Beast

by S. R. Schwalb

  Lafont discussed the d’Ennevals’ request for thirty louis and a meeting with them in which they expressed their conviction that, if they hunted with Duhamel, and, if the father/son team killed La Bête first, the dragoons would shoot the Beast after them and refuse to relinquish it to the hunters from Normandy. Lafont stressed cooperation was needed, but the d’Ennevals would not budge. They expected Count Moncan to order Duhamel to cease hunting; if the count did not, they would write to the court.

  Lafont then met with Duhamel, who claimed young d’Enneval told him he had orders to fire him, but would not show these papers to the dragoon captain. Duhamel said he would continue hunting until he received word personally to cease. Lafont wrote that Duhamel was “a gallant person and listens to reason. Everyone praises his behavior in the face of the d’Ennevals.”

  Still, the next day, the d’Ennevals brought Lafont a list of demands along with a letter from Controller-General Laverdy to the Governor of Alençon. They would commence operation in districts between the Gévaudan and the Auvergne, and asked Lafont to communicate to those communities that individuals should assist them, that they let the Normans know right away if La Bête attacks, and that they be provided with two horses in each parish.

  Lafont pressed upon the Normans that the hunt was open to anyone and that he had already issued several permits to locals and outsiders. He was also under orders to send the Beast’s remains to his superior in Montpellier, who would forward the carcass to Versailles. D’Enneval said he had later orders and would show them to Lafont. Lafont wrote later that he did his best to produce agreement between the captain and the Normans, “but the thing was not possible.”

  The subdelegate noted that the elder d’Enneval now seemed a bit flustered and said he could not promise his dogs could find the creature. “I think he … did not expect to find so many mountains, woods, swamps, and so much snow, nor that La Bête covered so much territory.”

  Young d’Enneval, dining with Lafont, showed him a document that appeared to be signed by the king, but would not allow the subdelegate to read it.

  The dogs arrived at last, but some said they’d been brought to the area days before and hidden. Lafont shrugged. There would have been no hunting the week before. “The weather was as cruel as it could be and a large amount of snow fell.”

  He advised Duhamel to hunt away from the d’Ennevals, and told his superior that under the circumstances, the Sunday and feast day hunts had been postponed.

  Meanwhile the Beast was enjoying carte blanche, devouring children day after day.

  And now we see where Lafont was going: “All these horrors are preparing us for even bigger ones, because there is much to fear if this Bête is not destroyed before the month of May, that is to say before the grain begins to come up.”

  By the end of the month the d’Ennevals had begun their own hunts, but they’d also gained a fuller appreciation for what they’d gotten themselves into, even keeping their valuable dogs from pursuing the Beast when questionable conditions prevailed.

  ***

  Carrying on ancient oral traditions of spreading news and stories, eighteenth-century poems and ballads or laments (writings that commemorate a calamity) were featured on broadsheets and in news accounts, often accompanied by images of the Beast.

  Here are two examples:

  Courage hunters of France,

  Depart for the Gévaudan,

  Go by a fast coach,

  Don’t lose a minute.

  In hunting the Beast

  Who ravages the countryside.

  He’s eaten up so many folk,

  The Beast of the Gévaudan,

  that he’s grown round, like a ball,

  The Beast of the Gévaudan.

  CHAPTER 12

  “An Unfortunate Time”

  Representatives from the various Estates of the Gévaudan met for their annual meeting with the bishop of Mende on March 26, 1765. Normally they met to discuss the economical and spiritual health of the region. This year’s discussions would understandably focus on the Beast.

  Lafont presented an action plan, which included arming the peasantry (cautiously), hiring poachers, guarding livestock in common areas, and allowing Count Morangiès to coordinate contingents of guards in locales frequented by the Beast. He was disappointed to receive little initial support for his plans, and forwarded the proposals to Saint-Priest. Ultimately, however, the authorities allowed the d’Ennevals their opportunity to hunt at large. The father and son from Normandy asked for the speedy reporting of attacks and for bodies to be left in place until they arrived.

