Beast Page 8

  The authorities examined Marie-Jeanne’s spear and noted that the shaft of the weapon was coated in two to three inches of blood. The intrepid Jeanne-Marie was an “Amazon,” according to the local press. Royal gunbearer François Antoine, impressed with her bravery and composure, called her a second Maid of Orleans—Joan of Arc.

  The girls, meanwhile, being uneducated, were unable to sign the statements documenting their experience.

  Marie-Jeanne Valet now has a sculpture commemorating her valor in a windswept churchyard in Auvers, France. The sculpture is by French artist Philippe Kaeppelin (1918–2011), who also created an altar for the Mende Cathedral.

  August 16 brought with it another pivotal episode in the chronicles of the Beast, an ill-fated encounter between two of François Antoine’s royal gamekeepers and members of the Chastel family—father Jean Chastel, farmer and tavernkeeper, and two of his sons, Pierre and Antoine—at the forest of Mont Chauvet.

  This dramatic sculpture by Philippe Kaeppelin represents the confrontation of young Marie-Jeanne Valet with the Beast on August 11, 1765. Photo Schwalb.

  On August 16 at the forest of Mont Chauvet, the gamekeepers of royalty asked the boys from La Besseyre-Saint-Mary if the area before them could be navigated safely on horseback.

  The Chastels said yes, likely knowing the area referred to was actually a bog.

  The first royal horseman’s mount became mired in the morass, panicked, and jettisoned its rider, much to the amusement of the Chastels.

  The incident ended badly, at gunpoint, and with the Chastels thrown in jail until François Antoine’s departure in November.

  Despite the misadventure, other locals were impressed with François Antoine if not the other envoys from court. During his stay, the gentleman requested that Catholic masses be said in support of the communities and he contributed personally to church charities.

  Touched by the poverty and hard lot of the peasants of the Gévaudan, François Antoine proposed a fireworks display to celebrate the feast day of Saint Louis, which occurs on August 25. (Louis IX [1214–1270], reformer and Crusader, was the only king of France to become a saint.)

  At first worried they might be taxed for this event, the peasants relaxed after assurances this would not be so. Some brought forth foodstuffs and even wine they kept hidden from tax collectors to share with the man sent to help them by a far-away king.

  Using fireworks he’d set aside to use in flushing the Beast from the forest, François Antoine and his assistants presented a grand spectacle. The loud and colorful pyrotechnics (which until the Revolution demonstrated the power of the crown) awed the countryfolk.

  As a subject and servant of Louis XV himself, here on a mission he knew he was expected to wrap up very, very soon, François Antoine felt an affinity for these souls.

  “We will destroy this Beast!” he shouted at the end of the entertainment.

  Most of the paysans could not understand his French, but smiled and nodded, the kaleidoscope of fleeting lighting effects lingering in their minds and explosions echoing in their ears.

  The cause of the show, the Beast, had also observed it from not so far away, more curious than frightened.

  Days later, on August 28, François Antoine’s nephew, a man named Rinchard, who was a gamekeeper and horse wrangler for the Duke of Orléans, killed a big wolf in the Bois Noir (the Black Woods).

  As nearly one year ago, when a similar wolf was killed on September 20, 1764, the question again on everyone’s mind: Had the Beast been destroyed at last?

  September 1765

  The deaths of two twelve-year-old girls, one on September 8, one on September 13, proved that the Beast's offensive was not over.

  A string of attacks took place during the first half of the month, including one in which the Beast attacked a man who’d fired upon it, a first.

  When a pack of wolves, including an immense male, was reported in the vicinity of the Abbey of Chazes, a nunnery near the river Allier, the the lords of venery moved in.

  And François Antoine would find he was in for the hunt of his life.

  CHAPTER 14

  Chazes

  On September 20, François Antoine and his men reconnoitered in the Abbey forest called the woods of Pommier (apple trees)—in which the wolves were observed.

