Werewolves

Like a Wolf, Yet Not a Wolf

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Engraving of the Beast, ca. 1765 

Grove Koger

During the 1760s, a specter was haunting the French countryside. More specifically, it was a huge animal, and the territory it was terrorizing was the Gévaudan in the south-central region of the country. More specifically still, it was known as la Bête du Gévaudan, or the Beast of Gévaudan, and it’s credited with killing and eating, or partially eating, 113 people and savagely wounding nearly 50 more.

The Beast (as it seems prudent to call it, even today) first made its presence known in the summer of 1764, when a shepherdess in the eastern part of the region was approached menacingly by an animal “like a wolf, yet not a wolf.” However, the young woman escaped when the bulls in her herd drove it off. On the last day of the month, however, the Beast prevailed, killing a 14-year-old girl, Jeanne Boulet. Another attack on August 8 resulted in the death of yet another girl of the same age. Were these the first victims, or merely the first recorded? We’ll never be sure, but, in any case, as the London Magazine for December 1765 noted, a “ detachment of dragoons” had been “out six weeks after him.”

At the time, it was thought that the Beast might be a hyena or a cross between a dog and a wolf—a wolfdog. Although the spotted hyena of Africa can reach a weight of 140 pounds, the hyenas that once lived in Europe, beginning with Pachycrocuta brevirostris, which apparently averaged 240 pounds in weight, have long been extinct. However, there’s always the possibility that an African hyena might have escaped from a local menagerie, of which there were a surprising number.

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18th engraving depicting the Beast

In modern times, the Eurasian wolf (Canis lupus lupus) has an average weight of 86 pounds but can reach as much as 174 pounds. However, specimens in Western Europe tend to be smaller than those in the east.

In any case, the attacks continued, with lulls followed by new series of attacks, and so on and on (and on), suggesting that there were several Beasts. To make a long and involved story short, on June 19, 1767, one Jean Chastel shot and killed what was apparently the Beast (or one of them) using a double-barreled rifle. The carcass appeared to be that of a large (although not terribly large) gray wolf (Canis lupus), although it’s possible that it was a cross involving one of the local Beauceron dogs—a mix that might well have resulted in aggressive behavior in a particular individual. Alas, all traces of the carcass have long since been lost.

As I researched the Beast, I was delighted to find that the Rev. Montague Summers (1880-1948) wrote about it in one of his many books. Summers was, among many other things, an authority on the literature of the Stuart Restoration, and published critical editions of the period’s dramatists. But he also wrote books about witchcraft, vampires, and … werewolves. What we might call the only serious catch regarding these works is that Summers actually seems to have believed in the literal existence of such supernatural beings.

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My 1966 University Bks ed.

In his study The Werewolf (1933), Summers claimed that “[n]ot merely solitary wayfarers were attacked by [the Beast], but even larger companies travelling in coaches and armed.” The Beast could “deal swindging blows” with its “immense tail,” could leap “to tremendous heights, and ran with supernatural speed.” What’s more, its stench was “beyond description.” Summers added that “the countryfolk” in the district were “well assured that the monster was a warlock, who had shifted his shape, and that it was useless to attempt to catch him.” A wealthy and “much respected farmer swore that he had encountered” the Beast, which went bounding through the air while murmuring, “Convenez que, pour un viellard de quatre-vingt-dix ans, ce n’est pas mal sauter”—or, in English, “You must agree that, for a ninety-year-old man, that’s not a bad jump.”

(Three points: This is the first time I’ve run across the word “swindging,” which is an archaic form of “swinging.” Two, of all the unbelievably bizarre claims made regarding the Beast, I think we can move the “much respected” farmer’s account to the top of the list. And three, I’ll mention that Summers’ somewhat scandalous private life may also be of interest, but I’ll leave it up to you to investigate it.)

More recently, Jay M. Smith has studied the story in detail in Monsters of the Gévaudan (Harvard U P, 2011), although, as he writes, he has approached “the story from a new angle by shifting attention away from the beast itself” to the “attitudes, assumptions, motives and frustrations of the human beings who struggled to understand and defeat the lethal enemy in their midst.”

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Maurice Sand & the Lubins

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Grove Koger

In my July 1, 2018, post about the winter that French writer George Sand and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin spent on the island of Majorca, I mentioned that the couple were accompanied by Sand’s son, Maurice, and reproduced his drawing of one of the houses that the party leased. It was while researching the subject further that I realized I was actually familiar with another of Maurice’s works.

One of my purchases at Boise’s Book Shop when I was young was The Werewolf by Montague Summers (1880-1948), an exhaustive investigation of what Summers called “that most terrible and depraved of all the bond slaves of Satan.” I actually found Summers’ book a little dry—fun to dip into but not the kind of thing I cared to read from cover to cover. However, it contained a frontispiece that has remained in my mind’s eye for decades.

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The black-and-white image was labeled “Les Lupins” and was credited to one Maurice Sand. Well, that name meant nothing to me all those decades ago, but now it does. Born on June 30, 1823, and known formally as Jean-Françoise-Maurice-Arnauld, Baron Dudevant, he grew up to be a lepidopterist and writer, producing novels, now completely forgotten, and a detailed study of the commedia dell’arte. Having studied for a time under famous French painter Eugene Delacroix, he also worked as an illustrator.

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One of the books that Maurice illustrated was his mother’s Légendes rustiques. (rustic legends), an 1858 collection of twelve peasants’ legends from province of Berry in central France. Maurice prepared an atmospheric engraving to accompany each one, and his contribution to the last—“Lubins ou Lupins”—shows nearly a dozen wolf-like creatures standing on hind legs and leaning casually against a cemetery wall at night.

According to George Sand’s text, which I’m adapting from a machine translation, lubins aren’t quite werewolves. “Sorrowful, dreamy and stupid spirits,” she writes, “they spend their lives chatting in an unknown language along the walls of cemeteries. In some places they are accused of breaking into the field of rest and gnawing on bones. In the latter case, they belong to the race of lycanthropes and werewolves, and must be called lupins. But in the case of lubins, manners soften with the name. They do no harm and escape at the slightest sound.”

As I’ve mentioned, Sand’s engraving is labeled “Les Lupins,” suggesting that he himself wasn’t paying too much attention to the distinction his mother was making. But as students of the field are wont to remind us, the study of lycanthropy isn’t an exact science.

The most striking aspect of Maurice’s engraving is that it’s not just ominous and unnerving, but funny as well. I grin every time I look at it. It’s a commonplace that tragedy and farce have much in common, and, in depicting these bizarre but timid creatures, the artist shows that the same is true of horror and humor.

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Montague Summers (1880-1948) was an English clergyman who claimed to believe that werewolves, vampires and the like were real. He converted to Catholicism in 1909 and began to pass himself off as the Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, although it’s not clear that he ever took orders. A colorful, puzzling and controversial individual, he deserves an entry of his own, which I’ll be putting together this year or next.