  April 1765

  The Beast butchered several children during Holy Week, the days leading up to Easter. A total of six perished in April, out of seventeen attacks. The d’Ennevals hunted, but with no success, stymied by hail and snow.

  A large hunt involving twenty communities was held on April 21, which to Lafont turned out to be a surprisingly similar strategy to that of Duhamel. The result: a saber-armed teenager chanced upon the Beast, but it ran off as he shouted for help. A wolf-stalk on the twenty-third disbanded after the Beast was seen elsewhere. A small she-wolf was killed. The month ended with more inclement weather and another hunt made up of participants from fifty-six parishes. Again, it was a nonsuccess.

  May 1765

  Four country people were killed in May, all female, ranging in age from thirteen to forty-five.

  Some wondered if there was more than one manslayer out there because of the distance between some of the more than twenty attacks on men, women, teens, and children. Multiple attacks occurred on several days, yet in different locations.

  On the evening of May 1, the Beast was seen and fired upon on by three brothers named La Chaumette at their home in Saint-Alban parish. After spying the creature from a window, one brother alerted the others; they seized their weapons and went after it. Two brothers were able to hit the animal, and it fell both times, but ultimately got to its feet and eluded them in the brushwood. The brothers immediately sent word to the d’Ennevals, but the Normans did not come until the next day. The brothers concurred with other witnesses that the Beast was a wolf of a different color, large and striped. And they were convinced it would be found dead.

  But the Normans found nothing.

  More hunts were held, wolves were spotted, fired upon, mostly missed. The d’Ennevals were losing credibility rapidly. One of their dogs, which had gone MIA, returned with a damaged collar, indicating a brawl with the Beast. Men from multiple communities assembled for an additional hunt on Ascension Thursday (observed forty days after Easter, this holy day commemorates Jesus’s ascent to heaven) and the following Sunday, during which a woman—in the very neighborhood of the hunt itself—was decapitated. The Normans had her remains poisoned and set out as bait, again with no results.

  As chronicler Pourcher comments, “It has to be admitted that this was indeed an unfortunate time!”

  ***

  The Beast’s reign served many enterprising souls, even as it satisfied its own appetites. It provided local, national, and international media with exciting content that sold papers, broadsheets, and merchandise. It continues to do so today. If one searches French bookshops and bookselling websites, one finds dozens of books, novels, and graphic novels devoted to fictitious and historical accounts of what happened between 1764 and 1767.

  “An exact representation of the FURIOUS WILD BEAST, which has so long ravaged the Gévaudan,” “From a drawing sent in April 1765 to the Intendant of Alençon.” (Artist I. Bayly) The London Magazine, vol. xxxiv, May 1765.

  The Beast also provided material for humor, thanks to misunderstandings of what the hunts for this creature truly entailed. A spoof account published in London wrote that the Beast, after having bested thousands of Frenchmen simply by wagging its tail, breaking wind, and so forth, was vanquished by an angry mother cat after it ate one of her kittens, a yarn that did not go over well with the French.

  The lead stor
y of London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, May 1765, was entitled “Ravages of the Wild Beast in France,” “With an exact representation of the FURIOUS WILD BEAST, which has so long ravaged the Gévaudan.” Said the publication,

  Altho’ we have taken care not to stuff our Magazine with the many accounts we have had of the ravages committed among the people of the South of France by a wild beast, to which they have not as yet given any proper name; yet as we have in this month given a representation of that voracious creature, we think it necessary to give at least one of the most remarkable accounts that have been communicated to the publick by the foreign news-papers …

  This was a preface to the story of Portefaix and his companions that appeared in the Paris Gazette. After relating the account, the Magazine added, “Capt. Duhamel of the dragoons is in pursuit of [the Beast], who has caused several of his men to dress themselves in women’s apparel, and to accompany the children that keep cattle.”

