Beastly

I'm currently in the alarming situation of having reached the last book in the TBR stack on my dresser.

My next good opportunity to restock isn't until the first week of May, at the volunteers' presale for the Tompkins County Friends of the Library used book sale, so I'm gonna have to make this one last.  Fortunately, the book I just started is in French -- which I can read pretty well, but am a bit slower than I am with English.  And at 373 pages, I might be able to stretch it out a bit, although I doubt I'll make it all the way to May.

The book I'm reading is La Bête de Gévaudan by Michel Louis, and is about one of the strangest stories to come out of pre-revolutionary France -- the "Beast of Gévaudan," which was responsible for a series of brutal attacks (many of them fatal) near the village of Gévaudan, in Lozère département in south-central France, between 1764 and 1767. 

An illustration of the Beast attacking Marie-Jeanne Vallet (she fought it off with a pitchfork, and survived) (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Beast dispatched its victims by ripping their throats out.  Apparently, there were more than sixty victims of the Beast, the first a fourteen-year-old girl killed in 1764.  There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the thing; it was described as a huge, hairy quadruped, with a foul odor and a heavy, thick tail.  Thus far, there's nothing particularly weird here, and in fact this description matches my friend's dog Rudy, who is half mastiff and half golden lab but looks like he has some Clydesdale somewhere in his ancestry.  Rudy has no idea how enormous he is, and galumphs around inside the house knocking over large pieces of furniture, all the while wagging happily.  Rudy's huge head, which is made entirely of reinforced concrete, is at a height that is seriously unfortunate for any adult male visitors, and guys have been known to go into a protective crouch whenever Rudy so much as looks at them.

But I digress.

Whatever the identity of the Beast, it created terror throughout the region, especially when the pattern was noticed that the attacks were mostly on young people who were by themselves.  Parents became understandably afraid to send their family members outdoors alone -- a serious problem for farmers and shepherds, who relied on their children to help out with the chores.  And of course, there's no horrible situation that can't be made worse by a religious figure saying "it's all your own fault, you know."  That function was fulfilled by the Bishop of Mende, Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, who issued a declaration stating that the Beast was "a scourge sent by God" to punish the people in the area for their sins.  He quoted Moses's threat, "I will arm the teeth of wild beasts against them," and said that everyone needed to pray like crazy so that God in His Infinite Mercy would stop sending monsters to tear the throats out of children.

This, as you might imagine, had exactly zero effect.

The opinion of many people at the time of the attacks, as well as many people today, is that the Beast of Gévaudan was an unusually large and aggressive wolf.  There is a twofold difficulty with this, however; first, wolves -- at least, non-rabid ones -- don't attack humans all that often, and second, the people who actually saw the Beast were unanimous that it wasn't a wolf.  The descriptions all substantially agree; it was tawny/reddish, not gray, had a dark stripe running down its back, and its muzzle was considerably larger, heavier, and more powerful than a wolf's.  Keep in mind that the people in this region had been farmers and sheep-raisers for centuries; they knew what a wolf looked like.  (One suggestion, apropos of the coat color, is that the Beast was the Italian subspecies of Eurasian wolf, which is known to develop a russet-colored coat in the summertime, but that still doesn't explain the Beast's formidable bulk.)

There's also the issue that a number of people who saw it thought it could walk on two legs -- but this much, at least, I'm willing to attribute to the inevitable wild exaggerations that happen when you've been through a harrowing experience.

One of the weirder explanations I've heard for the Beast of Gévaudan is that it was a prehistoric holdover of some kind -- perhaps a dire wolf (Aenocyron dirus), or, even less plausibly, an Andrewsarchus.  This latter critter is an early member of Artiodactyla, the order that includes pigs, hippos, and whales.  Although it may be hard to see a commonality between artiodactyls and wolves, keep in mind that early artiodactyls had a pretty formidable array of dental weaponry:

Artist's conception of Andrewsarchus [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem is, Andrewsarchus seems to have been extinct by the end of the Eocene Epoch (34 million years ago), so if the Beast of Gévaudan was an Andrewsarchus, this means the species has to have somehow survived for 34 million years without leaving a single fossil behind.  As far as dire wolves go, there's far less of a time gap -- there are dire wolf fossils from ten thousand years ago -- but they're only known from the Americas.

Me, I'm dubious.

In any case, the Beast of Gévaudan was finally killed in June 1767 by a hunter named Jean Chastel.  Chastel had been hired by the French government to take care of the Beast, and the story is that he was standing, leaning against a tree reading his Bible, when he heard a noise and saw the Beast loping toward him, murder in its eyes.  Instead of pissing his pants and then having a stroke, which is probably what I would have done, he calmly lifted his rifle and shot the Beast between the eyes with a specially-prepared silver bullet.  Chastel's bravery earned him a monument in his honor in the village of La Besseyre-Sainte-Mary, near where the Beast was killed, which you can still visit today.

Chastel placed the Beast's body on a wagon of a man bound for Versailles, with instructions to deliver it to the authorities there so that Chastel could collect his reward.  But this being in the days before refrigeration, the carcass started to decompose, and finally began to smell so bad the wagon-driver buried it beside the road along the way.  Chastel apparently never got his reward, but at least there were no more attacks afterward.

So what was the Beast of Gévaudan?  Despite the anomalous descriptions, my money is still on an unusually large, perhaps oddly-colored wolf.  (Or wolves.  From the number of attacks, it's hard to imagine they were all perpetrated by the same animal.)  Michel Louis, author of La Bête de Gévaudan, goes to great lengths to describe how remote and rugged the terrain in the region is -- this is the southern part of the Massif Central, the big mountain range in central Auvergne and northern Languedoc, and in the mid-eighteenth century it was largely trackless wilderness.  So there's no need to appeal to the even wilder explanations I've seen, like the Beast being a werewolf or a demonically-possessed man wearing a wolf suit.

In any case, it's a peculiar story, and one that excites the imagination even today, almost three hundred years later.  While the incidents undoubtedly had a purely prosaic explanation, it's entirely understandable that the populace in the region reacted with abject terror.  If I knew there was an enormous carnivore in upstate New York ripping people's throats out, I doubt I'd ever go outside.  

Hell, I'm afraid enough of Rudy.

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