  The royal gunbearer came upon a number of animal trails in the Pommier Woods. While examining the tracks he found at a convergence of several paths, he happened to look up.

  A donkey? Here?

  No.

  A wolf.

  Fifty steps away and closing in.

  It was monstrous.

  Mon dieu, breathed the knight of Saint Louis.

  He scrambled for his gun and took aim.

  François Antoine used a large-caliber long-barreled carardière, (a duck-hunting shotgun), loaded with five charges of strong powder (twenty grams, we are told) and thirty-three buckshot pellets ranging from four and a half to eight millimeters in diameter.

  He fired.

  And stumbled back two paces—the gun kicked like a mule.

  Wildly he recovered and peered through the gunsmoke.

  The load had hit home. It looked to have gone through the wolf’s right eye and into its right side. Hurrah!

  But …

  Impossible!

  The wolf got to its feet.

  And charged.

  Tight-lipped, Antoine forced himself to focus.

  No time to reload!

  My knife! He felt for it at his side.

  The gap narrowed.

  François Antoine’s mind raced.

  Beat and stun it with the gun. Then use the knife.

  The wolf was ten steps away.

  He brought up the gun.

  BAM!

  What? Who?

  “Uncle!”

  Rinchard! Thank the Lord!

  Antoine’s nephew, gamekeeper of the Duke of Orléans, had positioned himself behind the Beast and fired.

  Nephew! Did he succeed? The white smoke blinded Antoine, who expected the Beast to be upon him at any moment. He clasped the barrel of his gun. It burned.

  “Uncle!”

  Then he saw.

  The wolf had fallen again, but, true to the stories the peasants told, it was rising once more.

  How could this be?

  “Your knife!” shouted Rinchard.

  But there was no need.

  The wolf staggered off in a different direction, running crazily for twenty yards, fell, and died.

  The delighted hunting party contacted the local surgeon, who was to do a complete autopsy. The king was determined to know exactly what this animal was.

  “Then,” said François Antoine, “it is expected at court.”

  ***

  King and court were pleased with François Antoine’s feat, but back in the Gévaudan, there was controversy. Shouldn’t Rinchard be credited since he actually fired the shot that killed the Beast? Was the animal truly the Beast? Meanwhile, the Chazes wolf was prepped for its close-up in Versailles, to be accompanied by François Antoine’s son, Robert-François Antoine de Beauterne. As this Beast had technically been destroyed in Auvergne, not the Gévaudan, it would make a brief stop, not in Mende, but in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and the headquarters of Auvergne intendant Simon-Charles Ballainvilliers The gunbearer himself remained in the Chazes area to hunt down the rest of the pack.

  On the first day of October 1765, François Antoine’s wolf was presented at the court of the King Louis XV in Versailles.

  Visiting at the time was a prolific letter writer, Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, England, whose missives are tremendously valued by historians for their depictions of eighteenth-century life. According to an October 3, 1765, letter from Walpole to John Chute, Esquire:

  In the Queen’s antechamber we foreigners and the foreign ministers were shown the famous beast of the Gévaudan, just arrived, and covered with a cloth, which two chasseurs [pageboys] lifted up. It is an absolute wolf, bu
t uncommonly large, and the expression of agony and fierceness remains strongly imprinted on its dead jaws.

  (Walpole had had a pet spaniel seized by a wolf while crossing the Alps twenty-six years before.)

  In another letter, also written on October 3, to the Right Honorable Lady Hervey, Walpole wrote,

  Fortune bestowed on me a much more curious sight than a set of princes; the wild beast of the Gévaudan, which is killed, and actually is in the Queen’s antechamber. It is a thought less than a leviathan, and the beast in the Revelations, and has not half so many wings, and yes, and talons, as I believe they have, or will have some time or other; this being possessed but of two eyes, four feet, and no wings at all. It is as fine a wolf as a commissary in the late war, except, notwithstanding all the stories, that it has not devoured near so many persons. In short, Madam, now it is dead and come, a wolf it certainly was, and not more above the common size than Mrs. Cavendish [according to Smith, “a famously portly woman of English society”] is. It has left a dowager and four young princes.