  News stories about the Beast and other creatures provided an outlet from the everyday, especially for those for whom reality was one hardship after another. People were and are fascinated by unusual animals, whether in an eighteenth-century menagerie or on the twenty-first-century World Wide Web. Printers and newshawkers of that time took advantage of this curiosity by making accounts of the Beast’s activities and those of its victims and hunters widely available. Scholar Judith Devlin tells us that the story of the Beast, along with that of other creatures, such as Mérénas, the Amphibious Animal of Algeria of the mid-1800s, a creature which was said to have consumed French soldiers on the North African coast, were re-run again and again by publishers and printers.

  Imagine: The peasantry had no television, no Internet, no movies, no magazines, and so on. If we were to attempt to live as they did, it would be as if we lived in conditions of a natural or man-made disaster: no power, no phones, no news. The local church, with its modest sculptures and other artworks, depicting religious subjects, provided one of the few cultural diversions for countryfolk. Images and figurines of saints and national heroes were also sold by peddlers to those who could afford them.

  A Dickens of a Beast

  Charles Dickens, nearly one hundred years later, made use of accounts of the Beast’s life and times in an 1858 issue of his own publication, Household Words.

  “The way in which such a beast ought to have been dealt with,” says Dickens, “is very plainly stated in a letter addressed by an English foxhunter (who had read the royal [French] proclamation with great disgust) to the printer of the magazine in which an English version of the document was published:

  ‘Is it to be imagined, Mr. Printer,’ he says, “that the fiercest animal that ever traversed the wilds of Africa, would have been suffered in this nation for six whole months, to fatten upon the young boys and virgins of a country, throwing meanwhile the remaining ones into the most distressful consternation for the fate of their women and children, when a scarcity of provision might bring it to their turn to maintain him? No, sir, in England, not less superior to France in the achievements of the camp, than in the manly exercises of the field, if he had lived six weeks only, it would have been merely ex gratiâ, for the sake, perhaps, of hunting him a second or third time….

  Dickens continues, “The king [of France] … directed that he [the Beast] should be embalmed, and stuffed with straw! He was in that condition returned to Monsieur de Beauterne [meaning royal gunbearer François Antoine], who kept him till the Revolution came, and amongst other institutions swept away the terror of the Cévennes….”

  Dickens’ own opinion of the Beast:

  He was, doubtless, a terrible creature to behold, but if he at all resembled the portrait of him which was sent in April, seventeen hundred and sixty-five, to the Intendant of Alençon, (in case he should happen to pass that way—some three hundred miles off), he must have been a creature rather to kill you with laughter than with his teeth and claws. I have the engraving from the original picture before me at the moment, and it bears this inscription: ‘Figure de la Best féroce quo l’on a nommé l’hyène, qui a dévoré plus que quatre-vingt personnes dans le Gévaudan.’ The animal, is, in truth, a most ridiculous monster … Indeed one that Trinculo [of Shakespeare’s Tempest] would have jeered at as ‘a very weak monster,—a most poor credulous monster,—a puppy-headed monster,—a most scurvy monster.’ Indeed the jester could hardly have hit upon any phrase of absurdity whereby to load him with contempt, as he stands, passant gardant [a heraldic term meaning having one paw raised in the air] … his curly tail trailing on the ground, with ponderous head and cropped ears,—with his mouth filled with enormous teeth, wide open, as if he were catching flies; with his small sleepy eyes, and with the most good-natured expression on his foolish face.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Royal Gunbearer

  June 1765

  There were fewer attacks in June 1765, only about a dozen (which still was an average of four per week!). Nonetheless, the Beast took the lives of four people: three children (one may have been a young teen) and a forty-five-year-old woman, with two decapitations. Three deaths occurred within two days, June 20 and 21. The Beast roved the areas of Auvers-Nozeyrolles, Saugues, Le Malzieu, and Venteuges, France.

