The Lament of the Beast of Gévaudan

I received an obscure manuscript from the South of France the other day, dealing with a mysterious animal that devoured more than a hundred people between 1764 and 1767—the infamous Beast of Gévaudan! Come to me with tears in your eyes, and listen to the horrific stories about this fierce beast...

Gévaudan is a region in the South East of France. For 4 years, it became the scene of dozens of gruesome killings committed by an unidentified creature:

This fierce beast is long and strong,

Much formidable;

The head of a horse,

The sweet hair of a calf;

Its two twinkling eyes

Are like burning furnaces;

Everything about it terrifying

As everything about it about is death.

It preyed on kids, women and sometimes men. It cracked their skulls, broke their bones, and devoured their livers. And it seemed invincible:

The beast fears no carbine,

The bullets won’t penetrate its skin.

Fear spread all through the country; the printers issued terrifying engravings (1); articles, songs and laments were written. Our manuscript contains two laments, a song, and a relation in prose (as well as a few other unrelated poems). “Very scarce”, the bookseller explained. “We can date it from 1765. This manuscript had been sleeping in a farmhouse of La Chapelle Graillouse, on the Ardèche Plateau.” This is too nice to be true. Could it be a contemporary manuscript? Written almost on the spot? Can you imagine? Year 1765. In Ardèche, France. A lone man, bent over a wooden desk at night-time, inside a small isolated farmhouse, writing those lines by the candlelight, as the wind rages outside—the beast is roaming the land at the very same moment, killing and terrorising. Is this 24-page handwritten manuscript genuine? It’s an 18^th century booklet with endpapers covers, and hastily sewed with two thin threads. The pale ink doesn’t look suspicious, and the letters have been traced by hand, as varying densities of ink on the letters show. The typography of the “s” and the “&” also fits in. Furthermore, this isn’t a very expensive document, and had someone forged it, he would have lost a lot of time—and money. I asked the bookseller about its provenance: “I’ve found it myself,” he confirmed, “in a farmhouse near La Chapelle Graillouse (besides Coucouron), during a garage sale.” The relation in prose runs on 6 pages, and is well documented. It ends up with the arrival in Gévaudan of Denneval, “a famous wolves hunter from Normandie, France”. We know that Denneval came “on royal orders with his dreadful 28 inches tall dogs” in February 1765. But the relation doesn’t mention the fact that Dunneval failed to catch the beast, and that he eventually returned to Normandie. So it was probably written in 1765, indeed; while the beast was still at large, and Denneval still on its trail.

I found the first lament on the Internet, with the same verses although in a different order. The author of the website says it was first published in the Journal Encyclopédique (October 1^st, 1765), and then in Bachaumont’s memoirs the same year. But he’s wrong—the Journal Encyclopédique is referring to another poem dealing with the beast. I couldn’t find any trace of the second lament, that starts like that: “Come closer, whether you’re old or young, Come hear the lament of a vile monster that ravages many provinces, especially Gévaudan, where it kills every moment...” It tells the well-known anecdote involving a brave 12 year-old boy, who ran after the beast after it had taken a child away. He caught up with it in a morass and forced it to let go its prey.

The song is livelier, and aims at encouraging the hunters: “Be brave, you French hunters! And hurry up to Gévaudan to catch this beast...” In 1857, some university searchers collected popular songs from various French regions. In their bulletin (Volume 3—Paris), they quote our first lament as well as our song, stating: “they are from way back, and were written before the beast was killed; as such they deserve the title of historical souvenirs.”

Louis XIV eventually heard the people’s laments, and sent his best harquebusier Antoine de Beauterne to Gévaudan, in 1765. The royal emissary killed a big wolf and triumphantly displayed its carcass in front of the King—end of the story. But the killings resumed shortly afterwards, and the beast remained active until one Jean Chastel apparently shot it dead in 1767. His gunshot put an end to the killings, but not to the legend. The Beast of Gévaudan has inspired many theories—some involving a serial killer, a hyena and a wolf-dog hybrid—, many movies, and even more nightmares. Our little manuscript is an incredible contemporary testimony of one of the scariest mysteries in French history.

The National Library of France (BNF) displayed some of these very rare and fascinating representations at the Salon international de l’estampe du Grand-Palais, last April. Have a look at some of them here: https://estampe.hypotheses.org/631

Thibault Ehrengardt

Rare Book Monthly

The Lament of the Beast of Gévaudan

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