  Back in the Gévaudan, during October, François Antoine tracked down and destroyed the Beast’s mate and pups.

  November 1765

  The gunbearer left the Gévaudan for good on November 3. The Chastels were released from prison shortly thereafter. The Gévaudanais enjoyed some much-deserved peace as winter set in once more. There was also a falling off of the official conversation regarding La Bête du Gévaudan, which means less documentation of the story to come.

  Another Version

  Noted Scottish scholar and folklorist Andrew Lang devoted several pages to the Beast in “Stories about Wolves” in his 1896 Animal Story Book. “There have been instances, but fortunately few, of wolves with a perfect craving for human flesh,” he begins. “Such was the notorious Bête (or beast) du Gévaudan.” Lang tells his readers that the Beast was six feet long, and that it “was attacked from first to last by between two and three hundred thousand [sic] hunters, probably not all at once.” He further comments, “With half a dozen wolves, each equal to 200,000 men, a country could afford to do without an army. But the wolf of Gévaudan was no common wolf. He never married, having no leisure, fortunately for the human race.”

  Lang describes some of the Beast’s most famous qualities: the creature’s escaping the pursuit of experienced huntsmen by “disappearing as if he had been turned into smoke,” how “bullets had rebounded off him, flattened and harmless,” how it possessed “a pair of fiery eyes,” “that it was no ordinary wolf … but the Fiend himself in beast shape.”

  The folklorist also relates an alternative version of the Beast’s story. In it, “The young Countess de Mercoire, an orphan, and châtelaine [lady of the manor] of one of the finest estates of the district, offered her hand and fortune in marriage to whoever should rid the country of the scourge. This inspired the young Count Léonce de Varinas, who, though no sportsman by nature, was so deeply in love with the Countess that he determined to gain the reward or perish in the attempt. Assisted by a small band of well-trained hunters, and by two formidable dogs, a bloodhound and a mastiff, he began a systematic attack on the wolf.”

  One can guess the ending from the image reproduced here. Lang concludes, “It was not long before the Countess and the gallant champion were married; and, as the wolf left no family, the country was at peace. Are you not rather sorry for the poor wolf?”

  December 1765

  Seventy-two days after the Chazes wolf met its end, little Vidal Tourneyre, six or seven years old, was taken by an animal while with his family’s livestock. Teenager Jean Couret, nearby, charged after the predator and stabbed it with his spear until it released the herdboy.

  An illustration of La Bête’s demise by H. J. Ford for the 1896 edition of The Animal Story Book, edited by Andrew Lang. Dover Publications, Inc., 2002 edition.

  Three more attacks occurred that last month of the year, one on December 10; another about seventy-two hours later; then, on December 21, another, with a decapitation of an eleven-year-old girl from Lorcières. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl from Julianges was killed. Pourcher tells us she was consumed “with such voracity that, according to one document, they could only find her two hands, and, according to another, the two hands, the two legs, and some remnants of her clothes. Either way, so much of her was eaten that the Prior of Julianges considered the remains were insufficient for a burial service to be carried out.”

  In faraway Versailles, the case was officially closed and king and court had moved on. Indeed, the court was in mourning for the king’s son, Louis, who had passed away of consumption in December 1765. He was thirty-six. (Horace Walpole had written back in October that, on the same day he took in the sight of the Beast at Versailles, he saw the Dauphin [the title of the eldest son of the king of France], who looked “ghastly,” and he thought the young man would live only three months more.) Louis XV’s grandson, also named Louis, then only eleven, would become heir to the throne.

  ***

  One year after the Bishop of Mende’s pastoral letter, and after learning that a Beast-like creature had returned to the Gévaudan, Laverdy prepared a report to be communicated to the distant provinces regarding methods of poisoning to help them in the self-management of nuisance wolves. Saint-Priest would write Laverdy on December 30, 1765, to affirm that he did receive the report.

