of Mende was also Count of the Gévaudan, and co-ruled the diocese with the king of France.

  Lafont was concerned. When Bishop de Choiseul Beaupré was informed of the man-eating beast now at large in his diocese, he stated that he believed its sudden appearance was “auspicious.” Lafont responded with his usual tact. But he told the cleric he disagreed. The trustee’s contention was that the creature was not a sign from God, but an aberrant animal with a taste for human flesh.

  The bishop smiled.

  “No, no, Lafont,” said His Excellency. “Look at the signs. The Seven Years’ War. Livestock succumbing to outbreaks of disease. Unfortunate meteorological events.” He smoothed his robes with blue-veined hands. “This beast is yet another scourge. A reminder that we must heed the Commandments.”

  The bishop locked eyes with Lafont.

  “It is an agent of divine wrath.”

  ***

  The majority of people within the universe of the Beast were Catholic, although, as mentioned earlier, the rugged countryside had long provided a haven for oppressed Protestants.

  Villagers’ lives revolved around the local church and parish priest. A parish is a district of the Roman Catholic Church under the charge of a local priest. Each parish was part of a larger diocese, overseen by a bishop. Dioceses were, in turn, divisions of provinces in France.

  In the Gévaudan, the Catholic sacrament of penance or confession—disclosing to one’s priest the sins one has committed to receive absolution and permit reconciliation with God—allowed the parish curé to conduct “ecclesiastical surveillance,” with accounts of the most serious transgressions disclosed not to the local constabulary but to the seat of the diocese in the city of Mende.

  Small but robust, the metropolis of Mende, situated on the river Lot, is dominated by its Nôtre Dame Cathedral, begun by Pope Urban V (1310–1370), a son of the Gévaudan. The cathedral was once home to Non Pareille (No Other), the largest church bell in the world. Its twenty tons were melted and made into cannons by Huguenots, French Protestants, in 1579.

  ***

  His quill trimmed, Lafont selected a sheet of thick rag paper made by the craftsmen at the renowned paper mill in Auvergne.

  Despite the isolation of the individual communities within his care, word of this bête féroce (ferocious beast) was surely spreading. People exchanged news after mass, and at markets and fairs. Muleteers leading pack mules, which were often bedecked with bells and pom-poms, transported foodstuffs such as beans, barley, bacon, and cheeses, as well as cloth and wineskins, throughout the region. Surely they were recounting tales of the Beast at stops along the way. Printers and peddlers, sensing opportunity, would likely begin selling exaggerated likenesses of the creature to gullible peasants.

  Lafont rubbed his brow.

  Making the populace aware of the animal was positiv
e; more would know to look out for it, and children might be protected.

  On the other hand, stories of the Beast’s atrocities would likely cause panic. Lafont could envision a disastrous abandonment of key enterprises requisite to the economy.

  And it was September, time for harvest in the Gévaudan.

  The Gévaudan.

  The district for which he was accountable. To Bishop de Choiseul Beaupré. To intendant Saint-Priest. To King Louis XV himself.

  Lafont reached for his inkwell.

  The Beast must be destroyed. Immediately.

  Quill in hand, Stephen Lafont commenced a retaliatory campaign.

  CHAPTER 4

  Count Morangiès

  Lafont began by prevailing upon one of the area’s most influential, yet troubled, families: that of the House Morangiès.

  Pierre Charles de Molette, Marquis de Morangiès, and his son, Jean-François Charles de la Molette, comte de (count), were VIPS. Both had both served in the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War), but the marquis, a lieutenant general, had, with other leaders, brought dishonor upon France in the August 1, 1759, Battle of Minden, Prussia (in what is today Germany). In that conflict, seven thousand French troops had perished at the hands of Hanoverian and British opposition. At the direction of the court, the marquis retired to his estate in Saint-Alban, France, in the Gévaudan. Despite the disastrous outcome of his military career, the Morangiès family remained among the area’s most powerful. Sixty-three years old in 1764, the marquis was known to be an aloof member of society.

  His son, the count, now thirty-six, had joined the military early on, becoming a musketeer as a teenager. He had performed well in the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–1748), the conflict in which Maria Theresa of Austria (mother of Marie Antoinette), clashed with several rivals for the claim of the title of her late father, Emperor Charles VI.

  In the Seven Years’ War, as colonel of the infantry regiment from Languedoc led by Marshal Duke of Richelieu (friend of Louis XV, son of the famous Cardinal de Richelieu’s great-nephew, and said to be the inspiration for the character Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos), they took over the island of Minorca from the British, and Morangiès became governor of the island for a time. He became a brigadier in 1761, marechal de camp (field marshal) in 1762, and was eventually honored as a knight of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis.

  In 1764, the count had been a widower for eleven years. His wife, daughter of a duke, had passed away just three years after they’d married in 1753, leaving him two sons. Though an enthusiastic hunter at the time of the Beast, the count was dealing with enormous debt and the wrath of his brothers for consuming the family fortune for his military expenses. (Military commands in France were almost exclusively purchased and sold among those members of the nobility which could afford them.)

  After initial correspondence, Lafont visited the Morangiès estate in Saint-Alban.

  The older marquis was napping by the fire. The count was sprawled in a large oak chair, his boys, nine and ten, in his arms on either side, their eyes wide with the subdelegate’s accounts of the Beast and its horrors.