  On June 1, 1765, the Beast “devoured a nine- to ten-year-old boy … in Auvergne, bordering the Gévaudan,” says Pourcher. “A young sister of this boy, who was with him, took flight to save herself and hid in a nearby wood. As she had not reappeared, it was assumed she had been devoured like her brother. Her parents found her three days later, hidden in some rocks. She had completely lost her mind.”

  French functionaries deemed it time for the d’Ennevals to step back and allow a third hunter to take over: King Louis XV’s own trusted gunbearer—among his duties was that of loading the ball and powder of the king’s rifle—and lieutenant of the hunt, seventy-one-year-old François Antoine, a knight of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis. He was joined by his son, Robert-François Antoine de Beauterne, a company of royal gamekeepers sent by princes from court, and other assistants.

  After a two-week journey to the Gévaudan vicinity from court, François Antoine (who was an acquaintance of the senior d’Enneval) hunted with the father and son on June 23. He also met with Lafont, noting requirements, setting ground rules, offering rewards for wolves killed, with greater monies for the Beast.

  It had been one year since the death of the first official victim, Jeanne Boulet, of Les Hubacs.

  July 1765

  With an arsenal that included harpoon-like poles with barbed iron points, François Antoine took over, but like the hunters before him, he would face his share of setbacks, including rain and heavy fog that hampered his initial efforts from late June into the second week of July.

  Two people would lose their lives to the Beast in July 1765: On July 4, a woman in her fifties or sixties, of the parish of Lorcières was fatally assaulted; on the evening of the twenty-second, a nine-year-old boy from Auvers disappeared.

  The Beast attacked a number of people in July, including a mail carrier and two nuns. Two herdboys escaped harm by scrambling up a tree, prompting the thwarted Beast to destroy the little shelter in which they slept at night. The creature then threw itself at the tree, but withdrew at the sight of an approaching horseman.

  François Antoine observed two sets of wolf tracks (one very large) after the first death, and the Beast was spotted on the move over the next days and weeks, but easily outmaneuvered the hunters from court.

  The gunbearer again came across large paw prints at the location of the second death, that of the nine-year-old boy, which occurred on July 22. He ordered his hunters to beat the woods nearby, but their numbers were not adequate to the task.

  On the twenty-seventh, the Beast seized four-year-old Pierre Roussel (a future great-uncle of Abbé Pierre Pourcher), and carried him more than five hundred yards before dropping the boy. Unfortunately, a gullywasher destroyed all traces of the ani
mal before the gunbearer could get there.

  Determined to locate his target, François Antoine ordered a large hunt for Sunday, July 28, but once more, Mother Nature was uncooperative, sending cloudbursts and, incredibly, summer sleet.

  August 1765

  August brought more bad weather, more bad luck, eight attacks, and one death, that of a sixteen-year-old girl from La Besseyre-Saint-Mary.

  But one feisty young woman took on the Beast with her pike and sent it packing.

  On August 11, 1765, mid- to late morning, a young woman named Marie-Jeanne Valet, nineteen or twenty years old, a servant of the curate, or clergyman, of the parish of Paulhac, and her sister Thérèse, sixteen or seventeen, were crossing the river Desges on their way to the community’s tithe farm. (Local peasants contributed a tithe, or one-tenth, of their output for the support of the local church and cleric; it was kept in a tithe barn.)

  The Beast, lurking in the underbrush along the river banks, spotted the girls and flung itself at Marie-Jeanne.

  Luckily, the sensible young woman had brought along a spear, “a stick with a bayonet sharp on both sides about half a foot long and an inch and a half wide.”

  She used it.

  Marie-Jeanne Valet impaled the Beast with her weapon, actually knocking it down, all the while yelling for help, along with her sister. According to the accounts and letters presented by Pourcher, La Bête retreated, “cried out very loudly and held her paw in front of the wound,” then “threw herself in the river, where she rolled over several times” before disappearing.

  Later, when questioned by authorities, the girls—their testimony translated into French by Trophime Lafont—described the Beast as being the size of a large farm dog. It was gray with a white chest and black back, they said. Its front was bigger than its rear. It had a big flat head and big teeth.