  In the Gévaudan, locals and officials came to realize that the state had miscalculated what would be required.

  An outspoken area priest, Jean-Baptiste Ollier, wrote many letters trying to convince authorities that the Beast was not just a wolf, and not the animal François Antoine had destroyed, but a monster of some kind that was still at large. The lack of response to his missives only served to frustrate the cleric.

  Getting rid of the Beast would have to be a do-it-yourself project.

  CHAPTER 15

  “A Short Truce”

  1766

  “ Chastel, tell me again: What happened when you and your sons ran into the gamekeepers from court?”

  The Marquis d’Apcher had been sixteen “at the apparition” of the Beast nearly two years before, and had been among those on the great hunt of February 16, 1765. Still, he demanded to review each chapter of the story with his favorite old stager, Jean Chastel.

  Now that the Beast had returned, or perhaps had never been killed in the first place, the enthusiastic young aristocrat aimed to bask in the glory of its destruction once and for all.

  Meanwhile, Lafont and the other local authorities had to be prudent about what was communicated with the court in Versailles regarding wolves. To say the Beast was back was to offend the king himself.

  And so small and informal groups of locals, spurred on by the marquis, went hunting on their own.

  Sources vary with regard to the number of attacks in 1766. As mentioned, there was much less formal documentation of such incidents now that the court-approved Beast had been killed the previous September. In any case, a February 1766 letter speculates on whether the Beast was an animal killed in 1765, or whether it was “another of the same nature. Either way, the peace of the Gévaudan has proved to be only a short truce.”

  It seems between sixteen and twenty-two people were set upon during the first half of 1766, and in March and April, three children: an eight-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a six-year-old girl. On May 31, the Beast took a ten-year-old herdboy named Pierre Teyssèdre. Pierre’s older brother Jean had been wounded by an animal the previous September.

  In a somewhat lighter account from March 1766, Jean-Pierre Pourcher, who would become the great-grandfather of Beast historian Abbé Pierre Pourcher, is said to have been journeying in the vicinity with a fellow named Antony after a fair when the Beast came upon him. Pourcher insisted his companion was responding to a necessitous call of nature at the time. The creature left after being smacked with sticks by the two men, but it moved so fast Antony believed he’d been attacked by two beasts.

  A March
1766 letter from intendant Étienne Lafont describing the death of eight-year-old Jean Bergougnoux, “seized and carried off” while tending cattle. Photo Schwalb. Archives départementales de l’Hérault.

  Second and third pages of March 1766 letter from Lafont. Photo Schwalb. Archives départementales de l’Hérault.

  The Estates of the Gévaudan met once more in March 1766, with, to their chagrin, discussion of the Beast again monopolizing the agenda. Discussion centered around the government’s directives and strategies concerning wolf poisoning.

  The Beast slowed its predations during the latter half of 1766, with, according to sources, between about ten and twenty attacks over the six-month period, and from four to eleven deaths.

  August 1766

  The summer sun washed over the Massif Central. Granite peaks and limestone plateaus baked beneath the crystalline sky. The wind moved through the grasses in which a flock of goats grazed. Their mistress, a fourteen-year-old girl from Auvers, France, lay in the grass watching the clouds. She stroked her youngest charge’s head. The baby goat butted her hand and twitched its tail.

  Then it stopped.

  “What?” asked the girl, sitting up. The little creature was gazing at something behind her.

  A family member, come to check on her?

  A boy from the village, up to no good?

  She turned.

  A strange animal was sprinting toward her. The girl stood up, staring, her hand on the little goat’s head.

  A dog? Too big.

  A wolf? In the day?

  Her heart began to pound.

  The animal was strange—scrawny, bony, with a rough coat and a long tail. It leered at her with a snaggletooth grin.

  And ran faster.

  La Bête, she gasped. The Beast.

  The shepherdess scrambled to a rock outcropping nearby, where there was a small cave in which she played while the goats grazed. She flung herself through the small opening into the cool darkness.