December 1765

Winter in the Gévaudan

Seventy-two days after the Chazes’s wolf’s demise, little Vidal Tourneyre, six or seven years old, was taken by an animal while with his family’s livestock. Teenager Jean Couret, nearby, charged after the predator and stabbed it with his spear until it released the herdboy. Three more attacks occurred that last month of the year. On December 21, an 11-year-old girl from Lorcières was decapitated. Two days later, a 13-year-old Julianges girl was eaten “with such voracity, ” says priest-historian Abbé Pierre Pourcher, that, according to one document, they could only find her two hands, and according to another, the two hands, the two legs, and some remnants of her clothes. Either way, so much of her was eaten that the Prior of Julianges considered the remains were insufficient for a burial service to be carried out.”

Author Richard Thompson speculates as to whether the “new” Beast was a wolf wounded during Antoine’s hunt in October and now recovered, or the offspring of the “old” Beast, somehow overlooked. An outspoken area priest, Jean-Baptiste Ollier, wrote many letters trying to convince authorities that the Beast was not a wolf, but a monster of some kind. In faraway Versailles, the case was officially closed and king and court had moved on. Still, over the coming months, new directives would be communicated to distant provinces to help them in the self-management of nuisance wolves.

In the Gévaudan, locals and officials had come to realize that getting rid of the new Beast would have to be a do-it-yourself project.

October 1765: King meets Beast

King Louis XV and his court in Versailles look upon the infamous Beast of the Gévaudan.

At the beginning of October, François Antoine’s immense Chazes wolf was presented at the court of King Louis XV in Versailles, France.

A visitor to the court from England named Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford, wrote about the occasion to an acquaintance named John Chute, Esquire: 

“In the Queen's antechamber we foreigners and the foreign ministers were shown the famous beast of the Gévaudan, just arrived, and covered with a cloth, which two chasseurs [pageboys] lifted up. It is an absolute wolf, but uncommonly large, and the expression of agony and fierceness remains strongly imprinted on its dead jaws.” 

In another letter [Walpole’s many letters are valued for their “slice-of-life” depictions of the eighteenth century], written to the Right Honorable Lady Hervey, he wrote,

“Fortune bestowed on me a much more curious sight than a set of princes; the wild beast of the Gévaudan, which is killed, and actually is in the Queen's antechamber. It is a thought less than a leviathan, and the beast in the Revelations, and has not half so many wings, and yes, and talons, as I believe they have, or will have some time or other; this being possessed but of two eyes, four feet, and no wings at all. It is as fine a wolf as a commissary in the late war, except, notwithstanding all the stories, that it has not devoured near so many persons. In short, Madam, now it is dead and come, a wolf it certainly was, and not more above the common size than Mrs. Cavendish is. It has left a dowager and four young princes.”

Meanwhile in the Gévaudan, royal gunbearer François Antoine spent October tracking down and destroying the Beast’s alleged mate and pups. But did he get them all?

Image credit:"Wolf of Chazes" by Unknown - Unnamed French Periodical. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolf_of_Chazes.jpg#/media/File:Wolf_of_Chazes.jpg

The Chazes Wolf

A mysterious chapel of Saint Mary near the site where the first Beast was killed. There is a Black Virgin within.

September 1765: The deaths of two 12-year-old girls in September, on the 8th and 13th, evidenced that the affair of the Beast was not over. 

A string of attacks took place during the first half of the month, including one in which the Beast attacked a man who’d fired upon it, a first. 

But on the 20th, after a pack of wolves, including an immense male, is reported in the woods around a nunnery, the Abbey of Chazes, near the river Allier, royal gun bearer François Antoine shoots the first Beast, “the Chazes Wolf.” 

The wolf fell, but, true to legend, got up and came at the hunter. A second shot by nephew Rinchard, a royal gamekeeper of the Duke of Orléans, finished the job. 

The ecstatic hunting party contacted the local surgeon, who was to do a complete autopsy. King Louis XV was determined to know exactly what this animal was.

“Then,” said François Antoine, “it is expected at court.”

After this hunt, there is a clear abatement in attacks for weeks. There is also a falling off of the official conversation regarding La Bête du Gévaudan, which means much less documentation of the continuing story.

The king and his court are pleased with François Antoine’s feat, but back in the Gévaudan, there is controversy. Shouldn’t Rinchard be credited since he actually fired the shot that killed the Beast? And is it truly the Beast?

Meanwhile, this Beast is prepped for its close-up in Versailles, to be accompanied by Antoine’s son.

Antoine remained in the Chazes area to hunt down the rest of the pack.

Fireworks in the Gévaudan

A display of pyrotechnics in 17th-century Germany

August 1765 brought with it another pivotal episode in the chronicle of the Beast: An ill-fated encounter between two royal gamekeepers whose mission was to assist King Louis XV’s gunbearer, François Antoine, in finding and destroying the Beast, and members of an enigmatic local family, the Chastels—father Jean Chastel and his two sons, Pierre and Antoine.

On August 16 at the forest of Mont Chauvet, the gamekeepers of princes asked the boys from La Besseyre-Saint-Mary if the area before them could be navigated safely on horseback.

The Chastels said yes, likely knowing the area referred to was actually a bog.

The first royal horseman’s mount became mired in the morass, panicked, and jettisoned its rider, much to the amusement of the Chastels.

The incident ended badly, at gunpoint, and with the Chastels thrown in jail until François Antoine’s departure in November.

Despite the misadventure, other locals were impressed with François Antoine if not the other envoys from court. During his stay, the gentleman requested that Catholic masses be said in support of the communities and he contributed personally to church charities. 

Touched by the poverty and hard lot of the peasants of the Gévaudan, François Antoine proposed a fireworks display to celebrate the feast day of Saint Louis, which occurs on August 25. (Louis IX [1214–1270], reformer and Crusader, was the only king of France to become a saint.)

At first worried they might be taxed for this event, the peasants relaxed after assurances this would not be so. Some brought forth foodstuffs and even wine they kept hidden from tax collectors to share with the man sent to help them by a far-away king.

Using fireworks he’d set aside to use in flushing the Beast from the forest, François Antoine and his assistants presented a grand spectacle. The loud and colorful pyrotechnics (which until the Revolution evinced the power of the crown) awed the countryfolk.

As a subject and servant of Louis XV himself, here on a mission he knew he was expected to wrap up very, very soon, François Antoine felt an affinity for these souls.

“We will soon destroy this Beast!” he shouted at the end of the show.

Most of the paysans could not understand his French, but smiled and nodded, the kaleidoscope of fleeting lighting effects lingering in their minds and thunder of explosions echoing in their ears.

The cause of the show, the Beast, had also observed it from not-so-far away, more curious than frightened.

Days later, a big wolf was killed at the end of August,  and, as nearly one year ago, when a similar wolf was killed on September 20, 1764, the question was on everyone’s mind: Had the Beast been destroyed at last?

Illustration: "Furttenbach Feuerwerk" by Joseph Furttenbach (1591-1667). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Furttenbach_Feuerwerk.jpg#/media/File:Furttenbach_Feuerwerk.jpg