After a recent post about the "Beast of Gévaudan," an undeniably real creature that slaughtered between sixty and a hundred of the inhabitants of Lozère département in south-central France during a three-year period in the middle of the eighteenth century, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "What is it with French people getting eaten by monsters? It's a wonder any of your ancestors survived."
My initial reaction was that plenty of other cultures have legends of human-eating monstrosities -- the Algonquian Wendigo, the Jötunns of Scandinavia, and the Japanese Yama-Uba are three that come to mind. But I hadn't heard about any French ones other than the aforementioned Beast, so I decided to check out the source he sent.
The link was to a reference in a book by Carol Rose about creatures of legend, and was about La Velue de la Ferté-Bernard. La Velue translates to "the shaggy one," but if you're thinking about some friendly, sheepdog-like animal, you'll need to revise your mental image. La Velue haunted the region around the River Huisne, in northwestern France -- so at least it picked on a different bunch of peasants to terrorize than the Beast of Gévaudan did -- and is described as being the size of an ox, with an egg-shaped body, and having long green fur through which poison-tipped quills protruded.
Oh, and it could either cause floods, or shoot fire from its mouth. Possibly both.
Folklorist Paul Cordonnier-Détrie did a great deal of research into people's beliefs about La Velue, and published a book on it in 1954. Apparently the consensus is that it rampaged throughout the region in the fifteenth century, eating people and livestock and causing fires and/or floods (whichever version you went for earlier). Like the Beast of Gévaudan, the thing proved remarkably difficult to kill. It even made its way into the city of La Ferthé-Bernard, and when challenged, retreated into the River Huisne, but arrows and other weapons had little effect on it. La Velue, says Cordonnier-Détrie, is "of the same family as the Tarasque of Provence," another human-eating monster, this one resembling the unholy offspring of a lion and a snapping turtle.
So okay, maybe French people did have more problems than most with being eaten by monsters.
In any case, like the Beast of Gévaudan, eventually La Velue met its match. It made the mistake of grabbing a "virtuous young woman" called l'Agnelle ("Little Lamb"), and her fiancé understandably objected to this, so he drew his sword and struck the monster in the tail. Whether he knew this would work or it was just dumb luck isn't certain, but either way he hit the one vulnerable part of the monster, and it "writhed in agony and then died." The victory over La Velue was the cause of much rejoicing, and the site where it supposedly happened -- near the old Roman bridge in the village of Yvré-l'Évêque in Sarthe département -- hosted a yearly festival commemorating the young man's bravery that persisted well into the eighteenth century.
So, what are we to make of this?
Unfortunately, the answer is "probably not much." Unlike the Beast of Gévaudan, whose existence and murderous tendencies are extremely well-documented in primary sources from the time, La Velue seems to be a lot more tenuous. There isn't much in the way of contemporaneous source material to go by; most of it is in the realm of "back in the day there was this terrifying monster...", which honestly doesn't carry much weight.
On the other hand, it's curious how specific the legend is about the places it lived and died. It makes you wonder if there was some kind of creature attacking people back then, that later got embellished and inflated (and equipped with fiery breath and poisonous quills), and became La Velue by a process of accretion.
We'll probably never know. But it does make for an interesting story. Good enough that a version of it ended up in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (although under the Spanish name of "La Peluda").
In any case, if you live in France, I can only hope you're not still having to deal with monsters. The world's crazy enough these days without worrying that you're going to be eaten by a shaggy green thing, or a giant crazed wolf, or a lion-turtle hybrid, or whatnot. Me, if I thought those things were still around, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house.
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