Pavia takes the form of a wolf and murders multiple victims. Upon his confession, the magistrates order the severing of his arms and legs, from which separations he dies.
1558
. Near Apchon a huntsman, asked by a local gentleman to bring him some game, falls under attack by a wolf and severs its paw. Later, as he reaches into his bag to deliver this paw to his noble friend, he finds it has been transformed into a feminine hand—the hand, indeed, of the gentleman’s own wife, who, when found to be missing it, confesses to being a werewolf. She is burned to ashes.
1573
. The town of Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of western France, formally enjoins its peasantry to hunt down a marauding werewolf, authorizing the use of “pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks.”
1598
. An entire family near Dole, the Gandillons, is executed for lycanthropy. The first to go, Pernette, had allegedly set upon two children, intending to devour them, but managed to slay only one of them, a four-year-old boy, with the pocketknife the child had brandished to defend his sister. Pernette is torn limb from limb by the citizenry.
Her crime draws the authorities’ attention to her brother, Pierre, and to his son, Georges, both of whom confess (after what one suspects is rather insistent questioning) to having taken the form of wolves through the application of a salve. Pierre also has a daughter, Antoinette, who admits to starting hailstorms. All three are hanged, their bodies burned.
Meanwhile, two departments south, in the town of Châlons, a tailor is sentenced for having apparently lured, murdered, and eaten a numberless throng of small children. His alleged crimes are so terrible that the court orders the incineration of all the case records—and, naturally, of the tailor.
That same year, near Angers, a fifteen-year-old boy is murdered and a half-naked man, with long hair and beard, is taken into custody. This man, Jacques Roulet, admits to using a salve to transform himself into a wolf. He, too, is sentenced to death, though—in a sign the werewolf hunters of France have perhaps lost some of their moxie—the parliament in Paris later commutes his sentence to two years’ incarceration.
1603
. Jean Grenier, a teenager near Bordeaux, is arrested after terrorizing a series of local children, allegedly as both a boy and a wolf. Grenier’s story was later recounted at length by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century English parson perhaps best known for composing the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” but also the author of more than 130 books. Baring-Gould’s
Book of Were-Wolves
(1865) to this day remains by far the most readable account of the werewolf phenomenon—so readable, in fact, that we hesitate to dwell upon theprovenance of his elaborate narrative color and instead will simply draw upon it.
On a spring afternoon that year, as some young women are tending sheep (“the brightness of the sky,” Baring-Gould writes, “the freshness of the air puffing up off the blue twinkling Bay of Biscay, the hum or song of the wind as it made rich music among the pines which stood like a green uplifted wave on the East…conspired to fill the peasant maidens with joy, and to make their voices rise in song and laughter, which rung merrily over the hills”), they encounter a redheaded boy of perhaps thirteen, perched on a log. Evidently poor, given his gaunt frame and tattered clothing, the boy nevertheless cuts a menacing figure, his prominent white teeth protruding from a grinning leer.
“I have killed dogs and drunk their blood,” he tells the girls. “But little girls taste better; their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm. I have eaten many a maiden, as I have been on my raids together with my nine companions. I am a were-wolf!” he goes on, as if that still needed spelling out. “Ah, ha! if the sun were to set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!”
The young women flee and tell
1558
. Near Apchon a huntsman, asked by a local gentleman to bring him some game, falls under attack by a wolf and severs its paw. Later, as he reaches into his bag to deliver this paw to his noble friend, he finds it has been transformed into a feminine hand—the hand, indeed, of the gentleman’s own wife, who, when found to be missing it, confesses to being a werewolf. She is burned to ashes.
1573
. The town of Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of western France, formally enjoins its peasantry to hunt down a marauding werewolf, authorizing the use of “pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks.”
1598
. An entire family near Dole, the Gandillons, is executed for lycanthropy. The first to go, Pernette, had allegedly set upon two children, intending to devour them, but managed to slay only one of them, a four-year-old boy, with the pocketknife the child had brandished to defend his sister. Pernette is torn limb from limb by the citizenry.
Her crime draws the authorities’ attention to her brother, Pierre, and to his son, Georges, both of whom confess (after what one suspects is rather insistent questioning) to having taken the form of wolves through the application of a salve. Pierre also has a daughter, Antoinette, who admits to starting hailstorms. All three are hanged, their bodies burned.
Meanwhile, two departments south, in the town of Châlons, a tailor is sentenced for having apparently lured, murdered, and eaten a numberless throng of small children. His alleged crimes are so terrible that the court orders the incineration of all the case records—and, naturally, of the tailor.
That same year, near Angers, a fifteen-year-old boy is murdered and a half-naked man, with long hair and beard, is taken into custody. This man, Jacques Roulet, admits to using a salve to transform himself into a wolf. He, too, is sentenced to death, though—in a sign the werewolf hunters of France have perhaps lost some of their moxie—the parliament in Paris later commutes his sentence to two years’ incarceration.
1603
. Jean Grenier, a teenager near Bordeaux, is arrested after terrorizing a series of local children, allegedly as both a boy and a wolf. Grenier’s story was later recounted at length by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century English parson perhaps best known for composing the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” but also the author of more than 130 books. Baring-Gould’s
Book of Were-Wolves
(1865) to this day remains by far the most readable account of the werewolf phenomenon—so readable, in fact, that we hesitate to dwell upon theprovenance of his elaborate narrative color and instead will simply draw upon it.
On a spring afternoon that year, as some young women are tending sheep (“the brightness of the sky,” Baring-Gould writes, “the freshness of the air puffing up off the blue twinkling Bay of Biscay, the hum or song of the wind as it made rich music among the pines which stood like a green uplifted wave on the East…conspired to fill the peasant maidens with joy, and to make their voices rise in song and laughter, which rung merrily over the hills”), they encounter a redheaded boy of perhaps thirteen, perched on a log. Evidently poor, given his gaunt frame and tattered clothing, the boy nevertheless cuts a menacing figure, his prominent white teeth protruding from a grinning leer.
“I have killed dogs and drunk their blood,” he tells the girls. “But little girls taste better; their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm. I have eaten many a maiden, as I have been on my raids together with my nine companions. I am a were-wolf!” he goes on, as if that still needed spelling out. “Ah, ha! if the sun were to set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!”
The young women flee and tell
Similar Books
