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