  “Of course I will assist you, Lafont!” said the count, his eyes as wide as those of his sons. “When do we start?”

  The boys exchanged glances.

  “May we help?”

  “Non, you stay with grandpapa.”

  Their faces fell.

  “You must help him watch our home. Father, you will supervise?”

  “Come on, Grandpapa!”

  The marquis grunted, getting to his feet, a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “We might surprise you all if the Beast comes here,” he said. “Fetch your sabers, young ones. And let me tell you a story about my first battle.” The boys leapt to their grandfather’s bidding.

  As the marquis indulged his grandsons in an impromptu fencing lesson, Lafont and Morangiès made plans to enlist locals—both peasants and other noblemen—and begin initial hunts immediately, hoping to make short work of the crisis.

  The Beast, meanwhile, emboldened by the helplessness and availability of its human prey, continued its offensive upon the people of the Gévaudan.

  ***

  There are what may be considered a surprising number of records and documents related to the events in the Gévaudan from 1764 to June of 1767. Yet, despite the records that have survived, details of the deaths of some youngsters who may have perished in attacks by the Beast may not have been included in parish registers because they had not yet received their First Communion, the sacrament of the Eucharist in which the body and blood of Jesus are received as consecrated bread and wine.

  But not all the victims were children.

  The sleepy hameau (hamlet) of Les Estrets, France, is a stop along the Way of Saint James, the medieval pilgrimage route to the tomb of the brother of Jesus, in Compostela, Spain. Les Estrets, meaning “the straits,” with its quaint bridge on the river Truyère, was a place where the priestly brotherhood of St. John approved the comings and going of travelers.

  At about seven o’clock on the evening of September 6, the peace of the evening was overcome by a commotion in a local potager, or kitchen garden.

  A French village garden might contain vegetables such as turnips, herbs for seasoning and for teas and remedies, and hemp, of the nettle family; from which rough cloth could be woven. Flax provided seeds for linseed oil and its fibers could be spun into linen thread. Fodder crops for animals. And, in some regions, a prize type of lentils, considered “poor man’s caviar.”

  Known as the local witch—not non-Christian, but an herbalist and healer—a thirty-six-year-old woman had been harvesting rosemary to brew a tonic for her neighbor, a shy fellow who had a range of complaints; this time headaches and a too-fast heartbeat. It might help his thinning hair as well, she thought. Bent down, she collected leaves and flowering tops energetically, as the sun would soon be behind the mountains. I should have picked them this morning, she chastened herself, after the dew had gone. She would make a tea and was certain her neighbor would feel better in a day or two.

  She stopped.

  Someone or something was behind her.

  But she felt she could not turn around.

  The devil was surely near.

  She began to shake. She could not cry out—fear had seized her vocal cords. The fingers of her right hand flew to her forehead, down to her heart, to her left shoulder. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy …

  She was unable to finish the sign of the cross.

  ***

  And so, unlike the Beast’s younger victims, the thirty-six-year-old woman from Les Estrets did not meet her end in a remote pasture or far-flung meadow.

  She was consumed in her own garden.

  ***

  Ten days later, on September 16, a boy named Claude Maurines, twelve, took his family’s cattle to graze in the vicinity of the village of Choisinets, part of the town of Saint-Flour-de-Mercoire, founded long before by a Cistercian order of nuns. The nunnery was located within the dense Forest of Mercoire, over twenty-seven thousand acres in size even today.

  Claude knew of the Beast.

  He’d heard its presence announced at Sunday mass.

  In Old France, it was the parish priest’s responsibility to share not only the Good News of the sacred, but news of the profane as well. On a recent Sunday in their modest church, peasants huddled in the somber chill of the stone-walled interior, their breath steaming, along with that of their dogs at their feet, the canines’ claws scrabbling the slab floor.

  The local curé warned his flock that a fierce animal, still at large, had attacked and killed people in the vicinity.

  Continued the priest, “Subdelegate Lafont advises parents to keep young herders at home.”

  Stay at home? Claude was dumbfounded.

  He turned to his parents. His mother put an arm around him; Claude, embarrassed, pushed her away.
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  Claude’s father spat on the floor, narrowly missing their shaggy herding dog, Ruffe; the animal lifted an eyebrow, sighed, and rolled away.

  Claude’s father said, and not under his breath, “What does this curé want to do, vex us more than we are already vexed?”

  It was still acceptable at that time to comment on a priest’s messages during the service.

  The priest, unflinching, went on. “Lafont is organizing hunts with Count Morangiès. Parishioners are expected to participate. We await their direction.”

  The men groaned.

  “They mean to take us away from harvest?” demanded one.

  The curé said, “There is talk of generous premiums to be paid for the creature’s destruction, more than those usually paid for wolves.”

  A wolf carcass currently fetched six livres, or pounds, French units of currency at the time. A livre was said to contain about four and one half grams of silver.

  The groaning stopped. “More?” voices asked in unison.

  “And it may be that this animal is just a wolf or wolves,” said the priest.

  The male constituents of his flock regarded one another thoughtfully.

  After the service, Claude’s father told his son not to worry.

  “I’m not,” said Claude, one hand on Ruffe’s head. “And I am not staying home. I can take care of myself and the cattle. Perhaps I shall claim the reward.”

  But Claude’s mother was worried.